Brian Rudman: Cullen takes fast road to shoring up decision

No wonder Finance Minister Michael Cullen rushed to Auckland to console Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett after revelations in my column last Friday about the torrid time he'd got at a Beehive meeting a few days before.

At the time, Mr Barnett was obviously about to turn his back on the $200,000 anti-Government, more-roads advertising campaign being planned by his allies in the Employers and Manufacturers Association, and my guess is Dr Cullen had wind of it and didn't want Mr Barnett having second thoughts.

Dr Cullen gleefully announced the defection at question time in Parliament yesterday when he "noted" that "the Auckland Chamber of Commerce has declined to sign up to the Northern Employers and Manufacturers party political campaign against the Government".

He added that he'd visited Mr Barnett "because the Government values its relations with the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and wishes to co-operate further in proceeding even faster in resolving Auckland's transport problems".

At the private Beehive meeting 10 days ago, Labour Party president and Transit New Zealand board member Mike Williams apparently gave Mr Barnett a hard time over his claims of inaction on the Auckland roading front.

Also at the meeting were Dr Cullen, Transport Minister Pete Hodgson and more-roads lobbyist Tony Garnier of the Auckland Business Forum.

Amusingly, Mr Barnett now seems to be claiming credit for stirring the Government into action as a result of that meeting, even though the decision he claims to have extracted was announced in the Herald nearly a month before.

Yesterday he issued a press release declaring: "Construction on the long-delayed State Highway 20 Mt Roskill section ... will start in August".

He said a confirmed Auckland start date followed a meeting by the Auckland Business Forum with Dr Cullen and Mr Hodgson at which he, as a spokesman for the forum, was "seeking an accelerated work programme for completing critical missing links in the region's strategic motorway network".

He said the Mt Roskill decision "gives Auckland something real to celebrate".

True enough, but the rest of us have already been celebrating for at least three weeks. On May 9, Transit chairman David Stubbs wrote in this paper a rebuttal of an earlier moan by Mr Barnett that progress on solving Auckland's traffic problems was stalled.

In the article Mr Stubbs noted: "Fulton Hogan will start work on the State Highway 20 Mt Roskill extension in spring".

Mr Barnett was aware of this celebratory news. On May 26, we published a letter from him saying: "I appreciate David Stubbs' confirmation that a tender has at last been confirmed for a construction start on the State Highway 20 Mt Roskill extension next spring ... "

Despite Mr Stubbs' article, Mr Barnett continued his criticisms in submissions to various city council annual plan hearings. But now he's come in from the cold. He signalled as much in comments I reported last week when he told me "standing outside rattling the chain is one way [of dealing with the problem] ... Getting inside and helping people come up with some better solutions is another, and I'm giving that a shot. I think it's worth a shot."

I was rather bemused by the comments and didn't appreciate their import, until now.

What can I say now, but welcome inside the tent, Michael.

Better late than never.

As for Alasdair Thompson, chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association and the mastermind of the anti-Government campaign, in recent days, his Social Credit past has been crowding in on him, with ministers mocking his former roles as finance spokesman and deputy leader.

The wheels seem to be coming off the Skoda that is his "more-roads" advertising campaign that I revealed last week.

Not only the Chamber of Commerce has refused to back it, but so has the Auckland Business Forum and Heart of the City organisation.

Alex Swney, chief executive of Heart of the City says funding such a campaign is "not our business".