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(Photo: André Brett / Image design: Archi Banal)
(Photo: André Brett / Image design: Archi Banal)

OPINIONSocietyOctober 6, 2022

Decades of bad decisions have led Auckland rail to its current sorry state

(Photo: André Brett / Image design: Archi Banal)
(Photo: André Brett / Image design: Archi Banal)

This week’s announcement that Auckland faces years of city-wide railway closures is disastrous, and the result of bad decisions dating back to the 1950s. 

This week Auckland Transport and KiwiRail announced the Rail Network Rebuild. Auckland’s entire railway network will be closed in stages and rebuilt, which has come as a shock to a lot of people. Stage one will see the Onehunga Line and the Newmarket–Ōtāhuhu portion of the Southern Line close from 26 December until late March next year. Once that work is done, the Britomart–Ōtāhuhu portion of the Eastern Line (known to rail fans as the Westfield Deviation) will close until December 2023. There will be further stages of closure encompassing the rest of the network from late 2023 to 2025. This is in addition to the current closure of Papakura–Pukekohe, which is being electrified and won’t resume service until late 2024. It appears Te Huia and the Northern Explorer will be able to continue operating, at least for 2023, and freight must get through.

Aucklanders are no strangers to rail shutdowns and they hope the short-term pain will lead to long-term gain. Why do they keep happening, though? New Zealand has a history of railway neglect since the 1950s, and in attempting to summarise my initial reaction and answer some questions, plenty more arise.

An ex-Perth ADL/ADC diesel multiple unit at Pukekohe in July, just before these trains ceased duties. (Photos: André Brett)

What on earth is going on? 

Rails sit on sleepers, which are concrete or wooden supports laid perpendicular to the rails for stability and load distribution. The rails and sleepers sit on a bed of ballast—crushed rocks—which provides drainage and additional load distribution. The ballast is laid upon formation: compacted gravel and earth that forms the base of the railway line. Rails, sleepers, and ballast can often be renewed with brief shutdowns and they need to be renewed regularly; wooden sleepers, for example, have a lifespan of about 20 to 30 years.

It’s more of a challenge to renew the formation, and that is, evidently, what KiwiRail needs to do. They will be digging up the entire line and remaking it. Why? It’s one thing to need to remake specific portions, especially those on difficult soil – but the entire network?

KiwiRail and Auckland Transport have released little information to explain why the network is, evidently, in such a bad state. Is it simply decrepit? Have past upgrades not gone far enough? Has new data set off alarm bells? The network-wide scope might imply a rollingstock issue, but if the trains—good, up-to-date electric multiple units—are creating some critical issue everywhere along every line, then the public has not been told.

Pretty much all we get by way of explanation are press releases alluding to the age of the network, although they over-egg it: sure, the first line opened in 1873 (Auckland–Onehunga), but it has been substantially upgraded since. The Westfield Deviation dates from 1930 and was built to the highest standards – you don’t see Wellington’s Tawa Flat Deviation (the line to Tawa that includes the long tunnels) needing a similar shutdown, and it’s of the same vintage .

And why on earth does KiwiRail need to redo lines built or refurbished as part of Project DART (2006–12)? The Manukau Line was newly built in 2012, the Onehunga Line was effectively rebuilt for its return to passenger use in 2010, and the Western Line was substantially rebuilt in the late 2000s as a double-track line with some brand-new alignments (e.g. the New Lynn trench). The Third Main between Westfield and Wiri is under construction literally right now: why is it not possible to use this line to ensure that there is at least a partial service, with buses filling gaps instead of having to (inevitably inadequately) cover the whole timetable?

Why will it take so long?

I need to be clear: this just does not happen to entire transport networks in other cities. Moreover, it does not happen with the most privileged transport mode in New Zealand: roads. Imagine if the Auckland Harbour Bridge was shut for most of 2023. People would lose their minds. But that’s just the equivalent of one railway line. Imagine if every single motorway in Auckland had to be closed and rebuilt over the next three years. Governments would fall.

There is a simple reason why this and other rail projects take forever and cost bazillions of dollars in New Zealand: we no longer have the institutional capacity and expertise to deliver them efficiently and cheaply. Much of this was lost during the reforms of the 1980s–90s, which ostensibly sought efficiency but instead of trimming fat had a tendency to slice off limbs. By the early 2000s, New Zealand had lost much of its ability to maintain its railway network properly, let alone deliver major rail projects, and that is only slowly being recovered. Deferred maintenance has become chronic and severe; if you want to envisage the equivalent for roads, imagine if motorways were still of a 1930s standard. We lack the equipment, experience, expertise, and network redundancy of other countries. It is time to seriously reconsider and revitalise how we deliver major public works — not just rail — in New Zealand.

How did this happen anyway? 

