September 5, 2024 • 19 mins
The Government has announced a record 32.9-billion-dollar investment in New Zealand’s transport network over the next three years, through the National Land Transport Programme.
The big winner is new roads, and the big loser is walking and cycling improvements.
So, what does this mean for congestion and emissions in our biggest cities?
And will a new National Infrastructure Pipeline prevent these roads being scuppered by future Governments?
Today on The Front Page, Auckland University Senior Lecturer in urban planning Tim Welch bring us up to speed.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Georgina Campbell
Sound Engineer: Dan Goodwin
Producer: Ethan Sills
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Kyoda. I'm Georgina Campbell in for Chelsea Daniels and this
is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the
New Zealand Herald. The government has announced a record thirty
two point nine billion dollar investment in New Zealand's transport
(00:25):
network over the next three years through the National Land
Transport Program. The big winner is new roads and the
big loser is walking in cycling improvements. So what does
this mean for congestion and emissions in our biggest cities
and will a new national infrastructure pipeline prevent these roads
(00:47):
being scuppered by future governments. Today on the Front Page
we talk to Auckland University Senior lecturer in Urban Planning,
Tim Welch to bring us up to speed. Tim, can
you please run us through what the government has announced
(01:08):
this week.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Sure. This is the National Land Transportation Program or in LTP,
and it's a program that's announced every three years. It
can be six years by legislation, but traditionally our government
does this every three years and it's really forms a
budget for what we expect to spend over the next
(01:29):
three years on anything from roads to public transport to
walking and cycling, so anything that moves over land falls
within this purview, and the government has allocated about thirty
two point nine billion dollars over the next three years
for this type of transportation.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So what is in that thirty two point nine billion dollars.
Who are the winners and who are the losers?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, I mean, if we break it down, the biggest
amount of money that we're spending is going to roads,
and a lot of that is either what Simeon Brown
is calling pothole prevention. We used to call it just
road maintenance. A huge chunk of the funding goes there,
and out of that also is nearly eight billion dollars
(02:20):
for an old program that keeps kind of coming back
to life every few decades, which is the Roads of
National Significance, which is really a funding package to try
to bring more highways across the nation. There are some
funds allocated to things that aren't roads, of course, there's
six point eight billion dollars roughly going to public transportation,
(02:44):
walking and cycling. But what this budget does not do,
or this plan doesn't do, is bring us anything new
really in anything, especially in public transport. Though really what
this does is kind of fund existing programs and make
sure that our existing public transport, whether it's rail or bus,
(03:05):
continues to operate from a walking and cycling perspective. It's
only going to fund projects that are already in the pipeline,
and specifically, which is really unusual for something like the NLTP,
it states that there won't be any more cycling or
walking projects. And this is really unusual because even national
(03:26):
governments prior to this one have allocated funding for more
walking and cycling and have boosted public transport to some
degree as well.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Getting transport back to basics is one of the key
reasons why Kiwi's voted for this government. They're sick of
the potholes plaguing our roads. They'll fed up with the
phantom projects that cost a fortune but never got off
the ground. And they're tied of the speed bumps, planter
boxes and cycleways that made going about their day to
day lives all the more difficult.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So roads are clearly the big winner in your view.
Do you think the government has got that balance right?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
This isn't a balance that I mean we expected with
this new government. They kind of made it clear that
roads would be a priority, so it's not unexpected, but
the level to which roads are funded and the expense
of other modes is a bit of a surprise. It
kind of goes contrary to what most other countries are doing.
(04:32):
A lot of countries and cities are really focused on
building up alternatives to driving, knowing that building one more
road or one more highway isn't going to relieve congestion.
It's only going to increase demand for more driving over
the years and lead to further congestion. So really the
flow of budgeting and transportation across the globe has been
(04:57):
to balance out other public transport, walking, cycling, with road infrastructure.
This budget looks like something that we would have built
in or we would have budgeted for in the nineteen
sixties nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Does that concern you the given climate change?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, I certainly. Anytime we're looking at more roads, and
like I said, we're looking at more driving as a result,
and that clearly leads to higher levels of emissions. It's
this idea of induced demands. So when we add more
road space, it makes a trip seem cheaper in terms
(05:34):
of your time use, so it encourages more people to
do it more often, and as a result, we have
more driving, more congestion, and these effects happen rather quickly.
It's not like a ten to twenty year time horizon.
