John Roughan: Clark and co fear private enterprise

Suppose you were sitting in Helen's seat and a reputable company came along with a proposal for a commercial airport at Whenuapai. Why wouldn't you go for it?

You know, because you live in Auckland, that half of the city faces a ridiculous ordeal to reach the existing airport. Your MPs from the northern and western suburbs tell you that at peak times they need to allow two hours for the trip to Mangere.

Any morning of a weekday those MPs join several hundred people, business people mainly, making the journey for meetings in Wellington. Their drive to the airport can take twice as long as it will take them to fly to the capital. And they know, every time they embark on this odyssey, that there is a perfectly good airfield nearby at Whenuapai.

It used to be Auckland's commercial airport until the mid-1960s when Mangere was established. Since then it has been occupied in spacious splendour by a couple of squadrons of the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

The runway, your officials tell you, would be fine for smaller airliners such as 737s, and they say the proposal in front of you need not present the Government with a financial risk. You want the Air Force, or what remains of it, to go to Ohakea anyway. So why wouldn't you allow Infratil to set up a commercial operation at Whenuapai?

The reasons given by your Economic Development Minister, Jim Anderton, this week don't wash. "The New Zealand Defence Force has now advised the Cabinet that the consolidation from Whenuapai to Ohakea will not be completed until at least 2010, and possibly as late as 2014," he explained.

That is the kind of advice a man like Mr Anderton takes only when it suits him. When it doesn't suit, as when he wanted to help an expatriate yacht builder to set up at the Hobsonville base a few years back, he didn't let the sedate ways of the RNZAF become an obstacle.

In any case, Infratil was happy to share the airfield with the Air Force if necessary until the transfer to Ohakea. And Mr Anderton would have known that joint use was no problem. His electorate is in Christchurch where the international airport has happily shared runways for many years with the United States military base of Operation Deep Freeze.

So what's your real reason for knocking this back? The Anderton press statement says the cabinet decided that "there are no compelling national or strategic considerations to justify central Government's active involvement in establishing a commercial airport at Whenuapai".

It says you are "taking a neutral position on whether any such airport should go ahead". Neutral in the long run, that means, once the Air Force moves out - if it ever does. By then this Government won't have to make the call.

But those words "active" and "neutral" are odd, too. Nobody was asking for the Government's "active" participation in this investment. It was being asked to do little more than to transfer to the Waitakere City Council the authority to use the land under the Public Works Act.

The great irony is that this decision is in fact the "active" option. Governments are active in economic terms when they decide to favour one investment over another. This decision favours Auckland International Airport, which argued strenuously, in public and no doubt in the lobbies of Parliament, against competition at Whenuapai.

The "neutral" decision would have been to permit a commercial service at Whenuapai and let it find the true level of demand.

If you were sitting in Helen's seat the men from Auckland Airport would have been breathing heavily in your ear about duplication of facilities and staff and the threat to the substantial investment at Mangere. Ministers used to listen to this sort of nonsense, particularly from airlines, whenever a monopoly was challenged.

But then Roger Douglas permitted competition and proved that while it might duplicate private investment, it kept prices down and improved standards. His Government and the next became immune to anti-competitive lobbying but I am not so sure of this crew.

The real reason it baulked at the Whenuapai venture, I fear, is that it lacks any sense of enterprise. Helen Clark is a conservative character, as many of her supporters have been surprised to discover on security issues such as the treatment of Ahmed Zaoui and the secrecy of SAS in warfare waged in our name.

In economics she leads a Government content to retain the liberal reforms it inherited but not to continue them. It will not sell an asset for any money and though it is not about to buy back facilities such as air and sea ports it would never have allowed their privatisation or forced them to compete.

At heart it is a traditional Labour Government that believes private enterprise is just for the provision of frivolous things and only the state can be trusted to provide anything that is truly vital, such as railways and television. It tolerates private competition but seems unaware that no sensible investor dares really compete against the heavy hand of public authority and the bottomless pockets of taxation power.

Fundamentally the Clark Government lacks a sense of the unpredictable, creative possibilities of private enterprise in a competitive environment. It appears to have no conception of how civil aviation, for example, might settle into a pattern that satisfied more public needs.

It probably cannot envisage smaller carriers operating out of Whenuapai, filling a few daily commuter flights between Wellington and Auckland's north-western suburbs, providing charters and services to other New Zealand centres, the eastern states of Australia and to Pacific resorts. It really believes there is "no compelling national consideration" when it prevents a company answering a suspected popular demand. That is the worry.

* John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor.