Leaders required, not managers

Gavin Maclean

I love the word “integrated”. It suggests intelligence, taking in all possibilities, and fitting them together. Yet there are people who just use it as a buzz-word. We have something called an Integrated Transport Priority Plan, which is a bit of a joke, like so much business jargon, as its chief characteristic is disintegration. I quote: “The ITPP is to develop the case for investment in transport solutions that will support regional economic growth by connecting people and markets through improving roads.”

Modes of transport should be integrated, not so prioritised that one of them disappears completely. Unfortunately your editorial casts them as competitive, when you write about “rail versus coastal shipping”. Once we had both, and there was no problem. Certainly, big costly development cannot be applied everywhere at once, but basic restoration and maintenance can. This is called efficiency.

Now that at last we have a Ministry of Transport that understands integration, the money is actually available, assuming that Shane Jones is a man of his word, and that the community voice can be heard unfiltered and undistorted.

Levels of governance should be integrated. This depends on connection between people and their elected leaders. When Shane Jones came to Gisborne, he spoke of mixed messages, and deferred to the “business leaders”. Alas, the council has deferred to them too; but they are leaders in business only — in reality, just managers, not leaders. As with their recent embarrassment over the Titirangi Project, the council is too good at abandoning leadership to managers.

Business development should be integrated with community interest. If it is not, a business plan is not a real plan at all. Unlike managers, the people want planning to include not just profit, but also safety, versatility, resilience, climate change mitigation, and public transport for the less affluent — the freight that efficiently loads itself. You, Sir, had an unblemished copy-book in your recognition of climate change, but it is sadly blotted by your dogged opposition to the cause of rail.

The status quo should be integrated with future possibilities. When you claim, repeatedly, that there are not enough customers to justify restoring the rail, you are dead right; but the reason there are not enough customers is that there is no rail service to attract them. What has happened to the voice of venture entrepreneurialism, let alone awareness of future declining oil, increasing carbon taxes, and the inevitable development of rail in other regions that will continue to add to rolling stock and transfer efficiencies in the long term? What is happening even to the good aspects of capitalism?

Disintegration rules, temporarily I hope, on all four counts: transport modes, levels of government, community interest, and present with future.

Peter Wooding issued a challenge to three local managers, to which, in their splendid isolation, they did not rise. Of course given a champion like yourself, they don’t need to; and in a context of decent leadership, they shouldn’t matter quite so much anyway. They are obviously all rather good at their jobs, but the jobs constrain them from wider considerations, and make them, at the professional but not the personal level, distinctly unvisionary.

On that professional level, nobody, neither the managers nor you, has ever countered the claim of the rail lobby, held for all the years of this debate, that there is no business plan for roads, and never has been. I believe that if you actually summon the courage to try and justify the over-development of roading, you will come up with all the factors above that speak so eloquently for rail.