KEY POINTS:
Once again, National leader John Key is discovering how hard it is to teach old dogs new tricks. Especially the hardest trick of all to pull off, playing dead.
A few weeks ago it was his deputy, Bill English, who could not resist blurting out at an in-house cocktail party that Kiwibank might be sold "eventually". Now it's "exuberant" transport spokesman Maurice Williamson, whose tail started wagging "passionately" on Sunday morning television - now that's true passion - about the need for $50-a-week road tolls to pay for National's road-building plans.
He's hardly the first senior National MP to have reduced the party's road expansion plans to their bare basics. It seems only yesterday that North Shore MP Wayne Mapp was holding meetings around his electorate campaigning for a $3 billion tunnel under the Waitemata Harbour which would be paid for by a return toll of $6 - on it and the bridge above.
Obviously Dr Mapp must belong to one of the more docile breeds, because I've heard nothing of these plans since John Key started leading the pack.
Poor old bouncy Maurice, however, heard his leader waxing lyrical about Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) at the NZ Council for Infrastructure Development talkfest earlier this month and couldn't resist trying to please by adding a bit of detail. Which, of course, was his mistake.
Under Mr Key's powder blue style of leadership, the aim is to talk in the vaguest of generalities - apart from promising tax cuts and, more recently, Herceptin, for all. This way you frighten no one. Mr Williamson's gleeful admission there might be costs involved in delivering these promises was like breaking wind at a royal garden party.
Pro-road zealot that he is, Mr Williamson said he didn't know anyone who would not pay a $3-$5 toll each way if it were going to save them 40 minutes of commuting time. Obviously he talks only to people like himself who spend their working day travelling in Crown limousines or taxpayer-funded taxis.
The rest of us have regularly expressed our dislike of having to pay twice for parts of our highway system. Last year Transit New Zealand, after an extensive survey, abandoned plans for a series of tolls around the Auckland western ring route, totalling $7 between Albany and Manukau, after 80 per cent registered their opposition.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis last year of Aucklanders' attitude to road pricing - the tolling of existing roads - recorded "a strong level of opposition [approximately 75 per cent] to the concept of road pricing as a means of addressing Auckland's traffic problems". It found "fundamental opposition" to the idea of charging for what is viewed as a "free public good".
The panic buttons have now been struck, and Mr Williamson, like a naughty, errant boat-rocker, has been forced to publicly recant. "I am passionate about roading projects and unfortunately let my enthusiasm go unchecked. In the National Party we are in the business of reducing people's costs, not increasing them."
Mr Key chimed in, claiming a toll of less than half what Mr Williamson had stated was probably more realistic - something like $2. This immediately raises a credibility question. Who's telling the truth?
Mr Williamson, after all, has been analysing these issues for nearly a decade in Opposition, and before that, as Minister of Transport. His figure tends to match Transit's $7 a trip figure for SH20 rather better than Mr Key's sudden plucking of $2 from the sky.
And what about Dr Mapp's $6 a trip harbour bridge toll? What possible motive would the MP for the electorate most affected by a bridge toll have, to try to sell a charge to his constituents three times larger than his leader is now trying to convince us is "more realistic"?
The Clark Government has adopted an agnostic attitude towards PPP schemes. Both Transport and Treasury bureaucrats have been told to come up with a case to justify such schemes, and the Government would consider them. But despite beavering away, in nearly nine years they have failed to convince themselves, let alone the politicians, that the PPP approach will be any better than existing models of contracting out to private firms.
A March 2006 Treasury paper concluded, "There is little reliable empirical evidence about the costs and benefits of PPPs."
It said, "There are other ways of obtaining private sector finance" and "most of the advantages of private sector construction and management can also be obtained from conventional procurement methods."
It warned, "The advantages of PPPs must be weighed against the contractual complexities and rigidities they entail."
Given that one of Mr Key's close "mentors" is former National Party leader Jim McLay, the head of Macquarie New Zealand, the market leader in toll road financing in Europe and North America, all this ducking and diving by National is less than reassuring.
If the Opposition continues to blur its true agenda, is it any wonder discussion turns to speculation about secret game plans.
