I have (rightfully I think) hassled Labour for not paying enough attention to transport in recent times, letting Steven Joyce get away with a lot of the poor transport decisions that he’s making. So it was good to see them put together a few challenging questions today:
(Zip past the first minute or so, which is just silly stuff). You can read the transcript here.
I guess if we analyse this, one thing that I found quite interesting was Joyce’s approach to the City Rail Link. Although he continues to believe Ministry of Transport officials who say the BCR of the project is 0.3 to 0.4 (despite the absurdity of many of MoT’s assumptions that lead to the low result), I wonder whether there’s some acceptance that the politics of continuing to stubbornly oppose the project are getting a bit dicey. It’s this answer which I find quite interesting:
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I think the difficulty we are in with the central business district rail loop is that quite obviously the council has gone to that solution without looking at all the other options that are possible to improve public transport access in Auckland. I point out to the member that all the independent analysis by the Ministry of Transport and Treasury on the central business district rail loop says it will do very little to improve congestion. I am prepared to say that it is possible that the central business district rail link is the next project in Auckland, but, rather than bolting towards it without any consideration of the costs, as the Labour Party is doing, I think we have to ask some tough questions.
However, there’s still a lot of rubbish being spouted – particularly around the business case for the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” route. It was good to start to see some of that rubbish being pulled apart:
David Shearer: Given the Minister’s answer to written question No. 1515 that the calculation of the wider economic benefits on the holiday highway is not consistent with New Zealand Transport Agency’s own economic evaluation manual, has he asked for the business case to be re-evaluated; if not, why not?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: What I can confirm for the member is that the two projects—the central business district rail loop and the Pūhoi to Wellsford road—have been measured using the same ruler and have been found to be very, very significantly—
Hon Shane Jones: Oh, rubbish.
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, it happens to be true. I know it is sometimes difficult to face the truth when one is in the Labour Party, but it is actually true that it is over 1 versus 0.3 to 0.4.
There are many areas where I hope there are future followup questions. Exploring Joyce’s claim that this government’s spending $1.6 billion on rail projects in Auckland (which is rubbish) would be a great start.
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I have to admit, I did laugh at Joyce’s “compliment” of Shane Jones’s second oral question about transport in the 6 months he’s had the portfolio. Not sure if its true or not, but you get the feeling even Joyce cant believe how much Labour is letting him get away with. Imagine if we didnt have the Greens. No one would question him.
I laughed too. Though it is a damn pain it’s taken Labour this long.
Although I was thoroughly annoyed at Joyce by the time I got to the end of the video.
“Rubbish”
Not exactly a robust debate from labour, is it.
Is there a less enthusiastic MP than Jones? He seems completely disinterested. I felt that his contribution was just an opener to let Ardern talk about Auckland. She is from Morrinsville, stood for Waikato last time, and had an office out there until recently. Now she is standing in Auckland. I would have thought that even as a ringer she’d be a certainty for Auckland Central, given that she isn’t Judith Tizard and that alone is worth an extra 5000 votes. But they seem to have decided she needs promotion and Auckland transport is the issue she is going to promote.
It is a funny transport strategy for Labour. There are transport projects (road and public) going on all over the country, and Christchurch is going to need some serious attention at some stage. But they’re talking up Auckland to the exclusion of the rest of the country. It’s as if they’ve written off the rest of the country, and winning back one Auckland electorate might be the biggest success they can hope for.
And what was Mallard waving a bit of green paper all about?
I guess the Auckland focus is because transport is a pretty big issue here and the government focus for the city seems quite out of kilter with what the people seem to want.
This is a step in the right direction. Next they need to ask him why he insists on using rail patronage numbers from 2006 when Auckland transport produces data monthly (which he must be aware of), also they need to challenge his statement that more people use Puhoi to Wellsford than the entire Auckland rail network which clearly is not true. Thirdly they need to pick apart his claim that his government has spent $1.6 billion on rail in Auckland. He’s been allowed to lie up to now and get away with it. Good to see him finally challenged, keep it up Labour. They are going to get flogged in November but at least they can make a better fist of keeping the government honest, because when it comes to transport they have been anything but.
