Brian Rudman: Roads lobbyist does bizarre u-turn in capital

No one is talking publicly about the private meeting in Wellington on Tuesday between a group of Auckland's more-roads lobbyists and Finance Minister Michael Cullen and Transport Minister Pete Hodgson, but the outcome was bizarre.

Spokesman for the lobbyists, Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett, went in breathing fire and brimstone, but emerged a mewing pussycat.

"Standing outside rattling the chain is one way [of dealing with the problem]," he told me yesterday. "Getting inside and helping people come up with some better solutions is another, and I'm giving that a shot. I think it's worth a shot."

And what brought on this transformation?

"Probably just a better appreciation of the problem," he said. "I've never backed off from pursuing something, but by the same count, if you step into the ring and learn a few things, I think we've got to be smarter about the way we do things."

Mr Barnett refused to discuss the meeting, but Beehive sources say he was embarrassed at the meeting when it was pointed out to him that roading projects such as the Waiouru interchange, which he said were not underway, were in fact under construction.

Just a month ago, Mr Barnett lambasted the Auckland road-building programme in an article in the Business Herald. He wrote that 15 months after the Government launched its $1.62 billion roading package, "it is timely to ask, what is the billion-dollar package doing to accelerate Auckland's transport infrastructure development? The answer is clear: Nothing."

Yesterday he said: "I don't know how much future there is in just rattling the cage. Everyone knows there's a problem ...

"The Government's probably thrown enough money at it. We're going to have to be smarter about the way we project-manage. We're going to have to be smarter about the way we make Aucklanders in particular comfortable that there's an agreed programme, agreed funding and an industry capable of delivering it.

"It doesn't matter if it's public transport, trains, roads or whatever. We need to have a chart up on the wall that everybody knows what the progress is going to be and what we can do to accelerate that."

Time will tell whether this road-to-Damascus experience is catching, but it's unlikely to come as good news to roads lobbyist-extreme Tony Garnier, who masterminded and was part of Tuesday's delegation.

Mr Garnier is project co-ordinator of the Auckland Business Forum, which was formed in 1999 by the Chamber of Commerce, the Employers and Manufacturers Association, Ports of Auckland and other road-user groups to campaign for the ill-fated Eastern Highway. He also doubled in the same role in former Auckland Mayor John Banks' office. The forum was soon campaigning for bigger and better roads across the region.

More to his heart will be employers association's plans for an old-fashioned pro-roads advertising campaign in the run-up to this year's election. The draft campaign strategy document leaked to me declares the objective of the campaign is to "leverage" Aucklanders' discontent with the city's "roading issues" and "harness it into a powerful lobby" to make roads an election issue.

Lasting five weeks, the proposed campaign included a "Honk Day" for disgruntled motorists, and widespread advertising using, among other gimmicks, lookalike Tui billboards with lines such as "Helen's an Aucklander, she'll fix our roads - yeah, right."

There would be a website (www.revupthegovt.co.nz) and radio ads with lines such as "If they [the Government] won't fix it, we'll put our vote with the party that will."

Alasdair Thompson, employers association chief executive, says my information comes from a "first draft" and that "we have rejected aspects of it". He says my figure of $150,000 for the campaign is wrong, but "it will be a large sum".

The campaign was not aimed at the present Government, but at "central and local government politicians of all brands", he said.

Yeah, right! Whatever their motives, you have to admire their courage - or foolhardiness. It's less than a year ago that their lookalike campaign for the Eastern Highway bombed, bringing down Banks and his Auckland City allies and almost ending the 2000-year reign of Sir Barry Curtis in Manukau.