Image: Sir William (Alf) Stevenson (left) and Arnold Downer, 1967.
Civil Contractors New Zealand Chief Executive Alan Pollard
Last month (November), Civil Contractors NZ celebrated 80 years of serving civil and general construction members at a small reception at Parliament.
Life members, executive councillors, branch chairs and representatives, other like-minded associations, some clients, and the CCNZ team attended the function hosted by Simeon Brown (Minister of Transport, Local Government, Energy, and Auckland).
Each decade of the association’s history is being documented against the social history of the country by former CCNZ Chief Executive and Life Member Peter Tritt and published in this magazine. At the 80th celebrations, CCNZ Life Member Brian Warren, who held the Presidency from 2016-2018, shared a summary of the history of the organisation through the decades based on Peter’s research. I have devoted this column to a summary of this presentation.
The New Zealand Contractors Federation began in 1944 just across the road from Parliament, at the meeting room above the Backbencher – then known as the Wellington Hotel. Proprietor Dan Sloan, also a contractor and owner of the Gisborne Lime Company, called the first general meeting of Agricultural and General contractors in response to a call from the Minister of Public Works at the time, Bob Semple. Semple was famous for driving a Caterpillar D8 over a wheelbarrow at the opening of the Lewis Pass Highway in 1937 to symbolise the start of a new era of development, enabled by mechanised earthmoving.
Frustrated by the lack of a unified civil infrastructure construction voice to engage with, Semple urged contractors, including Dan Sloan, to form a national association for government engagement, so government could hear industry speak with one voice.
The first meeting was attended by 14 contractors, including the first eight presidents of the association. Sloan was voted the inaugural president, and the New Zealand Earthmovers and Agricultural Contractors Association was born. Initial members numbered 130 companies, and while the first Annual General Meeting after the formation of the association in 1944 was attended by only twenty-three members, within a decade the numbers were much greater, rising into the hundreds in the 1950s.
In the 1950s, building a better post-war future meant building new infrastructure to meet the nation’s growing transport and energy needs. The nation’s first five-kilometre stretch of motorway (Takapu Road to Johnsonville) opened in 1950 and the state highway from Auckland to Wellington was finally fully sealed in 1954, coinciding with the creation of the National Roads Board – later NZTA. Work on the Auckland Harbour Bridge started in 1958. New airports, hydro dams and power stations – including Maraetae, Whakamaru, Roxburgh and Tekapo – were built to harness our abundant natural resources.
The 1960s saw the association come of age. Until then, the administration of the association had been voluntary and was highly dependent on the commitment of representatives such as presidents Vic Draper, Harold Parsons, Trevor Culley, Dave Horlor, Eric Feast and Bill Kells, as well as branch chairs and secretaries. But in 1962, the association hired its first full-time staff member, Executive Director Ron Tarr.
In 1964, the association purchased a grand art-deco building as a base of operations in Wellington, now named ‘Margan House’ after the third association president Noel ‘Baldy’ Margan. In 1966, the organisation was re-named the New Zealand Contractors Federation.
The 1960s were a golden age for construction, and the 25th National Conference in Invercargill in 1969 was the first to include a field trip – to Te Anau to view the ongoing works of the Manapouri Power Project.
The 1970s continued to see major infrastructure investment, with ports, motorways, tunnels, and nine major hydroelectric projects in the construction pipeline. The federation’s 1971 Annual Conference in Whangarei gave a flavour of the industry’s issues of the day – inadequate cost escalation provision on contracts, recession, low growth and government expenditure cutbacks. The association also vigorously promoted its ‘construct by contract’ campaign. All remain valid topics today!
Contrafed Publishing and Contractor magazine were founded in 1976 to document the progress and perspectives of the country’s civil contracting industry. The Contracting Industry Training Council (CITC) was founded in 1970 to provide industry training courses – it would later become Infratrain and then Connexis as the industry’s training organisation. The first Construction Excellence Awards were held in 1978 to recognise each year’s top civil infrastructure construction projects, with Mangatangi Dam and Ruapehu Alpine Chairlifts taking home the inaugural awards. This decade also saw the creation of ‘Think Big’, as a response to the energy crisis of that decade.
The 1980s saw a construction boom. The Bitumen Contractors Association, later Roading NZ, was formed from a division of the Contractors Federation in 1988 to represent the needs of contractors working with bitumen and asphalt. The 1980s ended with the disestablishment of the Ministry of Works, meaning all works would be constructed by contract under a competitive construction market.
In the 1990s, as the Ministry of Works was privatised, the last of the major works in the pipeline dried up with the completion of the Clyde Dam. Environmental and health and safety reforms led to massive changes to the industry and the Resource Management Act was introduced in 1991, setting requirements for environmental management and significantly increased project complexity leading to an increasing role for quality assurance and health and safety certification.
And in 1994, Graeme Blackley and Grant Smith dreamed up the National Excavator Operator Competition, and it has been run at Central Districts Field Days by CCNZ Manawatu Whanganui Branch to showcase the amazing skills our industry has to the public. The competition has just seen its 30th year, and by all accounts it was the best one yet.
The 2000s saw a greater focus on people and how we look after our teams. The industry was doing metropolitan works, retrofits and improvements. With 15 branches, the Contractors Federation was a hive of activity, sharing offices with Roading New Zealand until around 2005, when the ‘big vs small contractor’ debate saw the associations butt heads, and Roading NZ take up new offices.
The 2010s saw increasing use of technology, and the industry was brought closer together to resolve significant natural disasters. The Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 had a devastating impact, and more than a decade on, contractors are still working hard to repair the damage. This was followed by the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, that wrecked the highway and rail line.
These events mobilised the whole industry, and the industry excelled in its disaster response and recovery. Roading NZ and the Contractors Federation, long rivals for government attention, settled their differences and merged in 2014 to form Civil Contractors New Zealand as a single, unified voice for the country’s horizontal construction contractors.
Civil Trades, the national trade certification for civil tradespeople, was born. As was EPIC Careers in Infrastructure, a platform to show people what they could expect when taking up the tools of the civil trades.
The association today is going from strength to strength. More women are now working in construction. Contractors continue to value CCNZ as the safe place to make positive change for our industry. Thousands attend branch and regional events each year.
What the industry does has a profound effect on the health, wealth, and well-being of our communities and our country. Our objectives still mirror the expectations of the contractors gathered in that room back in 1944. Bob Semple, alongside Dan Sloan, Vic Draper, Noel ‘Baldy’ Margan, Harold Parsons, and Sam Neville, would look at what has transpired since then with a sense of achievement and pride.
The movement they started 80 years ago has achieved what they set out to do. It has served and continues to serve our members (contractors and associates) well.
Peter Tritt continues to document the history and the deeds of those who have contributed through the years, and we intend releasing this in the near future. If you are interested in more information or securing an advance copy, please get in touch to let us know.