When this happens, it happens within months to years of
the construction finishing. And so certainly we'll have more cars
(05:55):
on the road, more traffic, and more pollution, especially as
the previously ended its focus on encouraging more electric vehicles,
so we'll have more vehicles consuming fossil fuels, producing emissions
and sitting in traffic for the foreseeable future of the
next decade at least.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
What did you make of Transport Minister Samine Brown's comments
that he thinks Kiwi's are sick and tired of the
amount of money going into things like psychle ways for example.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
This really reflects something we often call a windshield bias,
and so what it really is telling him us is
that when you typically conduct all your travel driving and
looking through a windshield, you tend to see everything from
the perspective of a driver. And the another old saying
is you know, if you as someone who has a hammer,
(06:51):
everything looks like a nail. So the perspective is that
you know if you see if you're driving and you
see people on a bike. You can't really relate to
them very well. There's no empathy for that, and everything's
kind of framed in the idea that nobody else wants
this infrastructure because it's just slowing everyone else down. The
(07:12):
reality is that walking and cycling are hugely important to
our cities. Without that infrastructure, our cities would be at
a complete standstill. In Auckland alone are very limited cycle
ways and shared paths carry over three million cycle trips
a year, and if those were all converted to cars,
(07:35):
this is our roads just wouldn't move at all.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
And it's quite a political statement. Simeon Brown wouldn't be
saying that unless he thought people would like to hear that.
So how do you change that perspective or encourage more
people into active modes of transport or is driving just
what people want?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's a really difficult position. And so whenever something like
walking in cycling or public transport is put into the
frame of a culture war, it makes it really difficult
to make progress on these really important modes. And it's
easy for politicians to say that people don't want it
and to build roads because cutting ribbons is on roads
(08:22):
or announcing that new roads will be built, or that
you'll spend less time in your car is always something
that gets headlines and it provides a few votes, But
the reality is that we need these other modes. They're
just part of functioning as a city. And it's unfortunate
that it's kind of become part of political fodder that
(08:43):
we would cut cycle ways and walking cycling and even
limit our funding on public transport, when in reality they
do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep our
cities moving and they're really a critical component. So the
rhetoric is really unfortunate. It'd be good to go back
to a time when public transport and walking cycling investments
(09:05):
didn't make the news. They just were quietly funded and
were an important part of our total transportation package.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
You have written about how all these billions of dollars
that the government has gone to spend in the next
three years won't actually just buy and kind of measure
up new highways. Can you elaborate on that.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, we were allocating seven billion dollars to these roads
of national significance and another billion dollars in contingency funding
to try to speed up that planning process. But that
eight billion dollars really is just going to lay the
initial groundwork for building these roads, so there's a lot
of work that had to go into it, including securing
(10:02):
routes and right away purchasing property, doing planning, writing business cases.
So most of this money is really just going to
go to those stages, and a lot of that will
go into the pockets of consulting firms that do this
on a regular basis. And what people won't see drivers
(10:23):
or cyclists or people on public transport, will be any
progress towards relieving congestion. And many of the projects aren't
even slated to begin construction until well after this plan
ends in t and twenty seven, some of them not
even until twenty twenty nine at the earliest, so we
(10:43):
won't see a significant movement here in building roads, but
we will see a significant spend towards planning these roads.
So we're spending a lot of money that could be
used for other things with immediate impact going towards the
idea of roads that likely won't even be built in
the long run anyway.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Labour's transport spokesperson, tonguing You to Kenny, is unimpressed the.
Speaker 5 (11:11):
Increased levels of driver's license fees at are coming in
the driver's text that will kick in from the start
of next year. The planned increases to fuel excise from
twenty twenty seven. This is a government that is simply
hypocritical and lumping additional costs onto road users.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Julie and Genter from the Greens says local roads account
for most trips and the balance of the funding is
all wrong.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
New Zealand does have a bit of a track record
of infrastructure projects being scuppered by future governments. For example,
this government has axed Auckland light rail and let's get
Wellington moving. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop says workers underway to
develop this thirty year national Infrastructure pipeline in the hope
(11:58):
that political consensus can be built on an enduring list
of priorities. Does that mean that these new state highways
that the government has promised, you know as sort of
future proof, and that they can't just be scuppered by
you know, maybe a more leaf leaning future government.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Well, it's an interesting idea, but there's nothing really that
locks us into these roads to be built, you know
the future. You know, National actually National Infrastructure Agency is
supposed to make it easier to start to build facilities
(12:38):
like roads and attract private investment. But really there's no
evidence that a future government wouldn't be able to change that,
and it's just not the way funding works. We could
find somebody that will privately fund an entire road and
then build it, but that's that's typically not the case.