Auckland is paying for the mistakes of the past. This is an unsurprising outcome of rail policy since the early 1950s, when cabinet minister Stan Goosman persuaded his National Party colleagues to discard plans to electrify the Auckland railway network and go all-in for motorways. Ever since, rail has operated at a serious disadvantage. The abandonment of Auckland mayor Dove-Myer Robinson’s rapid rail proposal of the early 1970s confirmed a policy of managed decline: increasingly dilapidated old locomotive-hauled carriage trains trundled along an ever-contracting network and had steadily reduced timetables. Christchurch (1976) and Dunedin (1982) lost their commuter trains; Auckland was going to be next. 

If not for CityRail manager Raymond Siddalls cannily securing a cheap purchase of 19 near-new diesel multiple units from Perth to begin revitalising Auckland’s railways in the early 1990s, the network might well have perished by 2000. Policy papers in the 1980s clearly viewed passenger rail as having no future in Auckland, and their recommendations explicitly set out how to manage the decline and dissuade remaining train passengers from using the services. The outcome planners wanted was to cancel every last train – and a convenient way to do that was to point to rolling stock (trains) and/or physical infrastructure as life-expired and unsafe, and to say “nobody uses it anyway”. It is likely that without the introduction of the Perth trains, the only railway that would remain in Auckland would be a single freight line to the port.

Two ex-Perth ADL/ADC units near the end of their days, parked at Westfield in July. (Photo: André Brett)

The need to totally rebuild the network is a legacy of these decades of neglect and the intention to let the physical network degrade and become unusable. But questions remain. Once the decision was taken to build Britomart in 1998, rail policy shifted from managed decline to revival. Why, then, are we here now? Why were these issues not identified and resolved sooner?

One revelation on Monday was that some officials have been aware of the need for this rebuild for at least seven months, but only on that day were elected representatives and the general public informed. We are seven months behind where we could be in terms of preparing bus priority and bike lanes along key corridors to create options during shutdowns (and, longer term, create integrated multimodal transport). If this had been identified earlier, it could be resolved by now: a large proportion of the work could have been done in 2020–21 while the pandemic kept passenger numbers low. For these shutdowns to come just as patronage is bouncing back – it’s a disaster.

Construction of the Third Main at Puhinui in July, with Te Huia disappearing north towards Britomart. (Photo: André Brett)

The consequences

I mean it: this is a disaster for rail in Auckland, and for public transport in New Zealand more broadly. The contraction of passenger rail from the 1950s went hand-in-hand with the encouragement of attitudes that public transport was unreliable, outdated, and a mere fallback for the needy. Most New Zealanders are unaware just how badly rail has been managed and how severely it has been underfunded compared to networks overseas. All they see is further proof of ingrained local attitudes that you just can’t depend on public transport and that it is a second or third-rate solution for people who can’t drive. 

Little wonder, then, that instead of identifying the actual causes for the massive differences in modal quality (a litany of bad decisions, mistakes, excuses, and funding imbalances), many people think public transport is inherently inferior or that it might work elsewhere but it can’t work here for [insert spurious excuse du jour]. The desirable sorts of public transport that exist overseas – networks you want to use instead of bothering with the hassle and expense of car ownership – are a distant dream.

The entire Auckland rail network having to be rebuilt in stages will fuel the “cars will always be essential” and “we must have more roads” mantras of New Zealand’s most unimaginative people. It potentially means a delay to better frequencies for Te Huia and the Northern Explorer. It will be used by people to say better things are not possible: I can already hear the advocates of commuter rail in Christchurch or Dunedin, and the advocates of regional rail nationwide, being dismissed with “you don’t want to end up like Auckland, do you?” Never mind that Wellington’s rail network, the only one to retain hints of modernity in the second half of the twentieth century, has never needed such a severe shutdown because it was never subjected to a policy of managed decline.

Hopefully I am worrying too much and mouthing off too soon. Maybe there are good answers for the questions above. But it’s yet another frustration in a long list of disappointing and disheartening moments in New Zealand railway history. We once had a good passenger rail network, and it could have been great; we threw it away, and getting it back is proving a challenge indeed.

Dr André Brett is the author of  Can’t Get There from Here: New Zealand Passenger Rail since 1920 (Otago University Press, 2021). A version of this article was first published on his blog and is republished here with permission.

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a red tinted photo of a prison with barbed wire (it's mount eden prison I think, all gothic old stone)
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietyOctober 4, 2022

Our prisons are breeding grounds for crime – what needs to change?

a red tinted photo of a prison with barbed wire (it's mount eden prison I think, all gothic old stone)
Image: Tina Tiller

With prisoners leaving the system with a harder mindset than they had going in, change is urgently needed.  A new podcast aims to be the first step in a process to change the way we view the system.  

It was in 2012 that Tommy Doran was first held in prison on remand. At the time he was 18 and addicted to methamphetamine. For the next five years, he was in and out of the system – mostly on remand, but then later sentenced to prison time. 

His memories of the last time he was in prison in 2017 are of being locked in his cell for 23 hours a day without any kind of rehabilitation programme offered. In an overpopulated and understaffed prison, the emergency button in his cell was instead used like “room service” for the basics – “we’d ring that and sometimes we’ll be sitting there for an hour waiting for response,” Doran recalls.

