Brian Rudman: Selective tolling an unjust and wasteful way of paying for roads

If toll-free state highway building is good enough for the people of Tauranga then it's good enough for Aucklanders as well. That's the message we should be sending loudly and clearly, to Transit New Zealand and Finance Minister Michael Cullen.

This time last year, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters showed us just how political road building is. After a close-run election, Labour leader Helen Clark needed Tauranga-based Mr Peters' long-term backing to ensure her return as Prime Minister.

Mr Peters' message was simple. Drop plans to toll the new Tauranga harbour bridge and I'm all yours. And so it was done.

Even though, just two months before, the Clark-led Cabinet had approved tolling for Tauranga with Transit, declaring this "allows the project to progress to construction many years earlier than would otherwise be possible".

Now we Aucklanders are being subjected to the same flannel. The state road builder has launched a $2.6 million "consultation" process seeking our reaction to a proposal to introduce tolling on the western ring route in order to speed construction.

With a tolling system, Transit holds out the carrot of completion "as early as 2015". But if we reject tolling and rely on "traditional funding", Transit chief executive Rick van Barneveld warns, "there can be no certainty of any opening for at least 25 years".

What skews this consultation totally is the underlying proposition that there is a shortfall in government funding that is set in stone and can only be made up by squeezing Aucklanders for the difference.

But the Tauranga example is proof that nothing is for ever in politics, particularly when it's a matter of holding on to power.

The polling document being posted to every Auckland home asks whether we support tolling, and also whether we support tolling as a way of completing the ring route by 2015. It doesn't offer other propositions such as should the Government allocate a more equitable share of Aucklanders' petrol taxes to Auckland so that the ring route can be completed without tolls by 2015.

Neither does it ask if tolling Auckland motorists will turn you off voting Labour at the next election. But there's nothing to stop you writing these propositions in.

Just over a month ago, Wellington-based New Zealand Institute for Economic Research calculated that $3.8 billion more tax was paid by Aucklanders each year than was spent by government here. That's the equivalent of a $5823.75 donation by every Auckland worker to prop up the rest of the country. As for roading, in the fiscal year 2005 the Auckland region scored only 29 per cent of Land Transport New Zealand funding despite being home to 34 per cent of New Zealanders. And that shortfall was nowhere near as bad as occurred throughout the 1990s.

So whatever Dr Cullen might think, Auckland is not looking for special favours, it just wants a fair share of what's ours.

But even if there was a case for making Aucklanders pay twice for our transport infrastructure, selective tolling seems an unjust and wasteful way of doing it. Why not a simple regional add-on to the petrol tax already collected.

At least Transit has abandoned, for now at least, its original plan to plant electronic transponders in each vehicle which would be monitored as they passed motorway tolling points. That system was going to cost almost more to run, than it collected. Now a simple camera-based system, which will snap number plates of passing cars and mail out regular bills, is being proposed. The on-road infrastructure for this will cost $140 million plus ongoing costs of 30 cents per transaction - each camera click. Which still sounds like an expensive way to raise funds.

Then there are local equity issues. Transit is treating the western ring route as a self-contained entity. But Greater Auckland's road system is one giant circulatory system. Block one artery and the whole flow becomes sluggish - or worse. The beneficiaries of an easy-flowing, completed western bypass will be as much the State Highway One-using rich of Remuera as anyone. All going to plan, they will find the cruise across the harbour bridge to their northern holiday home much easier.

It seems unjust that they pay nothing for their easier ride, while the Labour voters of South Auckland and West Auckland who have finally got a highway of their own, do.

It makes little political sense either.