@Obi – which transport projects around the rest of the country are needed but the government is refusing to fund? I don’t see what you are getting at, you seem to be saying that because the Labour party is advocating a transport project in Auckland they have written off the rest of the country. How exactly do you figure that? Unless of course you are just trying to change the debate by going off on a tangent.
I’m saying that Labour seem to have a strategy to win Auckland Central. That isn’t the same as a strategy to win a national election.
I dunno Obi, attacking the holiday highway and supporting the CRL seems a pretty popular strategy throughout NZ: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10738341
That depends what question you ask. I suspect that if you polled South Islanders on whether they should pay for an Auckland rail tunnel, the answer would probably run 99:1 against. That’d probably be true for Auckland roads as well. But I don’t know why the pollsters are asking people to prefer one project over the other. There is no need to choose since it isn’t a matter that only one of the two projects can proceed.
Personally I think we do have only enough money to build one of those two projects over the next decade so the debate between the two of them is very important.
NZ’s GDP is around $150billion a year. Government spending is around 40% of this. That means over the next ten years, government is going to spend around $600billion. Plenty of scope in there for building a short motorway and a rail tunnel.
You’ve consistently taken the view that if you cancel one project, then the money is available for another transport project specifically, and for an Auckland project specifically. But if you canceled P2W then the government might decide to fund Transmission Gully instead. Or build a pile of new hospitals. Or pay down debt. Government has hundreds of competing priorities, not just two.
“You’ve consistently taken the view that if you cancel one project, then the money is available for another transport project specifically, and for an Auckland project specifically. But if you canceled P2W then the government might decide to fund Transmission Gully instead. Or build a pile of new hospitals. Or pay down debt. Government has hundreds of competing priorities, not just two.”
Except that Transmission Gully is already funded (or at least it will be) as it is part of the RoNS. All of the RoNS are paid for out of the NLTF which can’t be used for non transport projects. I still think the better solution would be to significantly upgrade the existing route with a bypass of the towns, corner easing, more passing lanes where possible and other safety improvements, perhaps spend about $400m on that which would go quite far, this would probably deliver 80% of the benefits of doing it as a new motorway. Then spend about $150m-$200m upgrading the NAL and building a line to the port at Marsden Point, this would help to get a lot more of the freight off the roads and make lines in Northland viable. That leaves $1b of the $1.6 that is initially planned to be spent on the P2W route and that could go towards the CRL with the council coughing up the rest.
Matt’s thinking is very similar to mine. Use the $1.6 billion this way and everyone’s happy. Northland gets a better road link to Auckland quickly and a major rail upgrade to get trucks off that road. Auckland gets its CRL.
Regarding the “there’s money for both” argument, I try not to get into arguments over whether the transport budget should be bigger, I just stick to how we could spend that budget smarter. Generally I actually think we probably spend too much on transport.
Another thing Labour should be focussed on is that under National we now have the highest excise taxes in history on petrol. In New Zealand there is 59 cents/litre in fuel excise, plus another 3 cents/litre for the Emissions Trading Scheme, and then 15% GST added. By comparison, Australians pay 38 cents/litre in excise and 10% GST.
Yes but high fuel taxes are, as far as taxes go, a good thing. Taxing ‘bads’ ie things that it is helpful to to have negative price signals on is wise. Especially if that revenue is then used to build the alternative…. Nuts though, to use that money to further reinforce petrol dependency….
I agree, but I was thinking from a populist “cheaper petrol” vote point of view.
I don’t think that that’s a good approach at all, National tried when Brash was in charge and it made them look IMO like they had no ideas as to how to actually reduce petrol dependency. If Labour go down that road and thereby ignore how much money Joyce is wasting on his highways and what a poor spend they are then they’ll really demonstrate that they’re completely out of touch. Labour has been handed a platform on which to campaign and they seem completely oblivious to it all, at worst they give the impression they’d just maintain the status quo and actually build these RONS.
Where did the Rail Link BCR of 0.3-0.4 come from?
Sorry – having a brain freeze… that ‘interesting’ MoT one linked to in the article :$
Is this necessarily a negative? Higher fuel costs may see a shift away from private vehicles for commuting?