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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 15, 2022

Auckland’s best chance to fix its clogged transport system

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

A council plan released today could transform Auckland’s creaking transport infrastructure while slashing greenhouse gases and making the city safer for all, writes accessibility and sustainable transport advocate Tim Adriaansen.

This week Auckland Council will vote on what may be the most transformational policy Tāmaki Makaurau has ever seen.

The Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway, or TERP, sets out a plan to reduce Auckland’s greenhouse gas emissions at the same time as New Zealand’s biggest city is growing in both size and population. Transport is the region’s biggest source of climate-changing emissions, so the TERP will need to call for a huge reduction in the amount of petrol and diesel burned up in our vehicle’s engines.

This will require far more walking, cycling and public transport. It will require electric cars, trucks, buses and ferries. It will also require Aucklanders to drive less. A lot less. If the number-crunching climate action advocates are correct, every person in Auckland will spend around 75% less time sitting in a car in 2030 compared to what we do today.

For Auckland, this is an opportunity to create a transport system that provides options for everyone.

We can slash air pollution, smash heart disease and not crash into things nearly as often. Lower income families won’t be burdened with the high costs of car ownership. By adopting principles of universal access, we can improve opportunities for children, elderly and disabled people. Chances are that for most of us, we’ll be able to get where we’re going much more quickly, too. We can all be happier, healthier and wealthier.

A few Auckland residents didn’t seem so convinced by this approach when the parking strategy – a plan to make better use of just 3.25% of Auckland’s roads – came before council earlier this year. The plan became so contentious that its final approval was delayed until after the election, avoiding the need for councillors to make a decision while they’re busy trying to win votes.

Where the parking strategy was more of a storm in a teacup, the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway is a seven-course degustation. Council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee, where the TERP will be debated, has recognised that we’ve already spent enough time talking about reducing emissions and that, election or no election, Auckland Transport needs to be given a clear mandate to actually get to work.

After all, climate change shouldn’t be a contentious issue. Councillors unanimously voted to adopt Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri: Auckland’s Climate Plan, which called for a 64% reduction in emission from transport by the end of the decade. With around three-quarters of Aucklanders reporting growing concern about climate change, it would be politically risky and morally bankrupt for a councillor to openly oppose actually following that plan, this close to the election.

The TERP became necessary when, despite the clear transport objectives in Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri, Auckland Transport threw the widely consulted strategy into the ever-rising ocean by producing a 10-year investment plan that would see emissions from transport increase, rather than decrease.

When challenged in court over the significant difference between what Auckland Transport were asked to do and what they actually planned to do, lawyers acting for council took a pyrrhic victory when they went on to successfully trash their client’s own climate plans. This week’s adoption of the TERP is a shot at redemption.

Get ready for more travel by train, less by car. (Image: Auckland Transport / Supplied)

Perhaps some councillors will complain that while they voted for transformational climate action, they didn’t expect to actually have to follow through on that promise. No doubt some charlatans will wail and gnash at the thought of anything other than a car-saturated city. But if anybody should be embracing the TERP, it’s people who need to drive.

Think of it like this: Whenever you’re stuck in traffic, what’s really holding you up is the number of other drivers on the road. We might think that widening the road or adjusting an intersection to shift more traffic would solve the problem, but this is a fool’s errand. Every time we make it easier to drive, people respond by – unsurprisingly – driving more. Too many people driving is exactly the cause of our traffic problems—and our carbon problems.

This is known as induced demand, the phenomenon by which investing in roads inevitably makes traffic worse. Thankfully, there is an alternative.

The very best transport system for drivers is one where there are well-maintained roads which go everywhere we need to go, and nobody else driving on them; where the courier driver dropping off packages doesn’t have to compete for space with a light truck travelling two minutes to the dairy.  The very best transport plan, then, is the one which gives people good options to get around, and driving is low down on the list.

We don’t need to do this by making driving worse. We can do it by making everything else better. Most of the time, there will be a trade-off. We have neither the time nor the money to rebuild every piece of Auckland’s nearly 8,000 kilometres of roading network. We’ll need to work smarter, not harder; and we’ll need to get the best out of the tools we’ve already got.

The Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway offers the best chance we’ve ever had to beat traffic in Auckland – and if we treat this as the opportunity that it is, we can build a better world while we’re at it.

The Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway is scheduled to by published at 12pm today.

Keep going!
National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)
National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 14, 2022

Jobs for the bad boys

National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)
National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)

They all embarrassed their party during their tenures as National MPs. But what else do Andrew Falloon, Aaron Gilmore, Todd Barclay, Jami-Lee Ross and Sam Uffindell have in common?

