KEY POINTS:
The two government agencies responsible for funding and building our highways are about to be subjected to the bureaucratic equivalent of a landslip. Down upon their dreams of top-class, sustainable and future-proofed roads comes an inquiry by the State Services Commission, spurred by the thoughts of a ministerial advisory group and no doubt inspired by the fears of the Treasury at multi-billion-dollar bills.
The charge that Transit and Land Transport NZ seem to face is that they have a tendency to "gold plate" the projects they manage. In particular, aspects of the motorway extension north of Orewa which dares to incorporate two tunnels (one each way) near Puhoi and an "eco-viaduct", a name which plainly draws more attention to itself than is desirable but prevented an act of engineering vandalism on the environment.
The ministerial group, which issued a report on Friday, concluded that costs on this project appeared "not fully justified". An arguable claim, no doubt, but one for the Transit and Land Transport officials to rebut.
The suggestion that some roading investment comes "gold plated" is from the Minister of Transport, Annette King. It is hard to believe, given the evidence. This country's roads are surely among the more basic in the developed world. Of late, some substantial and much-needed projects have been finished, only to show immediate failings either in capacity or physical quality.
Mrs King opened the new section of State Highway 1 near Mercer last year and within days parts of the tarmac were lifting and corroding. The new southbound lanes on that road are all very impressive but the original highway lanes now turned into double lanes northbound are bordering on decrepit - all wrong angles, uneven joins, poor lane markings and a reduction to 80km/h. In Auckland city, the central motorway junction upgrade linking all the arms of the network has many fine attributes but has run two on-ramps perilously close together and caused widespread complaint and congestion.
Mrs King might be blinded by the dubious sculpting of concrete walls and median barriers within the new Spaghetti Junction, but she needs to know what motorists have learned the hard way: all that glisters is not gold.
Perhaps more concerning was the ministerial group wondering aloud if this country could afford "international standards" in roading. It has recommended that the adoption of these unspecified standards should be reviewed but surely no government with aspirations to economic development and improvement in New Zealand's rankings within the OECD could contemplate such a cop-out.
For too long a lack of real international benchmarking in our infrastructure has contributed to this country falling behind. Ideologues were happy to humour inadequacy in favour of cost containment. The limitations of broadband are testament to that. A propensity to do things on the cheap has existed within our governments and regulatory bodies in other areas, with the drive to reduce "gold plated" requirements in the residential building sector in the early 1990s producing the leaky homes scandal of today.
While Transit and Land Transport NZ have had their problems, including the mysterious re-ranking of priority projects and budget blowouts on the list of future works, there is evidence that good progress has started to be made on unsafe and uneconomic roads. The Government Budget last year made much of its investment in roading. The State Services Commission will now look at changing the set-up of Transit and Land Transport, possibly merging them and delivering the funding responsibility to the Ministry of Transport, a policy body.
Ringing in the commission's ears, though, will be the minister's talk of "gold plated" spending. For her advisers to be expected to cut corners to rein in spending would be a backward step. To accept that New Zealand should make do with roads beneath "international standard" would be unthinkable.
