Wayne Brown wants a new harbour bridge from Meola Reef to Kauri Point.
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.
OPINION
“You can’t bluff me,” Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown told the infrastructure industry last week.Governments on both sides were guilty of “shockers” in their spending and the construction sector itself should be “ashamed” of the “self-interested” way it benefits from high-cost, slow-progress projects.
Right through the speech, bombastic bluster jockeyed for prominence with some telling home truths.
He was, as always, rude. “I haven’t formed a particularly good view of you as a group,” he said to the nearly 900 engineers, lawyers, planners, builders, bankers, analysts, accountants and council officers who filled the Viaduct Events Centre.
But though rude, he was also right. “In my experience, you are too costly and too slow. You need to change or the lure of Chinese contractors will defeat you.”
He was referring to the New Zealand habit of overlooking bids for construction work involving Chinese firms. Brown doesn’t think that can last.
He told them the Pūhoi-to-Warkworth motorway was a “gold-plated disgraceful waste of money”, where a “more modest motorway” would have stretched the funding much further, “probably over the Brynderwyns”.
“NZTA had unreasonable design specifications,” he said, “but did any of you say that’s too much? Can we do it better, cheaper, and faster? Or do you just sign up and take the money?”
Such projects, he said, “go through extensive and indeed very expensive business-case processes. Some of you have benefitted from that and you probably should be ashamed.
“In Wellington, this seems to result in the most expensive and oversized projects being chosen, possibly out of consultant self-interest.”
The Government had to share the blame. It was “a bit rich”, he said, for ministers to criticise councils for wasting money, considering that motorway and other “shockers”.
Instead of a new hospital, he suggested, “if you’d offered to people in Dunedin the old hospital plus a new Ford Ranger, most of them would have taken the Ford Ranger”.
Well, perhaps, but only until they need a hospital, right?
Auckland’s City Rail Link (CRL) was “a good project but it’s way over time and way over budget”. Brown is especially annoyed about the “waste of money” in the stations’ design.
“They’re like cathedrals, but you’re catching a train.”
Which has long been the point of railway station design in many parts of the world. They’re public spaces designed for people to enjoy. With the CRL, in my view, the new stations will increase patronage because they’ll contribute much to the pleasure of catching the train.
You either get it or you don’t, I guess.
An artist's rendering of the City Rail Link station at Karangahape Road.
Still, inflammatory references to new cars and cathedrals aside, Brown is right. The country does need to find cheaper and faster ways to build things. And the infrastructure industry, instead of complaining they don’t get enough support, could be taking the lead.
But Brown is also wrong, in that he did not acknowledge any of the barriers governments have put in the way of a regular pipeline of work that will help control costs.
Still, his singular mix of the insightful and the odd keeps on coming. The “worst waste of money”, he told the conference, was the proposal, supported by both National and Labour, to build an “idiotic cross-harbour tunnel”. Last heard, it was priced at $56 billion.
“This will cost twice what Fonterra is worth and just joins one traffic jam to another traffic jam,” Brown spluttered.
“And this is my city! But the Government has already wasted $40 million on investigating it.”
Brown believes there are “obvious, much cheaper and better solutions”. His favourite is a bridge across the upper harbour, connecting Meola Reef in Westmere to Kauri Centennial Park on the North Shore, west of the Chelsea Sugar Refinery.
He says that would cost less than 8% of the proposed tunnels. “Value uplift” could be captured by selling Crown and council land that becomes more valuable near the route.
This proposal requires a new motorway. On the southern side it would probably skirt Western Springs Park and the zoo, running along Meola Rd, over Seddon Fields and through Meola Reserve.
To the north, it would connect to the Upper Harbour Motorway or the Northern Motorway, with no obvious route that doesn’t take out a lot of housing as well as beautiful bush reserves.
Brown described all this land as “under-utilised”.
If we ever do get a new harbour crossing, I’m with the mayor: it should be a bridge. But not that bridge. While tunnels are a ridiculously expensive option, it’s equally ridiculous to propose a motorway bissecting the inner west suburbs and Birkenhead.
Settled suburbs and their valuable parks and reserves are not on “under-utilised” land.
Brown is focused right now on “taking control” of the so-called council-controlled organisations, especially Auckland Transport. “I’m fed up,” he said, “and I know the public are overwhelmingly on my side. Aucklanders want their democratically elected mayor and council to be in control.”
He’s playing a high-stakes game. His opponent, three times over, is Simeon Brown: the Minister of Transport and Local Government and Minister for Auckland, and they do not see eye to eye.
The mayor has called on the minister to change the law, so the council will be directly in charge of transport in Auckland. “We get on quite well and he sounds like he’s doing that.”
This is not true. Minister Brown has officials looking at several options for the future of Auckland Transport.
When I asked him about the mayor’s preference last week, he made a point of saying the government pays the full cost of the railways, the motorways and other state highways and 51% of the cost of local roads.
“I don’t know why we would want to give up our interest in how that money is spent,” the minister said.
Especially, perhaps, when it comes to rapid transit. Mayor Brown used his speech to thank the Government for cancelling the Auckland Light Rail project. “But,” he said, “we still need to build rapid transit to the airport.”
He’s right about that. The minister seems to have ruled out light rail in any circumstances, but the mayor told the conference that we should learn from France.
“They can do light rail for $51 million per kilometre. Last year I visited a brand new one in the city of Angers.” That’s cheaper than the line proposed here by several orders of magnitude.
Not interested, the minister told me. Light rail is completely ruled out.
The difference between the mayor and the minister is also clearly on display when it comes to congestion or “time-of-use” charging on clogged-up roads.
Minister Brown has begun a process to allow such charges, but it will start with the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi creating a nationwide framework and it will not be in place for several years.
The mayor harrumphed at that. “There’s no need for a national framework,” he said. “It’s probably only likely to happen in Auckland in the foreseeable future and other areas can copy Auckland, if there is a need. There’s also no need for NZTA to be involved.”
He noted there’s cross-party support for the idea, “So why is it taking so long? And why is there no room for trialling?”
Step aside and we’ll get it done, says the mayor. Not on your nellie, says the minister. Both insist they’re getting on well.
Simeon Brown, Minister of Transport and Local Government and Minister for Auckland. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Right through his speech, the mayor kept up his fractious attack on both the government and the crowd in front of him. There’s a “fortune being spent on needless seismic strengthening and the culprits include some senior companies here”.
And then this: “Auckland’s seismic rules are rubbish. We have volcanoes here. Wellington has earthquakes. Not enough of them.”
A burst of rather shocked laughter spread through the hall.
“So why do we have seismic rules? It’s ridiculous. I’m sure our steel fabricators aren’t complaining about the work, but it’s delaying projects, causing mass inefficiencies, bumping up prices and delaying the pipeline of work.”
He’s right about the problem, although it’s already being addressed and he knows it. “I acknowledge the Government for ... setting up a panel to look at changing these rules. Get on with it.”
He finished with a couple of culture references. “As Winston Churchill said, ‘Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job’.” Stand by for a Churchillian re-election campaign next year.
And he signed off with, “That’s it, folks”.
That’s the slightly misquoted signature of Looney Tunes.