(12:59):
There's usually a high amount of public funding that goes
into that. And anytime there's public funding, there's the opportunity
for the government to change its plans. And we've seen
with things like Let's get Moving, Wellington Moving and the
Auckland light Rail, that spending can occur. We can start
to plan and we can start to build a little bit,
(13:21):
and political winds do change and projects still come to
an end. So there's nothing about these new projects or
Bishop's agency that would safeguard these road projects from never
being canceled.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Green Party Transport spokeswoman Julian Gender has also drawn attention
to another problem that these roads could run into, and
that's a graph in this recent National Land Transport Plan
which shows n zta's revenue mainly from fuel taxes and
road user charges, basically that it will fall slate short
(14:01):
of its estimated expenditure. So does the government have a
massive hole in its transport plane.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, by current calculations, by twenty thirty, we're looking about
a six billion dollars shortfall because of this massive spind
up for these additional roads. And the issue really is
that we have we rely on funding for our transportation
system from fuel tax is one of the primary sources
(14:29):
of revenue, but the amount that we are receiving in
that revenue has been falling over the years because people
have more efficient vehicles, so they're using less fuel for
every trip they take. There's the introduction, of course of
electric vehicles, which have reduced demand, and the fact that
we haven't increased the fuel tax in several years and
(14:52):
four years since twenty twenty. At the same time we've
seen a huge ramp up of inflation. So you know
what we pay now about seventy cents per liter from
twenty twenty on, should have been raised to about eighty
six eighty seven cents now if we wanted to keep
up with the level of revenue. So we've lost about
(15:17):
thirteen and a half cents in value for every leader
of fuel that we sell, and that has a huge
impact on what we can spend and what we plan
to take on in the future, and as a result,
we're seeing these huge deficits coming into the future. And
the only way that we're going to be able to
plug that hole is by increasing our road user charges
(15:39):
or significantly increasing fuel tax, both of which are pretty
politically unfriendly.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Transport Texas by stealth coming road tolls, vehicle licensing, road
user charges are all set to increase over the next
three years.
Speaker 6 (15:57):
The first thing we did was we stopped the petrol
tech increases which the last government had been planning. We said, no,
that's not right when New Zealanders have been struggling through
a cost of living crisis, and we've postponed those out
to twenty twenty seven. So that's a really significant backdrop.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
But what we've also.
Speaker 6 (16:14):
Heard from New Zealanders loud and clear is they want
proper highways, they want proper public transport projects, and they
recognize that in some cases paying a small toll will
mean that happens a lot quicker.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
And I guess the government could help plug that with
Crown funding, but the budgets are looking pretty tight for
the next few years, right there's not a lot of
room to move.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Well. Unfortunately, well there is a huge budget crunch. That's
essentially what the plan is telling us now is that
we are going to plug this hole with crown funding.
Some of it will be Crown grants, so money. The
government gives about three billion there and then another three
billion in Crown loans. So just if we go back
even five six years ago, our transport plans didn't require much,
(17:06):
if any, Crown funding. It was all supposed to be
essentially self funded through the fuel tax and through road
user charges and a few other sources of revenue. But
now if we look at the budget coming forward again,
it was like almost six billion dollars in Crown funding.
So we're actually relying more and more on rates pain
(17:30):
than we were in the past ever in the past.
So not people just driving, but people who are pain
rates are now subsidizing our roads to a massive degree.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And finally, tim how do you think the government will
measure the success of its plan.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
It's a good question. We don't have a lot of
information on that yet. The idea, the objective of these
plans for the last couple iterations has been reducing congestion.
Unfortun only none of the investments really are aimed at
doing that and the idea is there, but the reality
(18:08):
of things I conduce demand, which we've known about for
seventy years or more, really mute any kind of impact
we'd have on congestion from these roads. So it's really
hard to say what the measure of success would be
other than having a plan, you know, something on paper
that says these roads will be built. That's about all
(18:29):
we can expect at this point and maintaining the status
quo for walking and cycling in public transport. But you know,
for looking at this from a business angle, it's hard
to see any KPIs that would really come out of
this investment that would that would be a surefire way
to say it's a success or not.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Thanks so much for joining us, Tim, that's set for
this episode of The Front Page. You can read more
about today's stories and extincts of news coverage at inzipherld
dot co dot inzet. The Front Page is produced by
Ethan Sills. Dan Goodwin is the sound engineer. I'm Georgina Campbell.
