{"id":280471,"date":"2026-02-12T12:57:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T12:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/280471\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T12:57:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T12:57:12","slug":"new-outpatients-building-expected-to-open-on-time-within-budget-hnz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/280471\/","title":{"rendered":"New outpatients building expected to open on time, within budget: HNZ"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Phil Pennington of RNZ<\/a><\/p>\n

Health New Zealand says two of its flagship hospital rebuilds are on track despite red alerts put on them months ago.<\/p>\n

The red ratings on the Nelson and Dunedin projects were in the latest publicly available investment report from Treasury dated mid-2025.<\/p>\n

Around that same time, the central health agency had rated itself badly with Treasury for how it managed its billions in assets, joined in the dog-house by Police and Defence on the latest measurement known as the Chief Executive Annual Attestations.<\/p>\n

The Treasury investment report meanwhile showed the Dunedin outpatients building project under cost pressure, by a sum that was blanked out.<\/p>\n

It also red-flagged Nelson to ministers for not having its business case ready in time for Budget 2026 decisions.<\/p>\n

Health NZ said on Wednesday that this related to Nelson’s future stages of work and there was no impact on construction timelines or the expected operation of new facilities.<\/p>\n

“The project continues to progress as planned,” head of delivery of infrastructure Simon Trotter said.<\/p>\n

The Nelson project was\u00a0shrunk to under half its former budget\u00a0and cut into phases by the present government.<\/p>\n

In Dunedin’s new hospital build, the cost risks had since been managed and it was expected to open within budget on time later this year, Trotter said.<\/p>\n

The wider programme that included the bigger inpatients build was also expected to be delivered within approved funding.<\/p>\n

The total budget was set at $1.88 billion a year ago after the government\u00a0rescoped it in the face of public protest, on the grounds sticking with the previous plan would blow it out to maybe $3b.<\/p>\n

Trotter also commented that a red rating reflected an assessment against specific reporting measures at a point in time and “does not necessarily indicate a delay to delivery”.<\/p>\n

However, Treasury’s description of a red rating was that: “Successful delivery appears to be unachievable. There are major issues which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The programme may need re-baselining and\/or overall viability re-assessed.”<\/p>\n

Falling short on keeping up<\/p>\n

In the other Treasury pulse-taking reports to ministers – the attestations – Health, Defence and Police scored the worst for meeting higher standards for managing their billions of dollars of assets.<\/p>\n

Infrastructure experts have castigated public agencies in general for not keeping across the state of their buildings or spending enough on maintenance – the\u00a0country’s leaky courts\u00a0have been an egregious example of lack of maintenance, which a series of expensive projects were now trying to sort out.<\/p>\n

Since 2023, 62 agency chief executives have had to\u00a0attest to Treasury\u00a0annually on how they measure up in 25 areas such as taking care of really critical assets.<\/p>\n

A minnow like Antarctica NZ that has been caught up in stop-start rebuilding was non-compliant in only one of the 25 (some measures did not apply) in the latest attestations done last July.<\/p>\n

One or two non-compliances were common, such as at Internal Affairs, and perhaps surprisingly Justice, and Kainga Ora, which has massive assets. Education complied with all 25.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Health NZ failed in more than half – for 13 out of 25 measures, including being too slow setting up investment assurance standards for its failure-prone digital services; and not properly keeping track of “the identity, condition, and risk exposure” of its service-critical assets.<\/p>\n

This last was a black mark against the Defence Force, that missed on seven measures, even as it struggled with a $2-3b refurbishment of rundown housing and other facilities.<\/p>\n

Police were non-compliant with the watchdog’s demands on eight fronts, telling Treasury they were five-10 years away with some, such as getting all their asset management plans done or having an IT set-up that could keep track.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Phil Pennington of RNZ Health New Zealand says two of its flagship hospital rebuilds are on track…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-280471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}