There are many reasons Chris Hipkins should be pleased to see the back of Michael Wood. But we don’t have forever, so for brevity, here are three.
The first is light rail. Now that the project’s chief cheerleader is out of the picture, Hipkins can send it where itbelongs. The dump.
It sounds like hardly anyone else around the Cabinet table is all that keen on blowing $29 billion on a single line. Neither are the public. Light rail is an extravagance when the Government apparently doesn’t have enough money to lift the pay of secondary school teachers at the rate of inflation.
If the aim is to move people fast from one place to another, there are cheaper ways to do that without introducing a whole new track system found nowhere else in the country. Use buses. Use the trains we already use.
The second reason is that Hipkins now doesn’t have the worst Transport Minister in the history of the country in his Cabinet.
Wood hasn’t earned that accolade because of the multitude of failures on his watch: the potholes, the Cook Strait ferry breakdowns, the Wellington bus network shambles, the 1000 daily Auckland bus cancellations, the track maintenance shutting down chunks of the Auckland train network for years. No, he doesn’t deserve to bear the blame for that alone. It took decades of underfunding and negligence for things to get that bad.
Wood earned that accolade for failing to do a single material thing to make our country move more easily from one place to another. He might’ve promised to build some roads destroyed by the cyclone but whoop-dee-doo. No politician keen on re-election wouldn’t.
But he cancelled or allowed the cancellation of more significant roading projects than he’s started. Mill Rd, south of Auckland. Stage 2 of the Takitimu Northern Link near Tauranga. Whangārei to Port Marsden highway. The rescoping of Otaki to Levin.
He slowed down Auckland by allowing the dropping of speeds on 1600 roads. He wanted to build an Auckland harbour crossing only for bikes when cars have needed another crossing for decades.
He was a bike-mad, car-hating ideologue. Good riddance.
Hipkins is now free to go nuts on roads this election. And he should, because Kiwis love roads. Just look at the reaction to the opening of the Pūhoi to Warkworth motorway. Authorities had to keep the actual opening date a secret to avoid us all turning up at the same time for a hoon on the new tarseal.
Michael Wood wanted to build an Auckland harbour crossing only for bikes when cars have needed another crossing for decades. Chris Hipkins is now free to go nuts on roads this election. Photo / Michael Craig.
The final reason is that Wood was a liability. Who knows what else is lurking in the J.M. Fairey Family Trust that Wood doesn’t know about and therefore hasn’t declared? This trust is like Mary Poppins’ magic bag. It keeps producing more goodies than you can possibly have imagined was being stashed away by a couple of - we all assumed - comfortable-but-not-wealthy battlers for the working man.
Finding out that there is more in the magic trust is better 15 weeks out from an election than two or three weeks out from the election, or whenever Sir Maarten Wevers’ register of pecuniary interests investigation reported back.
Wood is a loss to the Labour Party because he was clever and capable and didn’t look uncomfortable in a business suit. But he’s no great loss to New Zealand as a minister because he was a blocker rather not an enabler. We haven’t even touched on the crimes he inflicted on the economy by keeping out migrants during a labour crisis, because that’s a column of its own.
His resignation and the appearance of a party in crisis won’t hurt Labour at the election. Voters have already baked in the fact that it’s a shambles behind the scenes.
There is very little downside in losing Wood as a minister. Just a lot of upside for Hipkins and motorists and the whole economy.
Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.
