Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
The blurb the story said: “Government should focus positively on the road ahead, say business leaders.”
Fully 77% of the 100 surveyed business leaders told the Government they wanted big structural changes like a capital gains tax or a shake up in superannuation.
On that theme, O’Sullivan revealed, one criticised “settings which incentivise unproductive investments”. Another noted we have “rising levels of social disparity” because we’re “an outlier internationally on tax”. A third said, “We need to be able to have courageous conversations and debate ideas about unpopular realities”.
There was more. Most respondents were unimpressed with Act leader David Seymour’s attempts to stir up a culture war over the Treaty of Waitangi.
O’Sullivan also quoted them saying they were sick of the Government “blamestorming” others for our problems. And that “where good investment stacks up we should get on with it”. That is, stop being so scared of debt, because “New Zealand doesn’t have a significant public debt issue relative to other nations”.
There was even a call to make KiwiSaver fully compulsory, at the same rate as Australia.
That would mean saving 12% of your income, against our 3%, and a return to the compulsory scheme started by Labour in April 1975 and cancelled 37 weeks later by the new National Party Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon.
Muldoon thought that scheme was communist but clearly there are business leaders who beg to differ. He’d be turning in his proverbial now.
Here’s an idea. If, in their wisdom, the titans of the commercial world believe in fairer and more productive tax, a grown-up attitude to public debt, compulsory retirement savings and the stupidity of the Treaty bill, perhaps they’d like to say so more often and more loudly. Put their mouths where their money is.
Why leave it to the Opposition? The Government doesn’t listen to them, but business leaders could help swing the public mood. After all, they’re not always shy about doing that.
That list came out the same weekend Dunedin was half-drowned in heavy rain, days after Hurricane Helene smashed into Florida, days ahead of Hurricane Milton doing the same thing in the same state, all over again. Yes, these things are related.
“Hurricane of the century,” Milton was called. Why do they say these things? Tropical cyclones now deliver up to 50% more rainfall, because global warming has heated the oceans, causing more evaporation, and heated the air, causing it to hold more moisture. The storms are fiercer, more frequent, last longer and spread over more territory. And therefore kill more people, destroy more communities and ruin more lives.
Why are businesses so enthusiastic about the fast-track list? And why did they have surprisingly little to say about the climate crisis?
Of those 149 projects, nearly half, by my count, will increase our emissions. They include fossil-fuel mining, big new highways and massive housing developments in the countryside.
About a quarter will lower emissions and the other quarter may not have much impact either way.
In other words, for every wind farm there’s a coal mine. That’s not a plan.
Labour did this too, with its search for “shovel-ready” projects to lift the economy in the wake of pandemic lockdowns. It wasn’t good planning then and it’s no better this time round.
There’s much to agree with in the fast-track list. Yes, we need a strong, long-term commitment to infrastructure. Yes, we need to double the electricity supply, as the Government is committed to.
And yes, the Cook Strait cable needs renewing, the Carrington Residential Development on the Unitec site should progress and Green Steel’s plans for recycled steel deserve support. Many of the listed projects should not be controversial.
But the list is enormous, which means there’s no prospect of the Government having enough money, even over the next 20 years, to pay for all the public projects on it. And even with inputs from overseas, it seems highly unlikely the country will be able to provide the skills, workforce, capital and logistics needed to get everything built.
So it’s a wish list. And like all political wish lists, it’s full of politics.
New Zealand First will be thrilled about the 11 projects in its geographic stronghold of Northland, plus the Avondale-Southdown rail corridor, which would extend the North Auckland rail line directly into Auckland’s industrial heartland. Six of those projects, if they went ahead, would immensely strengthen the commercial appeal of Northport at Marsden Point.
But nearly all of them are unfunded and most don’t rate a mention in any other Government planning documents. This wish-listing is what, in other contexts, NZ First’s own politicians like to call virtue signalling.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop set out the logic like this: “We’ve got to do as much as we can to get growth into the arteries of this economy.”
I know, it’s seductive. Growth provides jobs and profits and it provides a larger tax base for spending on everything from schools to superannuation, the armed forces to the arts.
Until it can’t, because the floods keep coming, and the droughts and wildfires and the massive migration of populations, and – do I need to keep on with this list? It’s not news. Politicians like Bishop are fully aware we need to do everything we can, as soon as we can, to create a low-emissions economy.
They just choose to ignore it.
Perhaps if you’re in the horizontal construction sector, it doesn’t matter what you’re building, as long as you have that fabled pipeline of work.
But if that pipeline is increasing emissions, it will have to be shut off, and the cost of doing that will rise with every year we waste.
There’s also this: The fast-track list is not predicated on cross-party, long-term planning. Remember that? It’s the other thing the same Chris Bishop has been telling us we need to secure our future.
It takes no account of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s hopes for an integrated transport plan, either.
The Government has been praised for the “good politics” of this list because it “gets stuff done”.
But is it good politics if it’s rubbish policymaking?
In Auckland alone, there are nine enormous housing projects on the outskirts of the city but only one inside the existing urban area. This completely undermines the Auckland Unitary Plan, which prescribes a two-thirds urban, one-third rural split for new housing.
Those nine “greenfields” projects did not get on the list because there’s a new plan. Gary Taylor is right: there could be no plan at all. They’re there because the developers asked for them to be there.
Winton Property's proposed Sunfield development, near Ardmore, which is on the fast-track list.
The tragedy is that the fast-track list contains more than enough projects to secure the construction pipeline, build a low-emissions economy and help provide a more prosperous and more resilient economy. There’s no “economy first, environment next”. We could, and should, be doing both together.
But the work the good projects could do will be undone if the others proceed. Indeed, there’s a risk only the bad projects will proceed.
Another motorway to get clogged with cars in Auckland’s northwest, while the promised busway, which really would ease the pressure, stays unfunded. Boosting rail freight gets the big tick on paper, but not a red cent to make it happen.
Bishop claimed yesterday to have the business world almost universally on his side with this list.
But now the Mood of the Boardroom survey has told us what business leaders think about other parts of the Government programme, maybe they could get a bit angry about the ridiculous climate confusion too.
