Getting the City Rail Link approved may be John Key’s lasting Auckland legacy – Editorial

Sir John Key battled with members of his Cabinet to get the City Rail Link go-ahead.

Editorial

THREE KEY FACTS

• Former Prime Minister John Key battled with Bill English and Steven Joyce to approve the City Rail Link.
• The project, announced in 2016, was seen as essential despite the National Government’s debt priorities.
• The CRL, opening next year, is expected to significantly reduce Auckland’s traffic congestion.

We learned this week that former Prime Minister Sir John Key battled with influential figures in his kitchen Cabinet to get the City Rail Link greenlit.

Thankfully, he considered it the major project worth fighting for. Aucklanders, while having to endure years of construction disruption, will be grateful for generations to come to finally have a piece of world-class infrastructure.

“Probably the biggest problem was getting it past [Sir] Bill English and Steven Joyce,” Key told a breakfast event marking the first 15 years of Auckland as a Super City.

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English was, of course, the Finance Minister and Joyce the Minister for Economic Development at the time.

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The then National Government’s priority, expressed publicly, was to pay off debt. That is certainly a hard sell when embarking on a tunnel dig costing multiple billions of dollars.

But Key, then Transport Minister Simon Bridges and the Super City’s first Mayor, Len Brown, “wore down” the naysayers to announce a commitment to funding the project in 2016.

The CRL has been Auckland’s missing link in its rail network for decades, and digging under the rapidly growing city was first suggested a century ago.

A project of its size had never been undertaken in New Zealand before, and Joyce had warned against fans of the CRL to avoid “wishful thinking”.

We don’t have to look far to see how similar projects have greatly benefited cities.

Sydney has always invested in its public transport infrastructure, the latest being the enormously popular high-speed metro lines. Sydney has a population three times that of Auckland, but it has less congestion.

Auckland’s traffic congestion is projected to cost us $2.6 billion a year by 2026. This must certainly have been a huge factor in Key and his allies wanting to start construction as soon as possible. We must build to grow, a belief future Governments should continue to be reminded of.

The opening of the City Rail Link next year is expected to be transformative, particularly for Auckland’s midtown, which has in recent years gone through a period of decay.

Key said: “I guarantee you, in five years people will forget all about the cost and the problems of getting it built and say, ‘Thank God we’ve got it.’”

Getting the project over the line may well be his lasting legacy in the City of Sails.

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