(19:11):
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever it
you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another
look behind the headlines.
Kyoda. I'm Georgina Campbell in for Chelsea Daniels and this
is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the
New Zealand Herald. The government has announced a record thirty
two point nine billion dollar investment in New Zealand's transport
(00:25):
network over the next three years through the National Land
Transport Program. The big winner is new roads and the
big loser is walking in cycling improvements. So what does
this mean for congestion and emissions in our biggest cities
and will a new national infrastructure pipeline prevent these roads
(00:47):
being scuppered by future governments. Today on the Front Page
we talk to Auckland University Senior lecturer in Urban Planning,
Tim Welch to bring us up to speed. Tim, can
you please run us through what the government has announced
(01:08):
this week.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Sure. This is the National Land Transportation Program or in LTP,
and it's a program that's announced every three years. It
can be six years by legislation, but traditionally our government
does this every three years and it's really forms a
budget for what we expect to spend over the next
(01:29):
three years on anything from roads to public transport to
walking and cycling, so anything that moves over land falls
within this purview, and the government has allocated about thirty
two point nine billion dollars over the next three years
for this type of transportation.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So what is in that thirty two point nine billion dollars.
Who are the winners and who are the losers?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, I mean, if we break it down, the biggest
amount of money that we're spending is going to roads,
and a lot of that is either what Simeon Brown
is calling pothole prevention. We used to call it just
road maintenance. A huge chunk of the funding goes there,
and out of that also is nearly eight billion dollars
(02:20):
for an old program that keeps kind of coming back
to life every few decades, which is the Roads of
National Significance, which is really a funding package to try
to bring more highways across the nation. There are some
funds allocated to things that aren't roads, of course, there's
six point eight billion dollars roughly going to public transportation,
(02:44):
walking and cycling. But what this budget does not do,
or this plan doesn't do, is bring us anything new
really in anything, especially in public transport. Though really what
this does is kind of fund existing programs and make
sure that our existing public transport, whether it's rail or bus,
(03:05):
continues to operate from a walking and cycling perspective. It's
only going to fund projects that are already in the pipeline,
and specifically, which is really unusual for something like the NLTP,
it states that there won't be any more cycling or
walking projects. And this is really unusual because even national
(03:26):
governments prior to this one have allocated funding for more
walking and cycling and have boosted public transport to some
degree as well.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Getting transport back to basics is one of the key
reasons why Kiwi's voted for this government. They're sick of
the potholes plaguing our roads. They'll fed up with the
phantom projects that cost a fortune but never got off
the ground. And they're tied of the speed bumps, planter
boxes and cycleways that made going about their day to
day lives all the more difficult.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So roads are clearly the big winner in your view.
Do you think the government has got that balance right?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
This isn't a balance that I mean we expected with
this new government. They kind of made it clear that
roads would be a priority, so it's not unexpected, but
the level to which roads are funded and the expense
of other modes is a bit of a surprise. It
kind of goes contrary to what most other countries are doing.
(04:32):
A lot of countries and cities are really focused on
building up alternatives to driving, knowing that building one more
road or one more highway isn't going to relieve congestion.
It's only going to increase demand for more driving over
the years and lead to further congestion. So really the
flow of budgeting and transportation across the globe has been
(04:57):
to balance out other public transport, walking, cycling, with road infrastructure.
This budget looks like something that we would have built
in or we would have budgeted for in the nineteen
sixties nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Does that concern you the given climate change?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, I certainly. Anytime we're looking at more roads, and
like I said, we're looking at more driving as a result,
and that clearly leads to higher levels of emissions. It's
this idea of induced demands. So when we add more
road space, it makes a trip seem cheaper in terms
(05:34):
of your time use, so it encourages more people to
do it more often, and as a result, we have
more driving, more congestion, and these effects happen rather quickly.
It's not like a ten to twenty year time horizon.
