Rush hour traffic in Auckland City

PoliticsJune 22, 2016

The green light for Auckland road pricing is a breakthrough for a city blighted by political bickering

Guest writer

Rush hour traffic in Auckland City

The government’s change of heart on charging for use of Auckland roads at last releases the handbrake on planning for the region’s transport future, writes Matt Lowrie.

Auckland’s transport problems are pretty well known, even to those outside the city. They are the result of a toxic mix: decades of political bickering, poor decision making (in both housing and transport), under funding and rapid population growth.

How to “fix” transport in Auckland has long been the subject of debate around barbecues or water coolers.

That debate extends to the halls of power and in the years following the creation of the super city there have been plenty of exchanges and disagreements between the Auckland Council and central government on the issue. Disagreements might be understating it, however: it was more the council would want to do something and the government would give their best impression of Winston Peter’s infamous NO sign, even when government agencies were involved in the assessment of projects.

One of the key disagreements has been around the Auckland Plan, the 30-year vision for Auckland signed off in 2012. The Auckland Plan’s transport strategy was to effectively build every project ever thought of in Auckland and unsurprisingly that resulted in a $12 billion funding gap. Yet, despite building a lot of stuff, congestion was still projected to get worse.

The government and their agencies disagreed with the Auckland Plan on transport but that wasn’t because they had their own alternative, they just didn’t want to agree to “Len’s Plan”.

Mayor Brown pushed on and to address the funding gap he pulled together a number of disparate organisations into a Consensus Building Group which was tasked with looking at how to extract more money to pay for Auckland’s plans. They ultimately came up with two options, summarised as:

Increased rates, (regional) fuel taxes, tolls on new roads
Tolls on the motorways or for entering areas such as the central city

The major flaw in both of these options is they both required buy in and legislative change by the government, who again delighted in saying NO.

Then in August last year the government and council announced they were going to work out their differences and come up with a joint evidence based plan for Auckland. They called this the Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP). As well as looking at projects and when they might be needed, the terms of reference included that they could look at road pricing from a demand management perspective.

This was the first hint at a softening around the idea of road pricing but the focus on using it demand management that was a key point. When it comes to pricing roads it is done for one of two primary reasons, either to gather revenue or to manage demand. These aren’t mutually exclusive outcomes but they can have different fundamental impacts on how a system is designed.

As the name suggests, a revenue gathering based system is about collecting more money, ideally as efficiently as possible. Gantries on motorways or a cordon around an area are usually the preferred way of doing this but can have negative impacts such as encouraging people clogging local roads to avoid paying.

Demand management is fundamentally about using pricing in an attempt to change behaviour to get a better use of the transport resource we have. As the transport minister, Simon Bridges, said this morning, there’s a limit to how many more motorway lanes we can build. While some people may pay more to use the road, the system could potentially be designed to be revenue neutral, perhaps substituting rates or fuel taxes.

The ATAP process doesn’t finish till the end of August but yesterday they released an interim report on what they’ve found to date. They say the analysis shows that using road pricing to manage demand has the potential to make a major difference to transport in Auckland, much more so than just building a lot more stuff faster or changing the order of when things are built.

peak1

For this first stage of analysis, ATAP looked at a variable charge of between 3 cents and 40 cents per kilometre depending on time of day, location and type of network travel occurs within. An indication of how prices would vary is shown in the table below. As a quick comparison, current fuel taxes work out at approximately 6 cents per km. In this situation some could end up paying less than they do now.

peak2 ATAP stress that their analysis is only early days and a lot more work will need to be done to truly understand the impacts and just what prices might be. They suggest it could take 10 years before any road pricing scheme is fully operational.

Len Brown is of course happy with this outcome, especially coming hot on the heels of the City Rail Link finally starting construction. These may not be quite the motorway tolls he was looking for, but Bridges has indicated the government now agrees with the road pricing approach as an option that needs to be further considered.

In my view this is a very positive and important step. Road pricing is a discussion numerous cities have had but very few have actually been able to introduce any form despite it having long been accepted by many who are involved in the transport sector or who follow it closely. It has always suffered from a lack of political will and/or negative public perception. Now at least at a high level we appear to have some political consensus.

I suspect a lot will need to be done to address the public perception issue but we can look to some overseas examples. Stockholm presents one of the best case studies in this regard. Following much debate, a congestion tax for entering the central city was imposed at the start of 2006 as part of a seven month trial. Almost immediately they discovered a 20-25% reduction in traffic passing the cordon and that also corresponded with improvements in air quality. Seven months later when the trial ended the traffic returned. Following a subsequent referendum it was decided to introduce the congestion tax permanently and as of 2011 there is 65-70% support for them.

There are a number of issues that will need to be addressed, not least of which is we will need to have in place a much more viable set of alternatives for those who want to avoid driving. But that discussion and the how and when can come later though. For now this decision means that planning for the future of transport in Auckland can continue without having one hand tied behind its back. It also gives confidence that both the council and government will, come August, be able to produce a lasting and agreed transport plan for the region.

Kamal Reddy

OPINIONSocietyJune 22, 2016

How the police sprung a ‘Mr Big’ undercover sting to snare a murderer, and what we can’t say about it

Andrew Geddis

Contributing writer

Kamal Reddy

Kamal Reddy is going to jail following the successful use of the controversial ‘Crime Scenario Undercover Technique’. What does our highest court have to say about its use? Sorry, you’re not allowed to know that yet, writes Andrew Geddis

Kamal Reddy is an undeniably bad man. Last month a jury decided that, back in late 2006 or early 2007, he strangled his ex-partner Pakeeza Yusuf with the cord of an iron before smothering Ms Yusuf’s three-year-old daughter, Juwairiyah “Jojo” Kalim, with a pillow. Two awful murders that have earned him a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years behind bars.

