Ferry fiasco exposes the peril of political flip-flops on infrastructure projects – Shane Te Pou

THREE KEY FACTS

• New Zealand needs to spend about $1 trillion on its infrastructure deficit.
• This equates to around $30 billion per annum, or $115 per person per week for the next 30 years.
• NZ has ranked last in a global survey for its record of delivering national infrastructure.

If we needed proof of the case for new, more capable inter-island ferries, we got it this summer. What an embarrassment for the country to have thousands of tourists stranded because the worn-out Interislanders can’t handle the Cook Strait weather.

Two new ferries – much larger and more stable in rough weather – would be on their way in a matter of months, if Finance Minister Nicola Willis hadn’t rashly cancelled the iRex project just as building was set to begin in late 2023.

Willis’ reckless decision appears to have been driven more by the desire to get some cheap headlines and accuse the previous Labour government of waste than serious, responsible analysis of the options before us.

A year and a billion dollars down the gurgler later, Christopher Luxon had to take the ferries job off her and give it to Winston Peters in his new role as Minister for Rail. All signs imply we’ll eventually end up getting rail-enabled ferries after all – just years later and at greater cost.

Willis’ ferry fiasco is part of a worrying trend of new governments coming in and cancelling the other side’s infrastructure projects mid-stream.

Along with the ferries, National has reduced the new Dunedin Hospital project, canned school upgrades up and down the country and thousands of planned state house builds, not to mention Auckland Light Rail. In place of these projects, National is planning to pour money into major new highways, and looking to public-private partnerships and tolling to help with the financing.

Ironically, some of these new highway projects are ones that were themselves cancelled or scaled-back by the incoming Labour government in 2017.

You can debate the merit of each of these projects, but it’s clearly not in the country’s interest to be chopping and changing all the time.

On top of the billion dollars in sunk costs we lost on the ferries, how much planning and pre-construction work is going down the drain in all the other projects that got abruptly stopped? Every time we stop one project just before spades go in the ground and turn to another project (that’ll likely be cancelled in turn), we fall further behind other countries that are just getting on with it.

If we want Aotearoa New Zealand to have world-class infrastructure, rather than being littered with half-completed projects, we need a more serious commitment from our political leaders.

This is a long-standing problem for New Zealand – attempts to cost-cut or switch horses mid-stream that end up costing more and delivering less.

Aucklanders only need look to the Harbour Bridge. Originally planned for six lanes, plus walking and cycling paths, it was cut to just four lanes by the penny-pinching Holland government, which led to the clip-ons being needed just a decade later at greatly increased cost.

But the trend has definitely worsened in recent years, with growing political interference in what are meant to be independent decisions by New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi, KiwiRail and other agencies.

To National and Labour’s credit, both parties seem to understand there is a need for cross-party agreement to put an end to this chopping and changing. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop has spoken of the need for a durable infrastructure plan that has buy-in across Parliament, and Labour’s Barbara Edmonds recently put her name (with caveats) to a Government paper on accessing more private financing for infrastructure.

The problem is, there still seems to be an assumption “consensus” means “everyone else agrees with me”. Bishop is himself cancelling housing projects Labour funded and is in the middle of undoing the bipartisan housing accord agreed in 2021. The limit of “input” he is offering other parties is a briefing from the Infrastructure Commission every six months.

If we want Aotearoa New Zealand to have world-class infrastructure, rather than being littered with half-completed projects, we need a more serious commitment from our political leaders.

Parliament should pass legislation to create a panel of each party’s infrastructure spokespeople that meets regularly and, on the basis of expert advice, hammers out a detailed infrastructure plan by a two-thirds super-majority. This plan would have the force of law, and the government of the day would have to abide by it.

I’m not so naive to believe you can ever remove the politics from political decision-making, but a set-up like this would require genuine give and take on each side. Nobody will get all they want, but it’s better than getting nothing, which is what the status quo is getting us.

If we want to avoid future repeats of the ferry fiasco, our political leaders need to be prepared to meet each other halfway.