When this happens, it happens within months to years of
the construction finishing. And so certainly we'll have more cars
(05:55):
on the road, more traffic, and more pollution, especially as
the previously ended its focus on encouraging more electric vehicles,
so we'll have more vehicles consuming fossil fuels, producing emissions
and sitting in traffic for the foreseeable future of the
next decade at least.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
What did you make of Transport Minister Samine Brown's comments
that he thinks Kiwi's are sick and tired of the
amount of money going into things like psychle ways for example.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
This really reflects something we often call a windshield bias,
and so what it really is telling him us is
that when you typically conduct all your travel driving and
looking through a windshield, you tend to see everything from
the perspective of a driver. And the another old saying
is you know, if you as someone who has a hammer,
(06:51):
everything looks like a nail. So the perspective is that
you know if you see if you're driving and you
see people on a bike. You can't really relate to
them very well. There's no empathy for that, and everything's
kind of framed in the idea that nobody else wants
this infrastructure because it's just slowing everyone else down. The
(07:12):
reality is that walking and cycling are hugely important to
our cities. Without that infrastructure, our cities would be at
a complete standstill. In Auckland alone are very limited cycle
ways and shared paths carry over three million cycle trips
a year, and if those were all converted to cars,
(07:35):
this is our roads just wouldn't move at all.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
And it's quite a political statement. Simeon Brown wouldn't be
saying that unless he thought people would like to hear that.
So how do you change that perspective or encourage more
people into active modes of transport or is driving just
what people want?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's a really difficult position. And so whenever something like
walking in cycling or public transport is put into the
frame of a culture war, it makes it really difficult
to make progress on these really important modes. And it's
easy for politicians to say that people don't want it
and to build roads because cutting ribbons is on roads
(08:22):
or announcing that new roads will be built, or that
you'll spend less time in your car is always something
that gets headlines and it provides a few votes, But
the reality is that we need these other modes. They're
just part of functioning as a city. And it's unfortunate
that it's kind of become part of political fodder that
(08:43):
we would cut cycle ways and walking cycling and even
limit our funding on public transport, when in reality they
do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep our
cities moving and they're really a critical component. So the
rhetoric is really unfortunate. It'd be good to go back
to a time when public transport and walking cycling investments
(09:05):
didn't make the news. They just were quietly funded and
were an important part of our total transportation package.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
You have written about how all these billions of dollars
that the government has gone to spend in the next
three years won't actually just buy and kind of measure
up new highways. Can you elaborate on that.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, we were allocating seven billion dollars to these roads
of national significance and another billion dollars in contingency funding
to try to speed up that planning process. But that
eight billion dollars really is just going to lay the
initial groundwork for building these roads, so there's a lot
of work that had to go into it, including securing
(10:02):
routes and right away purchasing property, doing planning, writing business cases.
So most of this money is really just going to
go to those stages, and a lot of that will
go into the pockets of consulting firms that do this
on a regular basis. And what people won't see drivers
(10:23):
or cyclists or people on public transport, will be any
progress towards relieving congestion. And many of the projects aren't
even slated to begin construction until well after this plan
ends in t and twenty seven, some of them not
even until twenty twenty nine at the earliest, so we
(10:43):
won't see a significant movement here in building roads, but
we will see a significant spend towards planning these roads.
So we're spending a lot of money that could be
used for other things with immediate impact going towards the
idea of roads that likely won't even be built in
the long run anyway.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Labour's transport spokesperson, tonguing You to Kenny, is unimpressed the.
Speaker 5 (11:11):
Increased levels of driver's license fees at are coming in
the driver's text that will kick in from the start
of next year. The planned increases to fuel excise from
twenty twenty seven. This is a government that is simply
hypocritical and lumping additional costs onto road users.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Julie and Genter from the Greens says local roads account
for most trips and the balance of the funding is
all wrong.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
New Zealand does have a bit of a track record
of infrastructure projects being scuppered by future governments. For example,
this government has axed Auckland light rail and let's get
Wellington moving. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop says workers underway to
develop this thirty year national Infrastructure pipeline in the hope
(11:58):
that political consensus can be built on an enduring list
of priorities. Does that mean that these new state highways
that the government has promised, you know as sort of
future proof, and that they can't just be scuppered by
you know, maybe a more leaf leaning future government.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Well, it's an interesting idea, but there's nothing really that
locks us into these roads to be built, you know
the future. You know, National actually National Infrastructure Agency is
supposed to make it easier to start to build facilities
(12:38):
like roads and attract private investment. But really there's no
evidence that a future government wouldn't be able to change that,
and it's just not the way funding works. We could
find somebody that will privately fund an entire road and
then build it, but that's that's typically not the case.