But why is he only going to jail for these murders now, nearly a decade later? Well, after the killings Reddy buried his ex-wife and child under the Takapuna overbridge in Auckland’s North Shore. There they lay for six years, until Ms Yusuf’s mother finally grew concerned enough about her daughter’s silence to report her disappearance to the police. But with no bodies, a suspect who wouldn’t confess and a trail gone six years cold, what could the police do?

Until now we could only answer that question in the most circumspect of ways, using the most general of hints. The High Court suppressed almost all discussion of the police operation mounted to obtain Reddy’s confession on the basis that if it were talked about, then it would tip off other suspected criminals and the police wouldn’t be able to use it again. As that suppression order now has been lifted, I can explain in more detail the considerable lengths the police went to in order to get their man – as well as why their methods are potentially problematic.

To obtain Reddy’s confession, the police unpacked their “Crime Scenario Undercover Technique”; or, as it’s better known overseas, ran a “Mr Big” sting on him. In essence, the police tricked Reddy into thinking he was joining a criminal syndicate by infiltrating an undercover officer into his life who then involved him in a series of (sham) criminal offences for which he was paid small amounts of money. These “offences” brought him into contact with a number of other undercover police officers playing a range of roles connected with the “syndicate” and took him to various parts of New Zealand, including down to Queenstown for a holiday/apparent drug deal. One of the characters in this performance was an apparently corrupt cop, whom Reddy was led to believe could make any legal problems of the syndicate’s members disappear.

Following a period of initiation into this “syndicate”, Reddy was told that in order to join it as a full member he would have to pass an interview with its “Mr Big”. At that interview, Reddy was cajoled (but not compelled) into divulging what had happened to his wife and daughter on the grounds that without full disclosure of his past the syndicate could not trust him. He then took a fellow “syndicate member” to the place where he had buried the bodies. Having obtained Reddy’s confession on film and substantiated it with the victims’ remains, the police dropped the act and arrested him for murder. And at his subsequent trial the main prosecution witnesses were his fellow “syndicate members”, telling the jury just how they had conned Reddy into implicating himself for the crimes.

The precise details of this Mr Big sting against Reddy are pretty impressive, playing out like a script by David Mamet (I’m thinking House of Games or The Spanish Prisoner). And he’s not alone in being foxed by it. In filings to the court, the police stated that the technique has run “approximately seven” other times since the late 2000s, but only for really serious offending and with sign-off at the highest level. They also told the court that no such operations are in play at the moment; so publicly talking about the method won’t put any current investigations at risk.

While the Reddy case has shone the spotlight on it, the use of “Mr Big” in New Zealand isn’t entirely new news. You can read judicial discussion of one of the past police stings in the case of R v Cameron, involving the cold-case murder of Balwinder “Babu” Singh. You can also read descriptions of how Canadian and Australian police have been using the technique for years — the Canadians in particular have really taken to it with gusto. In one of their operations against a Mr Cheeseman, for example, “over 50 undercover police officers were involved in the charade which included strippers, lap dances, [and] two officers naked in bed together …” And Supreme Court Justice Susan Glazebrook gave a lengthy speech on the issue just last year.

However, somewhat annoyingly, I can’t tell you what the New Zealand Supreme Court might have said about the use of this investigative technique. It is annoying because, as Justice Glazebrook noted in the speech just referred to:

Both in the caselaw and the literature on Mr Big operations, a number of concerns have been raised with the technique. The main concern is with reliability and the spectre of false confessions. But there have also been issues raised about the legitimacy of state action that effectively coerces a suspect into confessing, particularly if that involves oppressive conduct or the subversion of rights accorded to suspects. There have been more general concerns expressed as to the technique, involving as it does fake criminal activity. The prejudicial effect at trial of evidence showing often enthusiastic involvement in criminal activity has also been pointed to as of concern.

After all, how much can you trust a confession made to “criminals” as the apparent price for gaining entry to their “syndicate”? Because while the interview with “Mr Big” doesn’t involve any coercion or threats, the message sent at it is pretty clear. The syndicate thinks the evidence shows you did the crime, and Mr Big doesn’t believe you if you try to deny it. So why not “confess” to the accusation, seeing as it is what Mr Big seems to expect you to say?

For as Teina Pora’s case so amply demonstrates, people can and will say the most obviously false, self-incriminating things to police officers in formal interview settings, where the potential consequences of their statements are pretty dire. Isn’t the risk that someone will falsely put their hand up for something they didn’t do then a whole lot higher where the audience (apparently) is a group of fellow criminals who won’t punish you for what you claim to have done, but might let you be a part of their (lucrative) criminal gang if you claim guilt? How “against interest”, and thus believable, is such a confession in such circumstances?

(Admittedly, the risk a confession is false is much reduced in a case like Reddy’s, where its veracity is backed up with tangible evidence like the location of the victims’ bodies. But what about cases, again like Teina Pora’s, where the “confession” is basically the central plank of the case against the accused?)

So, you might now be wondering, given that the New Zealand police have been using their “Crime Scenario Undercover Technique” for a number of years over a number of cases, and that serious questions exist as to its trustworthiness, surely our Supreme Court has had a look at the matter? To which I can only say, you might very well wonder that, I could not possibly comment.

No, really. For now, I can’t say anything about that final matter. At all.