By John Foley, a guest columnist on Eating the Elephant this week, lives near Lincoln in Canterbury and works in the seed industry.
Recently, there has been much commentary on New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit. Costed at more than $200 billion and growing year on year, it is becoming a severe limiter to our future economic prospects. Experts tell us our chronic under-investment is, in essence, robbing the future.
A change in government brings this issue into focus and is always a good time to reflect on what NZ governments do best – defunding the previous government’s projects and policies.
With every election cycle there is a bonfire, driven by ideology as much as good governance. Think climate change legislation, Three Waters, replacement ferries, Auckland’s light rail project, the NZ Battery project at Lake Onslow, school builds (for example, Rolleston College’s second campus), Northland’s rail revitalisation, and numerous cancelled roading projects, to name but a few.
Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, or whether these projects and polices had merit, the wastage in terms of human endeavour and taxpayer dollars is staggering – $65 million spent on consultants for Three Waters, the Auckland light rail project had $228m invested up to its cancellation, with nothing built, and then the $484m sunk into the replacement ferry project before it was halted.
In their place, new projects will be initiated, consultation undertaken, timelines developed, consultants engaged, and funding allocated – just in time for the next change of government. Then the cycle will repeat.
In another age, we were good at large-scale, complex infrastructure projects. In the 10 years from 1954 to 1964, with a population sitting around 2.9 million, NZ constructed the Auckland Harbour Bridge (from 1954), the Benmore Dam (from 1958), and started the Manapōuri Power Scheme (1964).
These vast projects were uniquely challenging and required innovation. During the construction of the Benmore Dam, the cost of steel rose. With costs ballooning, the Ministry of Works encouraged innovative thinking to solve the problem – instead of steel penstocks, the engineers decided to use enormous precast concrete ones, made on site. This method had never been used anywhere else in the world – but still the project was completed, with no political scandal.
Over this 10-year period there were three changes of government: National until 1957 (Holland), Labour until 1960 (Nash) and National again to 1972 (Holyoake). We had a national consensus on infrastructure, the government had expertise in the Ministry of Works, and projects had a high degree of co-ordination between the government and business.
What has changed? Undoubtedly NZ had a much greater degree of social cohesion in those days. The two degrees of separation really did apply and because of this, there was probably a much greater degree of accountability. Politicians had to be more engaged locally and, as a consequence, had a better understanding of the issues – politics was more “bottom up” than today’s “top down” version.
My father recounted an anecdote that captures this. He was a member of Waimate Federated Farmers for many years and was at a woolshed meeting attended by Colin Moyle, minister of agriculture at the time.
Moyle answered questions and when asked ones he could not answer would simply say “I don’t know the answer to that.” Farmers respected him for his honesty. They expected and received open dialogue directly with a minister; there was no spin or deflection.
In those days, farmers could influence the decision-makers through direct engagement and politicians were open to frank discussion – their ideology wasn’t hard wired.
This is called pragmatism. In a political sense, this means doing things because they need doing, or because they are the right thing to do.
Senator Robert Kennedy (snr) was actually a hardnosed pragmatist rather than the liberal he is remembered as. In his political career he shifted from conservative aide in Senator Joe McCarthy’s congressional hearings into communist sympathisers, to advocating for the advancement of civil rights, peace in Vietnam and the United States’s rural poor.
Kennedy was a pragmatist. He fundamentally changed his politics to reflect the reality of American society and wasn’t afraid to lose political capital. For modern New Zealand, the pragmatism to build infrastructure and create enduring government policies is hard to find. As a result, things aren’t done.
Even when projects are clearly needed, we struggle. Things that are more complex and risk political capital such as, mitigating climate change, gene editing, and large infrastructure projects, are placed firmly in the “too hard” basket. If we are to take a lesson from the life of Robert Kennedy, it is to have the courage to be a pragmatist.
