OPINION
The good news is that former Transport Minister Michael Wood’s ridiculous $30 billion-plus light rail project is now dead.
When Jacinda Ardern handed over to Chris Hipkins to try to save Labour from certain defeat, Beehive strategists indicated that Wood’s light-rail obsession was heading to the policy bonfire. It was estimated by the Treasury a year ago to cost up to $29.2b, but wiser heads in the Beehive understood that maximum forecasts should always be considered minimums.
Labour had felt obliged to pretend light rail might happen because Ardern’s first promise as party leader was to get it built from central Auckland to Wood’s Mt Roskill electorate by 2021 and to the airport by 2027. With Ardern gone, the whole fiction could safely be dropped.
But Wood, the darling of Labour’s trade-union left and its Grey Lynn Brahmins who loved light rail when last in Vienna, fought back.
Light rail was a bottom line for Wood’s co-operation with Hipkins’ sausage-rolls and bread-and-butter project.
While agreeing to scale back his ambitions from preposterous to merely ludicrous, Wood also doubled down, announcing light rail would be the main mode of a new Waitematā Harbour crossing. It would cost untold billions more, but would make the still-unfinished and over-budget City Rail Link (CRL) less efficient than it could be, despite CRL being designed to be extended across the harbour to link the North Shore to Auckland’s existing rail lines.
Wood’s suspension as Transport Minister, for shilly-shallying over his Auckland airport shares, deprives light rail of its last influential advocate. Finance Minister Grant Robertson will be delighted.
Even better for Labour, the new Transport Minister can now propose a rational congestion-busting programme for Auckland, based on bus lanes, regular rail, cycleways and roads.
Whoever gets the job may then re-allocate the balance to other projects in Auckland and elsewhere. If that’s the fast-rising, blokey, ute-driving former TAB bookie Kieran McAnulty, the winners will be provincial cities, where Labour must shore up its vote.
But the bigger reason light rail is kaput is that Wood’s dissembling has wrecked Labour’s re-election plan so carefully developed and brilliantly executed by Ardern, Hipkins and Robertson over the summer. However hard National leader Christopher Luxon sometimes seems to be trying not to become New Zealand’s 42nd Prime Minister, Wood has almost guaranteed it.
Nobody who has worked in the Beehive can believe Wood ignored the Cabinet Office’s demand, at least 12 times since November 2020, that he sell his airport shares.
The Cabinet Office is always on ministers’ side. Unlike other central agencies, it exists not to irritate ministers by arguing over their policies or getting in their way, but simply to help with the paperwork and keep them out of trouble.
If it tells a minister they must do something to be legally safe, even the most incompetent or dishonest knows to do it straight away.
Absent any other plausible explanation for ignoring or misleading the Cabinet Office, it seems Wood, convinced of his own rectitude as an Anglican socialist, thinks ministerial disclosure and conflict of interest rules to prevent corruption are about keeping those dirty Tories under control, so aren’t so important if you’re Labour.
Embattled Education Minister Jan Tinetti — the first MP to be hauled before the privileges committee since Winston Peters in 2008 — demonstrates the same attitude to Parliament’s rules over whether or not MPs have told it the truth.
Those mini-scandals follow Justice Minister Kiri Allan’s attack on the management of state-owned RNZ, 96 per cent of whose $50 million annual revenue relies on the government, after her fiancée didn’t get a top job presenting the show that competes with Mike Hosking’s breakfast programme on Newstalk ZB.
None of these three Cabinet ministers is legally corrupt.
They just don’t seem to think the rules apply to them. Sadly for Hipkins, Labour’s reputation for smug, self-regarding sanctimony that was meant to have left the Beehive with Ardern seems worse than ever.
Such arrogance is commonly associated with third-term governments. But whatever you think of John Key, Bill English, Helen Clark or Michael Cullen, their governments in fact made it through to the end of their third terms with their reputations for basic competence and integrity mostly intact.
Key even stepped down as Prime Minister when focus groups were beginning to suggest they saw him as arrogant, the character trait he says he most despises.
Arrogance is electoral poison, not just because voters can intuit it, but because of the ethical lapses and mini-scandals that result, further damaging a government’s reputation for competence and integrity while overshadowing any message.
This is only a second-term government, but it has fooled itself, despite its abject incompetence at delivery, into thinking there really was something special about its responses to the March 15 terrorist attack and Covid, when in fact any government would have done at least nearly as well.
Thus, electorally lethal arrogance has come early, as has overexposure after years of Covid press conferences and other live-streamed government events.
Make no mistake, the polls are still incredibly tight, and the Ardern-Hipkins Government has not yet totally collapsed like the Lange-Palmer-Moore circus in 1989 and 1990.
A better comparison of its incompetence, arrogance and over-staying of its welcome is with the last days of the Bolger-Shipley regime.
It too thought it had delivered world historical achievements and was infuriated that dumb voters disagreed. Well before the election, voters would no longer listen to anything it said, and assumed — self-fulfillingly — that it was toast.
The Shipley Government tried to scare the public about the horrors of a Labour-Alliance-Green regime, the same way Labour last Friday tried to associate Luxon’s policy to restore the $5 prescription charge with science-fiction accounts of societies where the ruling class kidnaps, imprisons and rapes women, and forces them to bear its children.
Promising to restore the $5 charge may not be smart politics, but it is the same impost the Ardern-Hipkins Government has administered for five and a half years, and which remains in place this very day.
Governments which don’t think the rules apply to them - and which think voters are so thick they will fall for claims that the MPs sitting across from them are not just wrong but monstrous - ought to be thrown out for those reasons alone.
It’s even worse in this case. Despite Wood’s own record of failure, he is keeping his job only because Hipkins rightly judges that he has no one else to meet even that mediocre talent for delivery.
- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
Walls has been ZB political editor since January 2023.