Brian Rudman: We're all grown-up, so let's get rail right

Each time Transport Minister Stephen Joyce produces another excuse for stalling the electrification of Auckland commuter rail, it makes me want to scream at the previous Labour administration for dragging its feet for so long.

If Labour had not left it to the dying days of its near-decade in power to back public transport moves such as electrification, integrated ticketing and a regional fuel tax to help pay the costs, contracts would now be locked in place and it would be too late for the pro-road National Party ideologues to start their unpicking.

Mr Joyce now seems to be deliberately taunting Aucklanders, promising all will be well, while slowly and publicly plucking the wheels off the trains, one by one.

He seemed to be deliberately mischievous last weekend when, while enthusing about roads, he told the Weekend Herald that "rail projects are [important] as well, but with the urban ones we need to know the impact on land-use planning in Auckland."

He complained "there's no business case or plans which says, 'here's where we're going to put the two million people we're told are going to live in Auckland in 22 years'."

Whatever else Auckland local government can be criticised for, a failure to prepare reports is not one of them.

Mr Joyce is one of the National Government's smarter minds and a quick learner, so it's hard to believe he was ignorant of the shelves of reports prepared over the years which could be wheeled out to contradict this claim.

Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee promptly did just that, packing at least 10 of the more recent of these documents off to the minister with a stern note.

The reports included the Auckland rail electrification business plan, prepared in 2006 by Brian Roche, now chairman of the NZ Transport Agency.

But so cocky is Mr Joyce that he doesn't even seem to care he was leaving himself wide open in his criticism of the Auckland rail project lacking a business plan.

For if ever there was an infrastructure project that came without such a document, it's Mr Joyce's own flight of fancy, the eye-wateringly expensive Puhoi to Wellsford motorway extension, estimated to cost at least $2.3 billion.

Certainly such a highway will speed Prime Minister John Key's journey from Parnell to his Omaha Beach holiday bach. It will also do no harm to Mr Joyce's reported desire to inherit Speaker Lockwood Smith's Rodney electorate, through which the grand motorway will run.

But such collateral advantages are hardly a viable substitute for a professional business study or a benefit-cost assessment. Neither do they justify Mr Joyce's post-election declaration that this motorway extension was forthwith to be one of seven roads of national importance.

The Auckland Regional Transport Committee certainly didn't think so last week when it chose to rank this road as bottom of its list of 15 regional transport priorities.

Top of the list was the $1 billion rail electrification project for which Mr Joyce and his Cabinet colleagues are still to allocate any money. Next came the central Auckland rail tunnel, looping out of the Britomart Station and under the CBD to Mt Eden. Third was integrated public transport ticketing.

The Auckland Regional Transport Authority and the Transport Agency chose a preferred tenderer for the ticketing months ago. But for months now the agency, under pressure from losing bidder Infratil, has avoided backing Auckland's choice.

The story with the new electric rolling stock is, if anything, worse.

In March, the regional transport authority had already called for international expression of interests in supplying electric rolling stock when the Government abolished the regional fuel tax and said state-owned KiwiRail would buy the train sets instead.

Not for the first time in Auckland's recent history, the tender process for a new public rail system has been stalled by Government antagonism.

In the 1990s the ARC had 58 international expressions of interest in a contest for a light rail system, but Wellington killed it. In 1975 the Kirk Labour Government okayed an electrified suburban rail system for Auckland but the incoming Muldoon National Government sank it.

It's not more business plans we need, it's Government willingness to treat Aucklanders as adults.