John MacDonald: The Government's roading spend-up is a no-brainer

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Let’s get this clear from the start: Transport Minister Simeon Brown is no knight in shining armour coming to the rescue of motorists up and down the country.

He’s not doing anything special or spectacular with this announcement that the Government wants to spend a record amount of money on our roads and transport.

$32.9 billion over the next three years. And, to be fair, it’s mostly roads. $5.5 billion on pothole repairs

Funding for walkways and cycleways has been halved and there’s going to be no taxpayer money going into speed bumps. Not that that will stop local councils from pouring money into speed bumps, but there’ll be no government money available for speed bumps.

But, like I say, before you go falling at Simeon’s feet or getting on the blower to the Vatican wanting him canonised, let’s see this announcement for what it is: it’s a no-brainer.

Because, despite the hefty price tag, if the Government hadn’t decided to spend this kind of money all its talk about committing big-time to infrastructure would have started to sound pretty hollow, pretty quickly.

The other reason why it needed to allocate a record amount of money to roading and transport —aside from it being a government that’s big on roads and big on infrastructure, in general— is that, when it comes down to it, it had no option.

It could have decided not to make such a big commitment, but that would have been nuts because our roading network is in desperate need of investment.

Tell that to the Opposition, though. Labour’s transport spokesperson Tangi Utikere is saying that the focus on big new roads is hypocritical for a government promising to cut costs. If that’s the best criticism you can offer, mate, you might need to think a bit harder.

The Greens aren’t impressed, either. They want more money for —you guessed it— cycleways and public transport.

I see that NZTA’s chief executive Nicole Rosie is saying that it will be "challenging to deliver everything within the confines of our budgeted funding". But she says they are "up for the challenge".

But her group general manager of transport services, Brett Gliddon, is sounding a bit more upbeat. Here’s what he’s saying:

“Not having sustainable funding over recent years has really impacted our ability to do things in an efficient way and design a pipeline so that construction companies can invest in plant and people to get efficiency.

“So what we're hoping with this new amount of money is contractors will get a pipeline of work into the future, they'll invest in people and better ways of doing things. So that's the hope.”

Well hey Brett, you better have been listening to the Transport Minister because it’s not going to be enough for you to just hope the roading contractors do things differently.

Because, even though Simeon Brown is confident that NZTA can deliver all these projects on time and within budget, it’s going to depend on them putting the screws on the outfits that actually do the work, as well.

Nevertheless, this is a plan the Government had no options other than going with.

Yes, it’s big money, but it’s also back-to-basics. Because, when it comes to roading, we’ve become pretty average at the basics. And the basics are what we have to get much better at.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.