Steven Joyce: Hopelessly marooned on a road to nowhere

Finance Minister Grant Robertson (right), Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis face a tough election year. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION:

The die is looking increasingly cast for this Government. In a range of crucial policy areas they have resolutely refused to change course in response to changed circumstances, despite people jumping up and down and telling them they are sailing on to the rocks. Now they are in the process of reaping the consequences of their intransigence. And at this late stage it seems there is precious little they can do about it.

The economy is a case in point. Grant Robertson’s refusal to alter his spending plans, his lack of interest in a more welcoming immigration policy to unstick the labour market, his failure to hold back his colleagues’ tsunami of increasing regulation, and his unwillingness to require discipline on government-mandated wage increases, have all contributed to a glum economic prognosis. He has sat on his hands blithely assuring everyone we are in good shape, and now can only watch as the Reserve Bank does what it must do to rein in runaway inflation.

Crime is another example. This government has spent years building a reputation for being soft. They doth protest but emptying the prisons, stopping police chases, softening sentences and generally showing more interest in criminals than victims leads to a sense of lawlessness and a growing list of personal tragedies.

And so on. Health, same story. Education as well. All a case of people arriving in government with a pre-conceived and rigid set of beliefs, often harking back to the 1970s, and then resolutely refusing to respond to the evidence in front of them until it is too late.

One of the biggest messes they have made, and continue to make, is in transport infrastructure. Its hard to fathom just how big a stuff-up this has become, and how difficult it will be to put it back together again.

On attaining office in 2017, the new Government inherited a set of roading and rail projects that sequentially followed on from the roads of national significance, regional highway builds, and the previous investment in commuter rail and in freight corridors. All were based on actual and projected use.

They proceeded to rip those plans up, not once but twice. The first time was in favour of their light rail project for Mt Roskill, announced during the 2017 election campaign, on which little work had been done.

Faced with a backlash on other plans, and a lack of progress on light rail, they then resurrected some of the pre-booked road and rail projects and then cancelled them again when they decided they didn’t have enough money. Contractors working on projects like Mill Road in South Auckland could be excused for feeling seasick with all the chopping and changing.

Meanwhile projects already under construction when they arrived moved towards completion, despite Covid lockdowns and labour restrictions. They are now nearly all finished, and in the absence of new ones to move onto, the equipment and workforce patiently built up over more than a decade is in many cases off to Australia to work there.

Meanwhile an army of consultants has been churning through plans and programmes over the past five years trying desperately to make sense of changing government instructions, be they on the type and width of each road to be built, the shape and size of Auckland light rail, or the unintentionally comical “Let’s Get Wellington Moving” shambles.

And pretty much nothing new of any scale has started construction. We’ve lost five years to paper pushing.

Now, in the face of a mounting road toll and pretty much no progress on a highway building plan, the government has resorted to the old saw of lowering speed limits, not on particular sections of road, but across the whole lot.

Ignoring that many of our road deaths occur out of driver impatience, or by people already flouting the current rules, the government has decided to punish everyone in terms of travel times and speeds, at the expense of productivity and getting home on time.

And yes it is the government. They are hiding behind NZTA but no agency advances these sorts of plans without government approval.

The only sure way to drive down our road toll is by relentlessly improving the quality of our roads. That means continuing to boost the capacity and safety of our busiest regional highways, and building more forgiving features into the not so busy ones.

If the current government had continued with the highway build-out plan, the deathtraps south of Cambridge, north of Tauranga, and south of Whangarei or Levin, for example, would be nearly complete by now — both improving journey times and reducing driver frustration and risk-taking.

They are putting in more median barriers, but that’s not enough on the busy highways, and its not happening fast enough on the less busy ones.

There is no getting away from the fact the country has lost at least six years in building transport infrastructure and mega millions of dollars because of an ideologically driven junking of pre-existing plans.

In what could surely only be desperation, this week Michael Wood attempted to show progress by announcing a round of consultation on the second Waitemata Harbour Crossing in Auckland, suggesting he might bring it forward from a planned construction date of the 2040s. A date of course that the current government pushed it out to.

Wood seems to be the only one who doesn’t know there was a full round of discussions, consultations and designs undertaken by NZTA just a decade ago, culminating in the confirmation in 2013 of twin multi-modal tunnels under the Waitemata Harbour, and route protection for those tunnels. Back in the days when we got on and built things they were due to be being built right now.

In bringing the harbour crossing up and announcing he is starting over, all the Minister has done is unwittingly highlight the failings of his government, how little actual progress has been made and how much opportunity has been lost.

The job for the next government will be to quickly resume a programme of transport investment focused on actual transport use rather than the fevered ideas of politicians and planners, one that is prioritised ruthlessly on actual benefits to actual users, and is funded over a decade or more so that contractors have confidence to invest in getting it built.

As with so much, it is too late for this Government and frankly beyond its wit to change tack.

- Steven Joyce is a former National Minister of Finance. He is director at Joyce Advisory.