Being a politician is a strange job and it takes a strange kind of person to do it well. But many of the people who seek political power are the wrong kind of strange, so parties try to be careful about who they select as candidates. This is a dark and difficult art. They want people who represent their members’ values to the wider public but most members of political parties are also rather weird. So your candidates can’t be too much like them or they’ll scare the voters. And parties have to vet the applicants: dredge up their awful pasts, but this information needs to be held close, not spread around or used to automatically disqualify, because everyone has an awful past – how many of us can truly say we’ve never brutally attacked a 13-year-old asleep in bed, or destroyed our own flat in a drug-fuelled rage? – and if the disclosures were misused no one would ever reveal anything.

It’s all very fraught. Parties try to get it right because once someone is elected to parliament they can be impossible to control. MPs aren’t employees – they represent the voters. They don’t work for their party leader or for parliamentary services or the speaker of the house. They can only be fired by the voters, and they get a handsome payout if they leave after a general election, so if you try to usher them out before then they’ll usually cling to their seat, salary and perks while screaming their lungs out.

The tensions arising from this dynamic twist through our politics like high voltage cables. Most of the time the parties step over or around the live wires. The party whips manage their MPs with carrots and sticks – promises of promotion, threats of deselection, briefings to the press gallery – while party officials scrutinise their candidates carefully. But from time to time the wrong people get through and then they arc and thrash in the media, throwing out cascades of sparks, lighting up their party’s internal failures for all to see. And voters generally respond by punishing that party mercilessly in the polls.

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On Monday afternoon Stuff investigative journalist Kirsty Johnston broke a story about parliament’s newest MP, Sam Uffindell that neatly encapsulated every negative stereotype National’s critics love to perpetuate about it: privileged white guy, elite boarding school, abhorrent cruelty, inept party processes, terrible candidates. Now National is faced with the question of what to do with Uffindell: keep him in parliament and have him step down next year with the risk of additional allegations coming to light? Or suffer the humiliation of a second Tauranga by-election? And whatever they decide is contingent on Uffindell going along with it.

But surely their larger problem is that National – its committees, MPs and officials – still don’t grasp the risk of selecting candidates that direct media discourse onto their party’s negative qualities while also making it harder to communicate their key messages. Here’s Christopher Luxon being interviewed by Guyon Espiner on RNZ earlier this week:

Luxon: We are the party of law and order–

Espiner: So you’re a party of law and order. Andrew Falloon sent a pornographic image to a 19-year-old. Hamish Walker leaked sensitive medical information about Covid-19 patients. Jake Bezzant… I don’t even really want to say what he did. Aaron Gilmore – do you know who he is?

Luxon: (Pause) Yes.

Espiner: Jami-Lee Ross is before the court at the moment so we won’t go too far into that. And Todd Barclay secretly recording his staffers’ phone conversations. Are you the party of law and order?

Sam Uffindell
MP Sam Uffindell in his Tauranga electorate (Photo: RNZ/Supplied)

Back in July, about the time Sam Uffindell won his by-election and began his now doomed political career, Kemi Badenoch emerged as a rising star of British Conservative politics. A 42-year-old Nigerian migrant who worked at McDonald’s while studying at a non-Oxbridge university, Badenoch was a breakthrough candidate in the Conservative leadership contest. She wasn’t senior enough to reach the final round but the right of her party was enraptured by the sight of a Black woman attacking wokeness and critical race theory, and the Daily Telegraph declared that “Kemi Badenoch is the future of conservatism”.

The diversification of right-wing politics is a global trend, part of the Great Realignment in which the traditional left-right coalitions of the 20th century are dissolving and reshaping. In the US it took the form of the red and black wave that broke for Trump in 2020 accompanied by a growing Hispanic drift to the Republicans, demographic shifts that almost cost Joe Biden the election. And if you looked at National during the 2010s, the diversification of the party was well underway. Paula Bennett, Simon Bridges and Hekia Parata were senior ministers; Melissa Lee was an undersecretary, Shane Reti and Harete Hipango won electorate nominations and then seats in the house. (I suppose we should also list Jian Yang, the Honourable Member for Chinese Military Intelligence, although it would be nice to see MPs representing the preferences of Chinese New Zealanders, rather than Beijing.)

But in the last five years the project has been abandoned. National seems to regard diversity and representation as a tedious chore the horrible left-wing media keeps nagging them about rather than a way to improve the culture of their party and the calibre of their MPs while expanding their voter base. Instead of selecting on merit they’ve become a party of identity politics repeatedly elevating candidates that are strange-in-a-bad-way because they reflect the membership’s race and gender preferences, rather than their suitability for public office. It’s a live wire the party keeps grabbing, compulsively. And the repeated shocks could kill its chances at the election.


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