Editorial: Electric train decision makes sense

Aucklanders are probably past caring whether the city's electric trains should be provided by a local body or the Government. For years they have been hearing the Auckland Regional Council announce decisions on electrification and still there is no sign of the trains. The Government's announcement yesterday that it will take over the purchase comes after the ARC's transport authority has sought expressions of interest from locomotive suppliers and was planning to invite formal tenders from a shortlist in May.

The work might not be wasted if the new national train operator, KiwiRail, is thinking along the same lines as the Auckland Regional Transport Authority, but the nature of bureaucracy makes that unlikely. KiwiRail will develop its own priorities and ideas of how Auckland commuter services should be run. And the Treasury will have a say in how they are to be financed now that the regional petrol tax approved by the previous Government has been canned.

In fact the takeover of the train purchase is a consequence of the petrol tax decision rather than an act of enthusiasm on the new Government's part. Even Labour took a long time to be convinced that electrifying Auckland's rail corridors was worth the considerable cost, and agreed to it on condition that Auckland carried the cost in the form of a levy on petrol sales.

National never agreed with selective regional fuel taxes and yesterday it pre-empted their introduction, proposing a smaller national petrol levy instead. The money is earmarked mainly for additional roading. The assurance on Auckland's rail electrification sounded like an afterthought. The Prime Minister said the latest transport package was "about better matching funding to the realities of how New Zealanders get around each day, and how our goods are transported".

How Aucklanders get around each day is not exactly as their regional planners would like. Rail electrification has been part of an integrated public transport plan designed to get commuters out of cars and on to trains. It is said to be having some success even with diesel locomotives and notoriously unreliable timetables. But with just three rail corridors serving a city of Auckland's spread, running even an electrified service is always going to require a hefty public subsidy.

For all the disruption the takeover of train purchases has caused to the regional council's plans, there was a logic and inevitability about it from the moment Labour bought the rest of the railway system. Fragmentation of public services offers little benefit to a nation of just four million people unless competition is possible and permitted.

Privatisation has confirmed that the national railway network is not economic. Two commercial operators have failed to make it pay for its capital maintenance. When Labour renationalised the deteriorating tracks and tried to recover the maintenance costs in access charges, the private operator could not pay them.

Now that the trains are also back in state ownership it is important that the transparencies of privatisation are not lost. The tracks and trains should remain separate accounting entities even if Ontrack and KiwiRail are merged. If the Auckland commuter units are owned by the national agency they will continue to be operated by the French company Veolia Transport, whose contract with the regional transport authority was recently extended to 2014.

The Government might not be as committed to the rail plan as the regional council has been, but the council's days may be numbered by a reorganisation of Auckland's governance. Whatever happens, progress on this railway could hardly be slower.