The New Zealand Transport Agency has refused to hand over a single one of the tolling documents RNZ asked it for, at the very point the Government is preparing to put tolls on far more of the roading network than New Zealanders have ever paid for.
RNZ reported on Saturday that it had asked Waka Kotahi for copies of any ministerial briefings on tolling written this year, and for any board minutes in which tolling came up. The agency found two briefings and two sets of minutes, all dated April and May. It withheld all four.
The first briefing dealt with the tolling consultation on the Belfast to Pegasus Motorway and Woodend Bypass north of Christchurch. NZTA withheld it on the grounds that decisions had not yet been made and that the confidentiality of advice to ministers needed protecting for the time being. The second briefing and both sets of board minutes were withheld because, the agency said, they contained commercially sensitive information.
None of those grounds are unusual in themselves. Officials use them every week. What makes this refusal worth noticing is the subject matter and the timing. Tolling is no longer a niche question affecting three stretches of motorway. It is becoming the Government’s answer to a roading programme it cannot otherwise afford, and the public is being asked to accept that shift while the working papers behind it stay in the drawer.
Only three roads in the country carry tolls today, all of them north of Auckland or around Tauranga. The Northern Gateway Toll Road, the Tauranga Eastern Link and Takitimu Drive charge between $2.10 and $2.60 for a car and between $5.20 and $5.60 for a truck. Of every $2.60 a car driver pays on the dearest of them, $1.46 goes to repaying the debt on the road, 80 cents goes to running the tolling system itself and 34 cents goes to GST. That last split is the quiet scandal of the current arrangement. Nearly a third of the money collected disappears into the machinery that collects it.
That is why the agency is now spending tens of millions of dollars replacing tolling technology that is well past its use-by date. Until that work is finished, adding more toll roads would mean adding more systems that eat their own revenue.
The wider policy is already moving. In 2024 the Government directed that every large new road project must be assessed for tolling, and it has since agreed to tolls on three more North Island highways, being the Εtaki to north of Levin route, Penlink in north Auckland and the Takitimu North Link from Tauranga to Te Puna. The Land Transport (Revenue) Amendment Bill, which passed its second reading under urgency in June, would go considerably further. It would allow corridor tolling for the first time, meaning an existing free road could be tolled if its users benefit from a new road built in the same corridor. It would also widen what toll money can be spent on, beyond the road that generated it, and index tolls to annual inflation.
The select committee that examined the bill recommended a guard rail, being that motorists must receive at least one of four benefits from a tolled road, namely a time saving, better safety, better reliability or better resilience. It recommended dropping “efficiency” from the list, on the basis that efficiency should show up in the benefits drivers actually get rather than being claimed on its own.
Underneath all of this sits a plan that does not exist yet. NZTA was meant to produce a national tolling plan and a strategic tolling position in 2025. Both were pushed to 2026, then pushed again to 2027. The agency told RNZ in July that the delay came down to “internal capacity constraints, resulting from the large volume of project-based tolling work that has been required in the past two years”. In other words, it has been so busy tolling individual roads that it has not found time to work out its overall approach to tolling roads.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop, who last month acknowledged that National’s 2023 roading commitments had been “very ambitious” and that circumstances had changed, was asked by RNZ whether his revised construction timeline accounted for the missing tolling plan. He did not answer. His office said, “The minister doesn’t have anything to add beyond NZTA’s statements to you.”
For Canterbury drivers the abstraction is about to become a monthly bill. NZTA’s proposal for the Belfast to Pegasus Motorway and Woodend Bypass, consulted on last year, involves two toll gantries, each charging $1.25 a car and $2.50 a truck. A Woodend or Pegasus commuter passing both points in each direction would be looking at $5 a day. The project is expected to cost around a billion dollars, and a decision on whether to toll it has not been announced. The briefing that would tell the public what officials advised on that question is one of the documents now being withheld.
There is a reasonable case for the agency’s position. Advice on a live decision is normally kept back until the decision is made, and contracts for new tolling technology are genuinely commercial. But there is also a reasonable case that a country being asked to pay a new charge for using roads it already paid to build deserves to see the reasoning before the gantries go up rather than after. The Ombudsman exists for exactly this argument, and anyone unhappy with a refusal can ask for it to be reviewed.
Tolls have a habit of turning into election issues. Chris Penk, the National MP for Kaipara ki Mahurangi, has already been telling his voters that drivers must keep the option of a free road near any tolled one. With the general election set for 7 November, how much of the roading programme is paid for at the gantry rather than at the pump is a question every party will have to answer. If you are still working out where the parties stand on transport funding and much else, our voting tool lets you compare their positions side by side.
Do you think toll roads are a fair way to pay for new highways, or should road building stay funded out of general taxes and fuel charges. Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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