Our dire infrastructure had a stark reckoning in 2023.
ANALYSIS
North Shore councillor Chris Darby captured the general malaise afflicting infrastructure in this country long before the new Government was formed.
“There’s been a disease in New Zealand,” Darby told The Front Page podcast.
“We have taken our eye off the future, not just in Auckland, but the nation, in some areas, and particularly in infrastructure. We’re always looking at what we should have been doing years ago.”
Darby pointed to the City Rail Link as one of the best examples of this.
“It was first suggested in 1924, and it will [soon] be 100 years between [when the idea was first proposed] and [anyone] actually riding it.”
That is some commitment to decision paralysis – and what’s most remarkable is we’re not quite done questioning whether the CRL is even a good idea.
Even now, as the project moves toward its end date, we still have criticism of how much it costs versus how much money it will make. Very little of this debate even considers the massive advantage this improvement to our public transport system will present in terms of improving connectivity in Auckland and what that might mean economically and socially.
The public – and by extension our infrastructure – seems caught in an endless limbo torn between one government’s priorities and those of their successors.
In this continuous back-and-forth, long-term strategy is jettisoned in favour of short-term political wins that over time congeal into complex problems we can’t explain away.
The dire state of our roads, our lack of fast and reliable public transport and our broken water pipes are all the toxic byproducts of an unwillingness to act. It’s always too expensive, too difficult or too low on the list of priorities.
Dr Timothy Welch, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Auckland, said the unwillingness of the current generation to spend ultimately gets passed on to the next generation.
“When we look at engineering and our investments in infrastructure, we look at the cost today, or the private costs, and ignore a lot of the social costs,” he told The Front Page in an interview after the devastating Auckland Anniversary floods.
“When we spend less on infrastructure up front, we’re really asking the rest of the people in society to front the bill later on. They pay more in terms of remediation and maintenance down the road.
“Short-sightedness can be very frustrating. As we look forward, we should include more of these social costs or broad-based community costs into our ratio of costs versus benefits and think more long term.”
This problem doesn’t only apply to our infrastructure.
Regarding our superannuation system, economist Shamubeel Eaqub warned our political inertia would eventually cost the country.
“We can keep doing that if we want to, but the issue is that we have to make some choices,” he said.
“Either we have to increase taxes to be able to afford it … or we have to cut other services that we might also want: for example, good healthcare, infrastructure or social services. It’s in those tensions that we have to make some really tough choices.”
Creating even greater tension in society is the fact the tax burden could, in the future, rest on fewer New Zealanders because the stock of young people is shrinking, relatively, over time.
“Politically, this issue is very hard, so what tends to happen is that we just keep kicking the can down the road, even though this is the one cost we could predict with a huge amount of accuracy.”
The reality is that Aoteaora isn’t unique in confronting this political inconvenience. The government of France faced public fury earlier this year for daring to raise the pension age from 62 to 64.
People don’t like change, particularly when they feel entitled to something. But it is often the responsibility of leaders to soak up that angst and show communities why the decision makes sense. This often takes bravery – something lacking in an age where policy decisions sometimes seem shaped by focus groups rather than what’s best for the country.
The city of Paris offers yet another good example of leaders willing to lean into controversy to do the right thing.
Between 2001 and 2018, car trips within the French capital declined by almost 60 per cent. This didn’t happen accidentally. It was driven by a series of conscious urban planning decisions within the city.
Slate magazine reports a huge investment in bus corridors, tramways and subways caused mass transit ridership to jump by almost 40 per cent in that time.
Successive mayors over the past two decades have committed to ensuring Paris isn’t just another car-choked city, typified by exhaust fumes and honking horns.
This type of thinking demands consensus on big issues across political lines. It means politicians need to accept tough debates and explain carefully why certain decisions need to be made. It means putting ego aside and accepting you can’t always take credit for everything that you do.
In reflecting on the 70th anniversary of the Tangiwai disaster, writer and Victoria University of Wellington researcher Max Rashbrook noted New Zealanders need to get better at having these difficult conversations if we want to see progress.
“We’re not a country that’s particularly good at long-term planning,” Rashbrook said.
“If you think about phrases like ‘number eight fencing wire’, that’s very much an ethos of: ‘Let’s find a clever but short-term fix to a problem’.
“I think we struggle with long-term planning, often because it involves having quite complicated debates, conflict and taking things very seriously, and those aren’t really hardwired into the New Zealand national character.”
Since coming into power, the National-led Government has continued that old habit of canning what their predecessors had planned and putting new plans in motion. Three Waters, Auckland light rail and the Cook Strait mega ferries are just some of the projects that have already been abandoned.
When I spoke to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in May last year, he bemoaned the abject lack of imagination and execution in politics in recent decades, contrasting our capability to nations like the United States.
“Kennedy said, ‘Let’s go to the moon’, and people landed on the [surface] in nine and half years,” Luxon said.
“So why does it take us longer than that to build a central interceptor in Auckland? Or why has it taken 24 years to build an eastern busway that’s just six and a half kilometres?”
In that interview, Luxon even said he would be willing to work with Labour to get key projects across the line regardless of who is in government to ensure the endless cycle of cancelled plans doesn’t continue for decades to come.
“What infrastructure will make the biggest amount of difference to the most people in the fastest amount of time? And 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.”
That’s the kind of bold thinking that could make a massive difference in the future, but we are yet to see any evidence of it being put into practice.
Damien Venuto is an Auckland-based writer with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017. He previously hosted The Front Page podcast.
Act MP Simon Court is looking at how the PPP framework can be improved.