Our new Prime Minister is blessed with natural signs of sincerity. His settled facial expression is guileless, his normal speaking voice earnest. When he abandons policies the Government previously promoted, it is possible to believe he has genuinely had second thoughts, though he never says that.
He says theGovernment was doing too much, which nobody really believes. Even its best friends had noticed their high-minded Government was chronically inept at getting things done.
The policy Chris Hipkins abandoned this week could hardly have been more central to its ideals. A draft national land transport strategy geared to climate change was an expression of its declared mission, “our generation’s nuclear policy”, as somebody once said.
The draft was also daft. Climate change is important but it is not the most important consideration in a national land transport strategy. Economic efficiency is more important. Without efficient arteries for the movement of goods and people, a country steadily loses an ability to afford climate change mitigation measures or much else.
This country has long had a fairly efficient system of funding roads from user charges in the form of taxes on petrol, vehicle registration and truck use. The money is put into a dedicated fund for allocation by an agency that has enough statutory independence to resist political pork barrelling and invest in projects that will be well used.
A government’s influence on the transport agency’s decisions is limited to a periodic “statement” of priorities that the agency is obliged to put into the equation when it assesses projects. Thanks to the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan on Monday, we learned Transport Minister Michael Wood was finalising a statement that would make vehicle emissions the agency’s highest priority.
It was, Coughlan wrote, “a stark pivot towards public transport and away from emissions-intensive investments like new highways”. It could mean street parking would be replaced by more bus lanes and cycleways, “paid for with money used to fix potholes, according to a briefing released to the Herald under the Official Information Act.”
His report, published on the front page, obviously caught the attention of the Cabinet meeting that morning. By afternoon the hapless bike bridge minister was announcing another back down.
Transport Minister Michael Wood. Photo / Mark Mitchell
“The indicative transport priorities signed off by Cabinet last year will change in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle,” said Wood.” We are now working on an emergency-style Government Policy Statement that will focus on the huge task of reconstruction of roads and bridges.” He knows that’s not a strategic goal, it’s an urgent need for which the agency will receive extra funds.
At his post-Cabinet press conference Hipkins also said things had changed since last year but he was not referring only to the weather, adding, “Clearly, there’s been a change in leadership of the Government.”
To convince us the change is one of substance, not just style, Hipkins is being more drastic than he needs to be. He didn’t need to abandon the draft transport statement, he could have defused it by relegating emissions reduction to be one of several priorities.
Likewise, the sacking of Rob Campbell for a comment about National that is not unusual from Labour appointees to public posts, as Campbell has pointed out. It is unbecoming for a government to have its appointees writing and tweeting like party activists but does not do much harm.
I suspect Campbell was fired because the National policy he condemned, on Three Waters and co-governance, is not very different from the revised policy the Government plans to announce.
Sacking Campbell was Hipkins’ first mistake as leader. Campbell immediately disclosed that redundancies and tougher performance measures are planned in the health service he briefly led. He will now probably become a frequent and valuable public commentator on its resources and its reform.
Hipkins has made no other mistakes yet. He and his colleagues must be delighted the survival strategy they adopted after falling behind in the polls last year has received so little criticism. National must be aggrieved, knowing if it did the same thing it would be roundly condemned for a phony, desperate, unprincipled attempt to cling to power.
Hipkins is likeable and he has grown in government. The fresh Education Minister hell-bent on centralising polytechs, disempowering school boards and abolishing charter schools became a better Minister of the Covid Response.
But I am still trying to work out whether he has a different cast of mind from Jacinda Ardern and whether we have a new government. He is ditching some of Ardern’s dross to focus, he says, on the things that matter.
He looks and sounds genuine but he might just be earnestly and sincerely keen to win an election.
