Barry Soper: Politicians argue over $12b infrastructure spending

Perspective: with Heather du Plessis-Allan - The Big Infrastructure Spend

COMMENT:

For the Government it should have been a day of celebration. They'd been stuck to the tarseal for the past two and a half years but finally the rubber's hit the road with their infrastructure spend on transport.

Even their chief opponent Simon Bridges was celebrating, claiming credit for their roading programme, saying everything in it was his plan as Transport Minister.

The trouble for the Government, the National leader maintains, is that they won't get to deliver it anyway, that'll be the job of his government later this year.

Yeah well, without the assistance of someone like Winston Peters he could have trouble doing that and it wouldn't seem the New Zealand First leader is of a mind to help him on that front.

The ever linguistically polite Peters accused him of "bovine scatology" and when it was put to Bridges that he saw him as a scatologist, and was asked how could he work with a man who doesn't believe him, he appeared sanguine.

That'll be a decision in due course, Bridges responded, and of course that course for National will be decided over the next eight months.

At the moment it would seem political beggars can't be choosers though, and if some other sympathetic party doesn't come out of the woodwork, he may have no choice but to try and snuggle up to what he would see as the huhu grub. Although this grub is revelling in the current environment with the finishing post now within his sights.

While his fellow ministers were concentrating on the "$12 billion" infrastructure package, Peters was playing politics, taking a shot at Bridges whenever the opportunity presented itself.

He seemed happy enough to put his name to a press statement with Jacinda Ardern and the Greens' James Shaw, along with another one from Grant Robertson, lauding their $12 billion "historic" spend on infrastructure, when in fact they were unveiling a spend of just $7 billion.

The only one being transparent about the amount actually being spent on the projects being unveiled was the pure as a driven putiputi Infrastructure Minister himself Shane Jones who correctly said it was seven billion.

The rest it seems has been spent or will be spent.

Before giving his view on the Government's spend, proudly posing over a plaque bearing his name, laid a few months before the last election at Auckland's Waterview Tunnel was Simon Bridges declaring National as the infrastructure party. But even that wasn't quite what it seemed.

It might have had his name on it but it wasn't National's project, it was Labour's...