Transport Minister Chris Bishop has defended the troubled Motu Move public transport ticketing project, arguing the $1.4 billion national system is too far advanced to abandon even as the Prime Minister criticises the wider record of government technology delivery.
Motu Move is intended to replace ageing public transport ticketing systems around New Zealand.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop has defended the troubled Motu Move public transport ticketing project, arguing the $1.4 billion national system is too far advanced to abandon even as Prime Minister Christopher Luxon criticises the wider record of government technology delivery. The project has effectively been in development by the New Zealand Transport Agency since 2009, with substantive work on the latest version beginning around seven years ago.
The issue is not simply whether a ticketing app or card works. Public transport ticketing sits at the point where commuters experience government delivery every day. If a bus card fails, the failure is not abstract. It delays a trip to work, makes a school run harder, complicates concessions and damages confidence in the agencies responsible for basic infrastructure. That is why a technical programme can quickly become a political test.
Bishop told media the project could not simply be walked away from because the legacy systems it would replace were reaching the end of their useful life. Continuing with existing systems would cost about $1.1 billion over 10 years, while the national ticketing system's operating costs would be about $830 million over the same period. That is the minister's central defence: the project is expensive, late and frustrating, but the alternative is not free.
The political problem is that major public technology projects are judged by delivery, not by counterfactual spreadsheets. An October independent review found development budgets were under pressure and that further significant delays were highly likely. The programme also missed three launch targets in nine months over 2024 and 2025. Those missed dates matter because they create a pattern voters recognise from other government IT failures, including a failed $33 million Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment immigration technology project now under a Public Service Commissioner inquiry.
The lesson from Motu Move is that public technology needs stronger staged accountability. A project can be genuinely necessary and still badly managed. Bishop's decision to keep going may be the least disruptive option, but the government now owns the outcome. If Motu Move eventually works, ministers will need to show what changed. If it slips again, the argument that it was too far gone will become harder to sustain.
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