An infrastructure symposium was held in Auckland last week and law firm Chapman Tripp produced a report about the country’s “infrastructure deficit”.

It argued that more co-ordination was needed to provide funding for projects and to create a long-term pipeline of work to help the construction sector develop its capacity to deliver.

The sector is constrained by a lack of visibility of future work and problems with cash flow. It said central and local government should look more to the private sector to help fund those major projects.

They would provide investors a long-term, stable cash flow, it said.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson had previously said the government wanted to encourage private investors to play a role in building long-term infrastructure for the country.

John Berry, chief executive of Pathfinder Asset Management, said there was the potential for the $40 billion-plus in KiwiSaver to be deployed.

“Infrastructure assets are potentially a good fit with KiwiSaver [they are] long-term investments with certainty of cash flow,” he said.

“But there are challenges, some of which are similar to KiwiSaver investing in private equity assets. The assets are unlisted (and so illiquid), will be more complex than listed shares.”

Such suggestions often hit snags when it comes to meeting KiwiSaver’s requirement for daily unit valuations – it is hard to provide investors an up-to-the-minute representation of an investment in an asset that is not regularly bought and sold.

However, some schemes are already dabbling in private equity in a small way and say that the limited size of the investment helps to offset this problem.

Berry said a direct investment in infrastructure would also have higher fee structures while KiwiSaver was trying to drive down fees overall.

Berry has been a proponent of KiwiSaver taking on more private equity investments, which he said would help counteract New Zealand’s lack of listed investment opportunities and give private companies a capital boost to get growing.