Terry Harris: When governments intervened

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I remember it though it were only yesterday - standing with a group of fellow student apprentices in what seemed like the bowels of Hades: the gloomy, sand-trodden expanse of the British Railway workshops at Swindon in England.

All about us wheel bogies were being turned true again, massive two-storey presses were deafeningly drop-forging huge parts for rolling stock. Before us, magnificently, stood the just completed, very last, steam locomotive built in Britain.

It was 1960, I was just 18, and my sensible British Government training then, sent a group of apprentices a couple of times a year to various industrial activities around the country for our edification. We also had one day a week and several nights to study for five years for what was accepted as the qualification for eventual entry into the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Many senior engineers in those days had begun their careers thus, like the the fabled Dr Barnes Wallace of Dam Busters fame.

Last weekend my wife and I left Mangawhai for a few days in Hamilton. There was the usual snarl into Warkworth and every other vehicle it seemed was a huge cartage truck.

Speeding, thankfully, through today's "cot-case city", we were eventually cruising past Meremere when a single diesel locomotive passed the other way. I estimate it was comfortably pulling at least 30 wagons, each with a container on. One diesel "loco" with a lifespan of more than 20 years doing the work of 30 imported trucks with a lifespan of perhaps 10 years.

The permanent way verses the huge modern-day expense of road construction and maintenance. Not much later we sped through the massive Hamilton approach and new roadworks. I suppose, though, that if the railways were looked at as a single entity business, through the eyes of a accountant, it would not appear to show a profit.

What about the overall picture? The true cost to the country.

Where is the cost-benefit analysis? Who has done the sums?

A powerful lobby is oil and transport.

In 1972 I left the design office of New Zealand Steel to get back north to the yachting and diving of Whangarei. I took the only job available, which was at the city council. I'd heard a lot about these organisations and their inefficiencies. What would I find?

What I did find was an amazing crowd of happy, efficient people. Some had been trained by the wonderful old Ministry of Works.

Almost everything was designed, and the resultant works supervised, in-house.

Rates and costs were minimal and red tape non-existent. Then governments intervened, no doubt, through business lobbying and MPs toeing party lines - misconceived ignorance.

What do we have today? Soaring rates, inefficiency, delays, added costs and Auckland.

And let's not even consider the safety industry madness.

What changes by political lobby and parliamentary manipulation I've seen in my days.

How sad. I have just finished reading the book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang of South Korea who is a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge University. Typical reviews are: "A well researched and readable case against free-trade orthodoxy." - Business Week.

"This is a marvellous book, well researched, panoramic in it's scope, and beautifully written. Bad Samaritans is the perfect riposte to devotees of a one-size-fits-all model of growth and globalisation. I strongly urge you read it." - Larry Elliott, economics editor, The Guardian.

Robert Service's poetical words ring true of successive governments. "And each fresh move, was only a fresh mistake." Mistake?

Or something more sinister?

- Terry Harris is retired but still retained by a Northland company whose major works he designed and facilitated the construction of in the 1990s, and which now help generate export-earned dollars. He does not belong to any political party.