Thomas Coughlan: National leader Christopher Luxon struggles with transport numbers

ANALYSIS

“Uh, well the costs on that one is uh… I haven’t got that right before me but I’ve got that in detail but it’s um, we’ve got uh… I can tell you Mike… I’ve got that detail not in front of me… Mt Vic is… it’s about $2.2 billion and we want to get going with that pretty quickly”.

Those are the words of National Party leader Christopher Luxon, enduring the most excruciating 20 seconds of his life on the Mike Hosking Breakfast show on Monday morning.

The question was a very basic one: How much does the second Mt Victoria Tunnel cost?

Luxon had come on the show wanting to talk about his party’s $24.8b transport package. One of the main commitments in it was a new Mt Victoria Tunnel. You’d think he would have had the cost to hand considering it’s the centrepiece of the party’s plans for Wellington and the party has campaigned on building it two elections in a row (it actually costs $1.4b, with the remaining money going towards upgrades for the Basin Reserve - a figure seared into the memory of his Parliamentary bench mates, Wellington MPs Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop who once stood outside the existing tunnel promising to build a second one).

For someone whose pitch is bringing C-suite rigour to the podgy lackadaisical world of government, the flub was deeply embarrassing. Would Luxon have committed to a $26b spending package at Air New Zealand if its proposer was so uncertain of the figures?

The interview was the low point in National’s day, which did improve, if only slightly.

The party announced a package based around 20 transport policies - many cancelled roads that have risen from the permafrost.

The package is the latest salvo in a battle begun in 2018 when Labour and its governing partners tweaked the settings on its own transport plan to favour public transport and road maintenance over building new state highways.

National campaigned on bringing the roads back, which Labour eventually did. Opting to debt-fund them as part of a $12b package in 2020.

Cue a year of Wiemar-style construction inflation and an unwanted cycle bridge and by 2021 Labour was once again in the position of cancelling roads.

Which brings us, more or less to today, with National promising to once again bring the roads back to life. You have to hand it to them, even Jesus only came back once.

Labour immediately got stuck into the costings of the package, Transport Minister David Parker (on ministerial rather than party letterhead - a bit odd) attacked National for a $2.8 billion dollar hole in its costings. He clearly spied an opportunity to punt Luxon and his transport spokesman Simeon Brown into the fiscal hole that claimed the careers of so many of the party’s predecessors.

National’s costings are, in all but a single case, the most up-to-date costings available to the public.

To National’s credit, the party has taken the largest figure currently available, rather than picking the lowest one and hoping no one notices.

The party, again to its credit, fattened the package with a $1.4b contingency to manage cost overruns.

Transport Minister David Parker leafing through the Government's costings. Photo / Mark Mitchell

That contingency is 10 times the size that Labour left in its own NZ Upgrade transport package in 2020 when it went against official warnings to leave just $47 million in contingency for a $6.8b transport package (that blunder meant a handful of those roads had to be cancelled and the rest bailed out with an additional $1.8b). It doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on there.

The party also lacks credibility when it comes to costing individual policies.

During the 2016 Mount Roskill byelection it committed to funding what was then a $1.36b light rail project to the electorate (the airport bit came later). In 2020, the party decided not to attach a cost to the project in its manifesto.

Nearly $100m of consultant spending later and we have a revised cost of $14.6b. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was coy on Monday when asked whether it would be included in a third Labour election manifesto, although it doesn’t yet sound like Labour will axe it fully.

This is really the crux of National’s costing problem. The sin is that National had used old figures, which lack credibility thanks to construction inflation.

The numbers are indeed old. One, for the Hamilton Southern Links, goes back to 2014. The East-West Link, already one of the most expensive roads per kilometre conceivable, was slated costed in 2016, and the Warkworth to Wellsford costings date back to 2019.

What should National have done? Perhaps promised a bit less, perhaps fattened the contingency.

The figures have to add up, but we can hardly expect political parties to engage the services of transport consultants to carry out detailed business cases and costings on their promised transport policies.

Parties need to be credible, but the barrier to entry for participating in the political lolly scramble can’t be so high that only parties that can build a shadow Waka Kotahi can play.

It’s also slightly iffy that Labour’s main attack on National comes from the fact it had silently engaged public servants to re-cost some of the policies itself for the Government’s transport budget, coming next month (Draft GPS on Land Transport, for the pedants).

The Government has refused to release any of the paperwork behind those costings. They exist only in a press release. In one case, the cost of the Cambridge–Piarere project was released to National’s transport spokesman Simeon Brown in a Parliamentary written question from Parker weeks ago, only to be superseded by a higher costing from Parker used to attack the Nats on Monday.

National needs to own the fact that its own costings are out by billions, but Labour needs to ponder whether it’s appropriate to release government costings for political damage, when the release of such material for an Official Information Act request would probably be denied, at least until the Budget is actually published.

But National can’t complain too much. They’d probably do the same thing. These are the perks of incumbency and if National wants to win the election they need to do what every other winning Opposition has done and up their game.

There are two questions here: one, is whether the numbers are credible; the other is whether any party has the right to point the finger when it comes to transport costings.

No party not in government could probably put together a well-costed ten-year transport package.

Perhaps the spat over the costings is indicative of the fact that the two major parties, after half a decade of duking it out on ideologically different transport plans as they did in 2018, are moving closer together with Labour again embracing road building as a path to electoral success.

National promised to axe the Let’s Get Wellington Moving transport plan, something Labour appears to be on the verge of doing itself with Parker refusing to commit to seeing it through to the election.

Likewise, National’s promise to build the Warkworth to Wellsford Expressway, Cambridge to Piarere, and Whangārei to Port Marsden roads appears to be something Labour is at least looking at. They were re-costed by the Government because it’s keen on doing something in those areas itself.

Climate change, the reason for Labour’s pivot away from roads, appears to have fallen by the wayside.

Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor of the New Zealand Herald, which he joined in 2021. He previously worked for Stuff and Newsroom in their Press Gallery offices in Wellington. He started in the Press Gallery in 2018.