Instead, this Government is funnelling millions of dollars to consultants to design frankly unaffordable billion-dollar mega-motorways. Meanwhile, a struggling construction sector faces the ongoing collapse of the pipeline of smaller, smarter projects.
This is due largely to one person: Simeon Brown.
As Minister for Transport from November 2023 until January 2025, Brown rewrote the Government Policy on Land Transport (GPS), gutting all new funding for walking and cycling and snatching funds intended for hundreds of shovel-ready locally significant projects to pour into a few overscoped expressways.
Worse, Brown imposed unprecedentedly detailed mandates against multi-modal design, such as forbidding “local roads” funding being used for walking and cycling improvements.
In Auckland, as in other places, Brown’s diktats wreaked havoc on the pipeline of long-planned transport projects. One high-profile example: the long-awaited fix for “New Zealand’s worst intersection”, the dangerous Hill St crossroads in Warkworth in the National Party stronghold of Kaipara ki Mahurangi.
The Hill St upgrade emerged from years of community co-design and was co-ordinated with water infrastructure upgrades in order to “dig once”. But in November 2024, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) declined Auckland Transport’s (AT) request for funding.
Why? Brown decreed that because it included safety upgrades that contravened his GPS, the project needed to be redesigned to ensure funding. Locals were appalled.
Another highly visible aspect of the minister’s culture-war transport crusade: the blanket speed limit increases forced on towns and cities by his rewritten speed rule, with ratepayers footing the bill.
Brown’s rewrite of the speed rule shocked expert observers as a perverse swerve away from all evidence and official advice, which also repudiated his pre-election promises to raise speeds “only where it was safe to do so”.
A key part of the speed rule required cities to undo any speed reductions from 2020 that involved the presence of a school. To widespread dismay, AT obediently complied, reverting more than a thousand residential streets from 30km/h back up to 50km/h, affecting more than a hundred schools – including a quiet cul-de-sac outside the Blind and Low Vision Network’s Manurewa campus.
In June, councillor Shane Henderson quizzed an AT lawyer on the logic, or lack thereof, of Brown’s new speed rule. Let me get this straight, Henderson asked. “If we lowered speeds to protect children, it gets captured [by the rule] and the speeds [must be] raised. If we didn’t lower speeds to protect children, the safer speeds can stay. Is that correct?”
AT’s lawyer agreed: “That’s how the rule is drafted.”
Based on AT’s evaluation of its Safe Speeds Programme, these reversals mean an estimated 564 people will be needlessly killed or seriously injured in our biggest city over the next 10 years.
An added outrage is that even by Brown’s favoured measure of “productivity”, safe speeds were a huge success. AT’s economic assessment estimated that every dollar spent on safer speeds returned $9 in benefits. And a May 2025 AustRoads study enumerated the many wider benefits to the freight industry, local businesses and traffic flow.
AT’s safety programme was world-class, reducing deaths and serious injuries by over 30% where it was implemented. In December last year, the programme won an international award.
Brown immediately retorted via media that the prestigious award was “woke”, reflecting the years he has spent, in Opposition and then as minister, as the tip of the spear in riling up culture war battles and spreading disinformation about lower speed limits.
Again and again, Brown shrugged off expertise and evidence. Although minister for scarcely more than a year, his tenure will likely be recorded as one of the most harmful in this country’s history.
The greatest irony is that his petty culture-war legacy of cancelled projects, now handed to Chris Bishop to salvage, means the Government will struggle to start, let alone finish, many transport projects before the next election.
Hence their endless reannouncements of the same old Roads Of National Significance (RONS).
Whereas smaller, faster transport projects win hearts and minds across the board. They also give you a chance to cut plenty of ribbons and give crowd-pleasing speeches. That’s something Key and Bridges clearly understood, when they jumped on their bikes back in 2016.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.
