Finance Minister Nicola Willis with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Transport Minister Simeon Brown: When should it be a Corolla and when should it be a Ferrari? Photo / Jason Oxenham
OPINION
The same week the Cook Strait ferry project was cancelled, Christopher Luxon opened a new bridge in the Coromandel.
The bridge spans a massive landslide on State Highway 25A, between Kōpū and Hikuai, caused by the storms of last summer. It was completed $7 million under budget and three months earlier than expected. Brilliant.
Luxon thought so too. He told TVNZ on Friday: “We were able to do this project incredibly fast because we were able to smash through resource consenting in terms of actually speeding up the process for getting this job done”.
“We”? All that “incredibly smash through actually” success was enabled by Labour’s fast-track process.
Sadly, it does sometimes seem the Prime Minister opens his mouth just to see what falls out.
It was a silly bit of points-scoring, but his Finance Minister Nicola Willis was also at it when she cancelled the ferry project. Although she did it in a different way: Willis opted for panic.
She didn’t have to. She could have assured us the Government was committed to a reliable service and would work with KiwiRail on a Plan B. After all, as she revealed only later, that would have been the truth.
Instead, she said nope, it’s off. KiwiRail’s request for an extra $1.47 billion, doubling the cost of the project, was unacceptable. As Georgina Campbell reported, there was no Plan B.
KiwiRail swiftly announced it will cancel the ferry-build contract with South Korean firm Hyundai.
Willis pitched her move as fiscal responsibility. The freight, infrastructure and tourism industries, along with much of Wellington, all of the South Island and the climate movement, reacted in shock. With good reason: this “responsible” decision will hurt all of them, and the entire economy.
Then it was revealed that Labour had also rejected KiwiRail’s request for more money. But it told the rail company to come up with a cheaper plan and it did this without panicking anyone.
“We have to be custodians of taxpayer money,” Willis said. This country needs a Toyota Corolla ferry service, she added, not a Ferrari.
Fiscal responsibility is good but the cars analogy was nonsense. A Corolla version of a ferry would not survive the rigours of Cook Strait and it could not manage the $15b worth of freight the ferries carry now, let alone cope with growth.
Besides, the cost blowout wasn’t caused by the ships themselves. Their cost is contained and amounts to only 20 per cent of the whole project.
The problem was landside: KiwiRail wants to build major new port infrastructure in Wellington and Picton that will future proof the service for the next 100 years.
The ferries themselves look like the result of exceptionally good strategic planning. They would have been hybrid electric, thus quieter and calmer in the harbours, with much lower emissions. They would have doubled the capacity for passengers, tripled it for rail wagons and almost doubled it for cars and trucks.
One reason the wharf rebuild was expensive is that it involved railway roll-on roll-off, known as “RoRo”. Another is that building new seawalls and raising the docks by a metre will help cope with the changing climate.
These things will all become essential. Shifting more freight to rail is a foundation for any serious plan to reduce transport emissions. It’s also critical to easing road congestion and making the roads safer. And the need for resilience in the face of rising sea levels and the storm surges of wilder weather is self evident.
How does climate change get abandoned in this debate?
And why didn’t Willis say any of this when she announced the decision? Why get out the blunderbuss when she could have said: ‘We’re going to find a better solution’?
Because she was points-scoring. She wanted her key message to be: “Will you look at the mess Labour made”.
But points-scoring over strategic infrastructure is a curse that undermines the national interest and no government should be doing it.
Again, it’s plain we need fiscal rigour, especially in infrastructure, where eye-watering costs have become common. But being “custodians of taxpayer money” also means being custodians of the future. Not future-proofing the Interislander now simply means condemning the next government to the misery of trying to catch up.
There’s another issue at stake. Infrastructure has become fiendishly difficult to build.
Labour failed. As the auditor-general shockingly revealed last week, the previous Government made a mess of the planning and fiscal controls on projects worth $22b.
Will National be able to do better? We must hope so.
City Rail Link (CRL) boss Sean Sweeney revealed last month that New Zealand is the most expensive country in the world for big projects like his. He’s proposed a more reliable pipeline of projects and less short-term penny-pinching. Infrastructure NZ agrees.
But these things require bipartisan political commitments. How will that happen, when National and Labour don’t agree about the roles of road and rail?
And there’s another conflict to manage. While Sweeney argues for a large and reliable big-budget pipeline, Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown wants no new projects until everything underway now is completed “better, faster, cheaper”.
He’s in the Corolla camp.
Both approaches are right. The challenge is to know when to apply each of them – especially as there have been successes and failures for both.
Auckland built a cheap harbour bridge in 1959 and had to double the capacity just 10 years later. The Key Government scrapped plans for a rapid busway on the Northwest Motorway and that led directly to the congestion there today.
The Corolla solution, in both cases, was wrong.
But the Ardern Government’s tunnelled light rail Ferrari to the airport was also wrong. The cost was prohibitive and the whole thing became so impossibly difficult, they might as well not have bothered.
A Corolla option – surface light rail, busways or perhaps on some routes even gondolas – could have given the city a whole network and some of it might even have been built by now.
The Corolla option is also relevant to cycleways: give a road lane to bikes and separate them from other traffic with cheap concrete or rubber dividers. Spend no other money on it. Nelson Street is the exemplar.
This is not appropriate everywhere but it clearly works and could have been rolled out much more widely by now. Giving a lane to bikes should also have been trialled on the harbour bridge. Instead, Waka Kotahi came up with a preposterously expensive alternative.
Labour’s Ferrari options for Auckland transport were a dangerous fantasy. They were never going to happen, but the cost and lack of action helped destroy political goodwill.
And yet sometimes it is clearly valuable to spend the extra money.
In 2018, CRL plans were revised to lengthen the platforms so they can take nine-unit trains, even though six is the maximum on our rail network now. This added costs but helped future-proof the project.
Where do the Cook Strait ferries sit in all this?
“Better, faster, cheaper”, it seems, is a valuable slogan except when it sabotages the big planning decisions we really do need.
And except when it’s code for cancelling projects you don’t like. Cycleways are the cheapest transport infrastructure and they often have good business cases. You’d think politicians who trumpet their “fiscal responsibility” would call for more of them.
Instead, Transport Minister Simeon Brown has stopped government funding for cycleways, saying they are “wasting taxpayers’ money” and “completely unnecessary”.
Does that put the minister in the Corolla camp with the mayor? If so, why hasn’t he ruled out Waitematā Harbour-crossing tunnels? Does he support the just-announced new road tunnel under Wellington’s Mt Victoria? Neither of them has a good business case.
It must be tempting to think rail and ferry projects are too hard, so we might as well keep building roads. But being easier doesn’t make them better.
As for all the points-scoring, it is possible to rise above. In a bipartisan move in 2021, the United States Congress adopted the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, earmarking US$850 billion ($1.37 trillion) over five years for transport, energy, water, broadband, coastlines and other environmental projects.
The money is allocated transparently and progress reports suggest it’s working.
You have to think, if America can do it, anyone can.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
David Seymour, Emma Higgins, Andrew Hoggard, Grant McCallum, Phil Duncan, Cheyne Gillooly.