The following is an op-ed I wrote which ran in The Post on February 13th 2026.
We need cross-party consensus for good long-term political decision-making, especially when it comes to major infrastructure. Right now, this isn’t happening. Worse: political parties may agree about the wrong things, seriously undermining our future at huge cost.
Take the Auckland Harbour Crossing.
Currently, the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) and the government seem to be converging on the idea of a tunnel, primarily for cars, with no dedicated access for public transport, walking or cycling.
Even if buildable, it would be wildly unaffordable. In 2016, the estimate for a tunnel crossing was $4 billion, and more recent figures suggest it’s now over $20 billion.
First: how is this even being seriously entertained?
Secondly: why is it so shrouded in secrecy? Hundreds of millions of our dollars (so far) have been shovelled towards various plans and designs, mostly to consultancies, with no public input.
Thirdly: after decades of work under many governments… has there been any progress?
You may wonder who’s accountable for this? Politicians?
NZTA is in charge of the Harbour Crossing work. In principle, it’s statutorily independent from politicians, with a funding source separate from general taxes. Nominally, it’s the chief decision-maker and delivery agency for transport projects.
But in practice, it is far from independent, due to a sticky combination of bureaucratic bias, pressure from politicians, and lobbying from the roading sector.
NZTA’s origins in the National Roads Board – set up to build state highways to make it easier to drive across the country – mean that significant parts of the modern organisation still don’t understand the kind of transport cities and towns need.
Thanks to this internal legacy, NZTA consistently underestimates demand for public transport, walking, and cycling, and prioritises urban roads instead.
Politicians of all stripes continue to pressure so-called ‘independent’ agencies to deliver campaign promises, using policy processes and funding mechanisms. Occasionally, this helps get vital non-road infrastructure over the line, as with the City Rail Link, tenaciously championed by former Mayor Len Brown.
More often, status-quo bias prevails. After the 2023 election, then-Minister of Transport Simeon Brown wrote to NZTA outlining his opposition to including new walking, cycling, or rapid transit connections in the Harbour Crossing. These, of course, are the very things we are currently lacking.
It’s worrying that, in spite of its purported independence, NZTA seems to have avidly acquiesced to this cars-only diktat. And worrying, too, that it’s broadly refusing to release any information justifying the public value of this narrow approach.
Meanwhile, the political pendulum swings a wrecking ball at the public service, reducing in-house capability and capacity. This leaves public agencies reliant on consultants to manage design and delivery of major projects.
Unsurprisingly, consultants and engineering firms often recommend the most ambitious (and most expensive) solution to any given problem. Cue scope creep and cost blowouts, as seems to be happening with Auckland’s Harbour Crossing.
What to do? It’s probably impossible to create a truly independent agency, completely free from political influence, industry lobbying, or internal bias. But for better outcomes, we need processes that are clear, transparent, and reliable.
Otherwise we’re stuck constantly pouring our money towards experts who beaver away in secret on projects deemed politically sensitive, only revealing their near-complete shovel-ready designs at the very last minute, to public dismay.
Luckily, there’s a promising way forward. An independent commission that researches and ranks all large-scale, long-term projects – with the results then presented to a citizen’s assembly for consideration.
This would reduce undue influence by both politicians and commercial enterprises.
It would also refocus the experts – and our precious public investment – on maintaining transparency, clarifying what’s at stake, and regaining trust.
Sounds too good to be true? Auckland has a recent, live example of this more transparent and democratic approach.
To help solve the challenge of how the city will source its water in the future, Watercare partnered with Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at the University of Auckland.
They convened a “citizens’ assembly”: a group of Aucklanders selected to represent the city’s demographics, who spent two months in 2022 carefully considering many options, ultimately recommending directly recycling water.
Deputy Director of Koi Tū, Dr Anne Bardsley, said this inclusive approach helps with better decision-making on “complex issues where we face numerous trade-offs and uncertainties, and where the decisions have long-term consequences on how our future might play out.”
The next Harbour Crossing is another major decision, fraught with trade-offs and uncertainties, and the long-term consequences will echo for decades. As we’ve seen recently, our current assumptions about resilience need rapid updating.
So let’s choose the better way forward. Yes, we need sincere cross-party commitment from the politicians we elect to guide us – but we also need decisions based on honest and open discussion about what we actually need, with a greater voice for the people.
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Sounds like a terrible idea to me, look what happened to LR when everyone got their say on the nice to haves.
BCRs may not be perfect but they are the best approach. However they should be used to rank the projects / solutions against each other, not just be “get the BCR of my favourite project / option above 1 and we’re good to go”. For example with the harbour crossing I can guarantee there is an option with a way better BCR than the current proposal. And even with LR, the mode should have been picked by BCR not politicians. It’s possible that bus was the best option for example.
ALR failed because they didn’t think to consult MOTAT, the owners of the existing Auckland light rail network
The problem with the “rank all the projects by their BCR” approach is that inevitably politicians and bureaucrats will just put a thumb on the scale with bogus criteria like “strategic fit” (is this project something wanted to do anyway regardless of what the BCR is) “mode shift” (how can we double-count the congestion, environmental, safety and health benefits of fewer cars) or “resilience” (sure the regular BCR doesn’t stack up, but if all the other routes magically disappear and this one is miraculously unaffected, then it might make sense).
“After the 2023 election, then-Minister of Transport Simeon Brown wrote to NZTA outlining his opposition to including new walking, cycling, or rapid transit connections in the Harbour Crossing.”
Auckland cant afford more radical car/truck only transport solutions forced on us by Wellington. And yet – here we are.
Years of wisdom in the greaterauckland transport blog undone by a single letter.
To me the evidence from recent large projects, built and unbuilt, is that a key component for success is the degree to which the client (govt.) is sceptical about the value of the project. This leads to more serious effort by the project teams to right size it. As that will be existential to it happening at all.
As ALR got out of control via the enthusiasm of the then govt for the project, insufficiently tempered by thin-eyed scepticism, the same is clearly the case with other govts on the magical powers of limitlessly vast highways.
Note I am not saying there is not value in all these projects, but are they in proportion to their costs? How can restraint be convincingly maintained, by the commissioners, while simultaneously needing to sell their value to the public?
Contrast with CRL, which, had it been approached as we have the Harbour Crossing over decades, we’d have been told it has to be four-tracked and headed all over the place. Would this be a bigger, more future-proofed, better project? Undoubtably, but would it have been funded, finished, or even started? No.
So there’s a case to be made that the very reluctance of significant parts of the govt to believe in the value of the project kept it to a viable scale.
The failure to right-size harbour-crossing options, and indeed right-mode them, has certainly contributed to their not starting.
I note Te Waihanga, in their very diplomatic language, are essentially saying this too, by showing that a toll, considered so unacceptable by many, is not even enough to fund current plans.
More thinking, less super-sizing, please.
Anyone remember when Joel Cayford was telling us that the CRL would be a waste of time if it didn’t do a U-bend under the city to have a Universities stop?