KEY POINTS:
The Prime Minister's "over my dead body" stance has long been suspected as the real reason there has been no progress on a motorway through her Mt Albert electorate to complete Auckland's long-overdue western ring route.
But Clark can rest assured. Transit NZ's decision to plunge a 3.2km twin tunnel deep under her Auckland electorate, rather than the much more cost-effective above-surface option, gets her off the hook.
Transit maintains just 160 residential properties in Mt Albert and Avondale will go when the twin tunnels are drilled, rather than the 500 that stood to be scuppered under the motorway plan. Her seat is as safe as it's ever been.
Finance Minister Michael Cullen suggests the project - which will be New Zealand's most expensive roading investment - could be undertaken by a private/public partnership. But motorists will not view the expensive tunnel favourably if they end up having to pay tolls, as Cullen has suggested, for the privilege of passing under rather than over Mt Albert.
Auckland motorists are already facing a regional fuels tax to fund such projects. Why should they pay twice?
After all, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters set the standard for pork-barrel politics by extracting a pledge from the Clark Government for a new toll-free harbour bridge for Tauranga as part of his 2005 post-election deal.
Surely Clark can extract a better deal for Auckland's motorists?
Cullen and Transport Minister Annette King are now in the box seat. They have appointed Sir Brian Elwood to chair a public/private steering body to assess whether the project should be undertaken by a private/public sector partnership or constructed in the usual fashion where the Government controls and funds the project and contracts the private sector to build it.
The problem is that Elwood's steering group sports nobody from the private sector with either major engineering project or financing expertise - just a trio of business organisation chiefs who have already nailed their colours to the wall on the urgent need to complete Auckland's motorway network to "Get Auckland Moving" - the slogan business plastered over its campaign at the 2005 election.
Michael Barnett (Auckland Chamber of Commerce), Phil O'Reilly (Business NZ) and Stephen Selwood (Infrastructure Development Council) face a challenge here.
The steering group has just five months to get its recommendation up to two Cabinet ministers who late last year were still professing publicly that they were against funding roading projects through public/private partnerships.
Cullen maintains (correctly) that it is more economic to fund projects off the Crown's balance sheet because the Government can acquire cheaper capital. Public/private partnerships have typically been undertaken by debt-ridden Governments that want to get such costs off their own balance sheets.
Not by a Government which, as Cullen boasts, has cut Crown debt to 20 per cent of GDP. And especially not when the cost of such privately accessed capital is now getting higher due to fears of an international credit crunch.
So why the change of heart? Surely not because it is election year and the Government wants to curry favour with the business sector by picking off some of National's policies?
If that's the case Barnett, O'Reilly and Selwood should be doubly careful that they don't assess the proposal through rose-tinted spectacles.
The reality is that by joining the steering group, their ability to publicly critique Transit's recommendation has gone. Cullen has duchessed them.
The business trio should also be making sure that the opportunity cost of putting Clark's expensive tunnel to the top of the project list does not limit other projects Aucklanders want, like the second harbour crossing.
The brute reality is that even the consortium behind Sydney's Cross City tunnel went belly-up.
When Governments suddenly change their stripes, intelligent people (and motorists) ask where's the fish-hook.
Is this a ruse by Cullen to free up the Government's balance sheet for more worthwhile pursuits like tax cuts? Or is it just the first downpayment on a 3.2km mausoleum that will rival that of Joe Stalin's or Mao Zedong - without the attendant tourist attraction?
