Why is Simeon Brown (left) the Minister for Auckland and not his boss Christopher Luxon? Photo / Alex Burton
OPINION
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon missed a trick when he didn’t make himself Minister for Auckland - imagine the signals that would have sent. But Auckland’s problems should still be very high on his agenda. Chief among them: money and transport.
Auckland Council, like almost every other council in the country, does not have enough revenue to meet its responsibilities. Solutions have been proposed.
Mayor Wayne Brown, like Local Government New Zealand, wants the GST paid on rates to stay with councils. He calls it “a tax on a tax” and he’s right.
Auckland Council gets around 40 per cent of its income from rates, amounting to about $2 billion a year. The GST on that, at 15 per cent, is about $300 million.
Act has aimed higher, securing a coalition agreement that the Government will be “considering sharing a portion of GST collected on new residential builds with councils”.
Auckland currently consents around 20,000 new builds a year. Data from construction companies suggests the average cost, conservatively estimated, is around $400,000 per dwelling. That’s a combined value of $8b, of which the GST is $1.2b.
Act and National have not said how much of this money might be “shared” with councils. If any. But why not all of it?
Mayor Brown has also called for other changes, such as councils being allowed to set their own parking fines. That seems the very least the Government could do.
Revenue reform - and reform of the responsibilities that go with it - is the single most important challenge facing the new Government in its relations with this city.
If the above measures were adopted in full, Auckland Council would be about $1.5b a year better off.
That would create a powerful capacity to fix some deeply rooted infrastructure problems which simply cannot be addressed through rates. $1.5b equates to a 75 per cent rates rise.
Of course, fiscal reform like this could not be limited just to Auckland. Nationwide, councils could be $4-$5b better off.
Which means the Government would be in a hole for that amount. So, end of the daydream? It’s not hard to see that the chances of this happening are remote.
But the amount of money involved indicates just how desperate councils are. The Government needs to work with them to confront this issue, as a matter of urgency. It wouldn’t hurt if Brown could swallow his pride and let Auckland Council rejoin Local Government New Zealand, to facilitate the process.
Meanwhile, Transport Minister Simeon Brown has put Auckland Light Rail (ALR) in a box and buried it six feet under, which is exactly six feet deeper than the tunnel fantasists at ALR ever managed to dig for themselves.
Minister Brown, who is also the Minister for Auckland, was right to stop the project. It was an election promise and a 100-day commitment, so no surprise, and the tunnelled option was stupidly expensive and slow.
But someone needs to explain why ALR spent $228m and yet did so little. Minister Brown likes to score political points by blaming “consultants” and Labour incompetence, but that’s not good enough.
Are there prohibitive geotechnical barriers to tunnelling through the sea of volcanic rock beneath this city? Was the project just too big? What can we learn from the ALR experience?
There must be a raft of valuable information to transfer to new projects. It won’t all be lost, will it?
In his media release on Sunday announcing the end of ALR, Minister Brown said: “Our focus is on building a rapid transit network in Auckland... and starting work on a Northwest Rapid Transit corridor, alongside other projects to deliver reduced congestion for Aucklanders.”
Hooray. Rapid transit includes the existing rail network and bus services like the Northern and Eastern Busways. Expanding the network could include more rapid busways, surface light rail and even an overhead system.
Brown was right to keep the focus on rapid transit, because it’s essential to any decent plan to address congestion.
He was also right to say the priority should be the northwest corridor. Rapid population growth has been so absurdly neglected there, the region has no rapid transit options at all. As a result, congestion is horrendous.
And he was right again not to announce any specific new projects, but to point instead to work already under way on a new Government Policy Statement (GPS) on transport. This is good practice: the GPS should provide a coherent framework for decision-making and therefore should precede specific plans.
The GPS may also inform Mayor Brown’s own desire for council and Government to create an integrated transport plan for the city.
But after getting all those things right in his written statement, Minister Brown then started giving interviews. And he went right off the rails.
On RNZ on Monday, almost all he could talk about was a brave new world of EVs, to deal with emissions, and more “Roads of National Significance” (Rons) for them to drive on.
Sadly, as the minister must know, you can’t fix congestion by building more roads. The more roads you build, the more people will drive on them. Aucklanders can see this in practice on the motorway at Papakura, where the new lanes are already full and the connecting roads worse than ever.
As he must also know, Rons do nothing for transport problems everywhere else: around schools, on suburban arterials, on dangerous rural roads, on inner city streets and on highways that are not expensive expressways.
In fact, it’s the opposite. Rons suck up much of the money that could be spent making those roads safer and more functional.
There’s more. The Government plans to abolish the regional fuel tax (RFT), which provides Auckland with $300m a year, but has announced no plans to introduce a congestion tax or anything else to replace that revenue. What chance GST reform with this kind of thinking?
And why isn’t new housing going to be focused on existing transit corridors and close to urban centres? The Government has, instead, signalled it will allow more rural land to be converted. Motorway congestion will keep growing because of it.
And as Mayor Brown often says, one often-overlooked key to easing the problems on the roads is to take trucks off them. No real word from the Government about better rail services yet, either.
Prime Minister Luxon asked a good question on the Herald’s Front Page podcast in May past year: “What infrastructure will make the biggest amount of difference to the most people in the fastest amount of time?”
He added: “Let’s lock and load on what those three to five critical projects are for each region. Let’s agree on how we’re going to fund it between central and local government. Let’s lock it in and get on with it, because getting things done is critical.”
Bingo. And seeing as he more or less asked, here are those three critical projects...
One: Fast-track the construction of rapid transit routes, mainly on existing roads. Take no more than four years for each. Include at least one cheap, small-scale, “experimental” project, like the aerial cable car they’re building in Paris right now, to test the concept.
Two: Create a citywide safe-streets project. Include cheap cycleways, neighbourhood pedestrian zones, safe school zones, priority access routes for buses and slower speeds where needed.
Three: Do what it takes to get as much freight on to rail as possible.
Combined, these three things would make a staggering difference to congestion, emissions, productivity, safety and public health. Combined, they could all be done this decade.
We would need that GST remittance - or some other significant revenue reform. But this should all still cost less than those stupid ALR tunnels. And it would make Auckland even more fabulous than it already is.
There you are, Prime Minister: “locked and loaded”.
It really is a shame Luxon is not the Minister for Auckland. But he could still “get it done”.
Perhaps he should take Minister Brown on a quick trip to Sydney, where they can ride the new surface light rail and wander the pedestrianised inner city. Or Melbourne and Brisbane, where similar things have happened.
They’re well ahead of us, building better cities in our part of the world. Will the new Government take any notice, or are we to become the urban backwater of the South Pacific?
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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