(12:59):
There's usually a high amount of public funding that goes
into that. And anytime there's public funding, there's the opportunity
for the government to change its plans. And we've seen
with things like Let's get Moving, Wellington Moving and the
Auckland light Rail, that spending can occur. We can start
to plan and we can start to build a little bit,
(13:21):
and political winds do change and projects still come to
an end. So there's nothing about these new projects or
Bishop's agency that would safeguard these road projects from never
being canceled.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Green Party Transport spokeswoman Julian Gender has also drawn attention
to another problem that these roads could run into, and
that's a graph in this recent National Land Transport Plan
which shows n zta's revenue mainly from fuel taxes and
road user charges, basically that it will fall slate short
(14:01):
of its estimated expenditure. So does the government have a
massive hole in its transport plane.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, by current calculations, by twenty thirty, we're looking about
a six billion dollars shortfall because of this massive spind
up for these additional roads. And the issue really is
that we have we rely on funding for our transportation
system from fuel tax is one of the primary sources
(14:29):
of revenue, but the amount that we are receiving in
that revenue has been falling over the years because people
have more efficient vehicles, so they're using less fuel for
every trip they take. There's the introduction, of course of
electric vehicles, which have reduced demand, and the fact that
we haven't increased the fuel tax in several years and
(14:52):
four years since twenty twenty. At the same time we've
seen a huge ramp up of inflation. So you know
what we pay now about seventy cents per liter from
twenty twenty on, should have been raised to about eighty
six eighty seven cents now if we wanted to keep
up with the level of revenue. So we've lost about
(15:17):
thirteen and a half cents in value for every leader
of fuel that we sell, and that has a huge
impact on what we can spend and what we plan
to take on in the future, and as a result,
we're seeing these huge deficits coming into the future. And
the only way that we're going to be able to
plug that hole is by increasing our road user charges
(15:39):
or significantly increasing fuel tax, both of which are pretty
politically unfriendly.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Transport Texas by stealth coming road tolls, vehicle licensing, road
user charges are all set to increase over the next
three years.
Speaker 6 (15:57):
The first thing we did was we stopped the petrol
tech increases which the last government had been planning. We said, no,
that's not right when New Zealanders have been struggling through
a cost of living crisis, and we've postponed those out
to twenty twenty seven. So that's a really significant backdrop.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
But what we've also.
Speaker 6 (16:14):
Heard from New Zealanders loud and clear is they want
proper highways, they want proper public transport projects, and they
recognize that in some cases paying a small toll will
mean that happens a lot quicker.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
And I guess the government could help plug that with
Crown funding, but the budgets are looking pretty tight for
the next few years, right there's not a lot of
room to move.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Well. Unfortunately, well there is a huge budget crunch. That's
essentially what the plan is telling us now is that
we are going to plug this hole with crown funding.
Some of it will be Crown grants, so money. The
government gives about three billion there and then another three
billion in Crown loans. So just if we go back
even five six years ago, our transport plans didn't require much,
(17:06):
if any, Crown funding. It was all supposed to be
essentially self funded through the fuel tax and through road
user charges and a few other sources of revenue. But
now if we look at the budget coming forward again,
it was like almost six billion dollars in Crown funding.
So we're actually relying more and more on rates pain
(17:30):
than we were in the past ever in the past.
So not people just driving, but people who are pain
rates are now subsidizing our roads to a massive degree.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And finally, tim how do you think the government will
measure the success of its plan.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
It's a good question. We don't have a lot of
information on that yet. The idea, the objective of these
plans for the last couple iterations has been reducing congestion.
Unfortun only none of the investments really are aimed at
doing that and the idea is there, but the reality
(18:08):
of things I conduce demand, which we've known about for
seventy years or more, really mute any kind of impact
we'd have on congestion from these roads. So it's really
hard to say what the measure of success would be
other than having a plan, you know, something on paper
that says these roads will be built. That's about all
(18:29):
we can expect at this point and maintaining the status
quo for walking and cycling in public transport. But you know,
for looking at this from a business angle, it's hard
to see any KPIs that would really come out of
this investment that would that would be a surefire way
to say it's a success or not.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Thanks so much for joining us, Tim, that's set for
this episode of The Front Page. You can read more
about today's stories and extincts of news coverage at inzipherld
dot co dot inzet. The Front Page is produced by
Ethan Sills. Dan Goodwin is the sound engineer. I'm Georgina Campbell.
(19:11):
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever it
you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another
look behind the headlines.
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