It was rather quaint to hear one of my younger colleagues ask why we, as in "we the people," didn't just make Tranz Rail provide a decent commuter rail service in Auckland.
In this, the 16th year since St Roger assumed high office, I thought such dangerous leftie talk had long since been driven from the land.
He was reflecting on yet another round in the drawn-out struggle by Auckland leaders to persuade the Government to pay for a local buyback of Tranz Rail's Auckland rail network.
Tranz Rail, as you may be aware, is the overseas-owned vintage railway company whose main function in Auckland seems to be to provide decaying station-buildings across Auckland for our graffiti vandals to practise their art on.
It has also been known to lay on a few trains, mainly, I'm told, to keep the tracks from rusting over.
I can sympathise with my young colleague's dream of using Tranz Rail's rail corridors for a decent public transport service. Ever since the railways were privatised in 1993, Auckland local authorities have been trying in vain to persuade Tranz Rail to become partners in realising that dream.
The American owners of Tranz Rail, however, are not big on dreaming. As to forcing them, well I'm afraid St Roger's successor as Minister of Finance, Ruth Richardson, put paid to that in 1993 when she sold an 80-year lease on these tracks - and every other railway track in the country - for a token $1.
What conditions, I wondered, had been built into this bargain-basement deal between Tranz Rail and the Government's agent, Railways Corporation, to ensure the rail corridors, once sold, continued as transport routes and were not flicked on to a housing developer or a golf-shooting-range entrepreneur?
Well, safeguards there were, but they turned out to be scandalously wanting. What happened was that in 1990, with restructuring, a new State Owned Enterprise called NZ Rail Ltd was set up to run the railways. It leased the land from the Railways Corporation.
As part of this lease, NZ Rail had to provide a specified minimum number of passenger seats on each line. Three years later, when NZ Rail was privatised, these minimum seat requirements remained unaltered. These required "annual average seat numbers" were much lower than NZ Rail was providing at the time of the sale.
Neither Railways Corporation nor Tranz Rail will give me comparative figures. Trans Rail claims commercial sensitivity, though embarrassment might be closer.
But I understand that the seat numbers specified - for example, 326,000 annually for the Waitakere-Avondale line, 1,238,000 for the Newmarket-Auckland line at the time of sale, were only around 60 per cent of the seats then being provided.
To make things worse, the Government gave the new operator even more leeway.
The lease would be considered broken and another operator brought in, only if services on the line fell more than 20 per cent below the level specified in the lease.
To add to the lack of incentive to improve Auckland rail services,, no clause was included to require the operator to increase seat numbers in line with population growth.
The Auckland Regional Growth Strategy estimates that Auckland's population will nearly double in the next 50 years, so this was a careless disregard for future transport needs.
Such pathetic targets certainly provided no incentive to the new owners to improve the service.
That services are now said to be two to three times the 1990 minimums is more to do with Government subsidies than anything else.
Government agencies are now running their fine-tooth combs over Auckland's application for money to buy back the rail lease so that we, the people, can finally get the service we need.
In making their decision, it would be well for them to reflect that it is thanks to previous Government bureaucrats and politicians that we Aucklanders are there, cap in hand, at all.
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