Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop and Resources Minister Shane Jones set out changes to the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill.
Video / NZ Herald
Opinion by Ryan Bridge
Ryan Bridge is Newstalk ZB's Early Edition host and the host of Herald NOW.
The National Infrastructure Agency will be established in December with a brief to partner with agencies, and in some cases local government, on projects involving private finance.
Got a road you want built but worried about the impact on “local communities” and that pesky perennial roadblock they call the “environment”?You need two things. A bulldozer - and a dictator in charge.
Sick of our continual slide into economic irrelevance because we don’t invest enough in research and development because our short-sighted politicians only really spend a year working then two years worrying about the next election, by which time the really big stuff doesn’t get fixed? Get yourself a tyrant. Let’s crush this ridiculous notion that “everybody has a voice”. No, they don’t. Shut up or get shot.
Our lack of progress with our biggest challenges all seems to boil down to the fact we all have a say and can’t agree on much. That much we can agree on.
It’s the new trendy buzzword on the lips of our corporate head honchos, industry analysts and even now some of our politicians when it comes to problems like infrastructure, productivity and the newborn child of political failure - the “energy crunch”.
Sounds nice, but who actually holds faith Wellington will down swords and up co-operation? Our Westminster system is specifically designed to engineer the exact opposite. Hence His Majesty’s Official Opposition.
The experts and reports tell us the problem is not how much we’re investing in infrastructure, but rather how poorly we’re making decisions and funding them.
No certainty over the “pipeline of work”. Will it be this railway or that motorway? By the time somebody makes up their mind, we’ve lost the workers and skills and capacity to get the job done.
It’s not just the Labour infrastructure spokesperson who does this, but politicians of all stripes. Edmonds also mentioned a spat over who had first suggested writing a letter between her and Chris Bishop’s office. She said/he said - it was all his idea but insisted it was in fact her idea first.
The now-defunct Productivity Commission (the fate of which was ironically sealed by what some saw as partisan political appointments) stressed the need for a long-term, bipartisan strategy to lift productivity out of its depressing OECD ranking of 26th out of 37.
We are “capital shallow” and short on commitment despite being so far behind comparable countries we’d apparently have to work 20% more just to achieve average GDP output. That’s an extra day’s work each week. Who’s keen on that?
The Productivity Commission pointed out while private sector choices determine overall economic performance, government direction and investment is crucial in driving productivity growth.
This would, unfortunately for us, require long-term certainty across a whole range of portfolios: immigration, R&D, technology and education to name but a few. Sounds like a breeze.
Ryan Bridge hosts Early Edition on Newstalk ZB.
To our credit, we’ve shown we can sing Kumbaya on trade. The results of this shared vision for New Zealand as a strong trading nation speak for themselves; goods exports to China alone have quadrupled since Helen Clark’s then-Trade Minister Phil Goff signed a free trade agreement with Beijing in 2008.
Our two-way trade is now worth $38 billion. Apart from Labour opposing while in Opposition parts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which they eventually signed while in government anyway), there’s been a largely friendly agreement on all matters of trade for decades which has served us well.
Free trade is relatively easy to agree on, however. It’s all upside and little down. The hard stuff is, well, harder. The fact is we all want a wealthier, more prosperous country with world-class roads and hospitals and jobs that pay enough for us to enjoy life.
If the people we elect to facilitate these things can’t do so then bring on a despot, I say. To hell with consensus. Get a plan. Build a bridge. Get over it.
Okay, maybe I’m getting a bit carried away there.
The middle-ground, compromise approach is to copy those countries that perform better than us. And on this Barbara Edmonds was right.
“Ireland, Australia and Denmark have developed models for fostering bipartisanship - meaningful roles for opposition parties in developing long-term infrastructure plans, special select committees to identify areas of consensus across the pipeline, and formal bipartisan agreements to give certainty to the sector,” she said.
The question for us is whether we think they can do it without the need to shut down Parliament.
The fact those higher-performing economies (Ireland, Australia, Denmark) are liberal democracies is perhaps an important sign autocracy probably isn’t the right way forward.
We do have some promising opportunity for collaboration on the horizon. By Christmas the new National Infrastructure Agency (NIA) will be up and running, which the Government is billing as a “shopfront” to receive proposals and facilitate private sector investment in infrastructure.
Despite Labour’s prior opposition to private capital in such matters, leader Chris Hipkins and Edmonds have welcomed the NIA’s creation while also calling for a “truly non-political process” to be entrenched within it, along with safeguards against political interference.
This sounds good. Like we’re finally sort of close to maybe agreeing we might be on the same page.
So, there’s hope. And if that doesn’t work, a coup.