Over those years circling in and out of prison, his experience was of a system that, despite costing New Zealand $1.3 billion this past year, did nothing to address the root cause of his problems. “I always came out of prison and pretty much just went straight back to what I used to do,” he says. In fact, the characteristics he developed to eventually recover from drug and alcohol addiction and to stop committing crime – honesty, vulnerability, openness – were the exact traits he says are rejected within the current prison system. 

Now a criminology student at Victoria University, Doran is hosting a new podcast alongside actress Ana Chaya Scotney (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Tāwhaki Ki Ngaputahi) called True Justice. The five-part series produced by justice advocacy group JustSpeak shares the stories of people who have been through the prison system, from the point of arrest to life after prison.

Tommy Doran co-hosts a new podcast focusing on stories of people who have been in prison. (Photo: Kirsten Johnstone)

Doran’s experience within the system isn’t an anomaly. In New Zealand recidivism rates are high. Around 70% of people released from prison are reconvicted within two years. And of those who manage to stay out of prison for two years after their release, 49% are eventually re-imprisoned. In this way the current system is comparable to an enormous revolving door. These reoffending rates beg the question – if prison doesn’t deter people from crime, is it time to shift away from this form of punishment and toward something new?

JustSpeak executive director Aphiphany Forward-Taua (Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto,Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Porou, Whānau-ā-Apanui) believes real transformation toward a prison-less Aotearoa is necessary. “It’s time to have a discussion about getting rid of prisons, we’re well and truly overdue,” says Forward-Taua. “It’s not going to happen overnight but we need to create a very clear, stepped journey.” 

After hitting a peak of almost 11,000 in 2018, the prison population now hovers below 8,000. That reduction in prison numbers is the most dramatic in New Zealand’s history. Still, the latest figures from corrections show that while just 16% of the general population in New Zealand identify as Māori, 53.4% of people in prison were Māori. We often think about prison numbers as just that, numbers – that’s important, but can often negate the fact that each prison stat is an individual with their own whānau, friends, stories and needs.

The first step in that transformation, Forward-Taua explains, is their aim for the podcast: changing hearts and minds. Despite the system relying entirely on taxpayer dollars, she reckons most of us aren’t entirely cognisant of what it’s really like in prison. “I think part of the reason there isn’t just-ness experienced by those who end up in the criminal justice system or in our prisons, is because lots of people don’t know the additional punishment that prisoners experience when they are in prison,” she says.  

When Doran was in prison he noticed what he felt were injustices beyond being locked up, but believed at the time that was just how prison was meant to be. “It’s the deprivation of people’s liberty that is the punishment,” Forward-Taua explains. Beyond being removed from society, anything else that takes away people’s rights within prisons is additional punishment. Being deprived of medicine or sanitary items, living in unclean conditions, not being fed properly, being housed in unsafe environments or being isolated for extended periods of time (a condition which has been especially exacerbated by the pandemic) are all additional punishments, despite likely being familiar experiences for people in prisons in this country. 

If anything, the pair say the conditions within prison only enhance antisocial behaviour, which leads to reoffending. “For people within prison, rather than challenging those behaviours, you have to be paranoid, you have to be on your toes, you can’t show emotion, you can’t be vulnerable, you can’t be honest, otherwise, you get walked all over,” says Doran. “So, you’re being conditioned into being a cold, hardened sort of person – and you come out like that,” he adds.

Our approach to justice revolves around the commonsense saying, if you do the crime, you do the time. With rising rhetoric around crimes dubbed catchy names like “smash-and-grabs” or “ram raids” there’s a growing pressure on decision makers to respond with a tough on crime approach. That’s counterproductive, though, says Doran. “Most people are going to get out one day,” he says. “If they’ve done no rehabilitation, just been treated like caged animals for the past however-many years, they’re gonna get out, and act no different, if not worse than they were before they went in.”

JustSpeak executive director Aphiphany Forward-Taua. (Image: Supplied)

For the taxpayers footing the bill, Forward-Taua questions why we wouldn’t “want that money to be invested in a system that actually fosters and nurtures long lasting and meaningful rehabilitation, so that whatever the harm is that they’ve caused victims, never happens again to anyone else.”

“We need to fix society so that people don’t even need to get to this place where they’re in prison,” Forward-Taua says. Whether that be housing, food, education, healthcare, rehabilitation or  mental health support. “Don’t do the bottom-of-the- cliff approach, go to the top of the cliff and make sure everyone has everything that they need.” 

Our high reoffending rates are because the issues that caused the person to offend aren’t addressed, says Doran. “I feel like people who don’t understand what prison abolition is, when they hear that word, they just start freaking out, because what’s going to happen to the people who are a genuine risk to the public?” says Doran. Those types of offenders shouldn’t necessarily be released to the public, he explains, but there still should be attempts to rehabilitate. At the same time, lower level offenders shouldn’t be treated the same way as higher-level offenders, as they are in our current one-size-fits-all approach to justice.

The evolution away from prisons means an alternative vision of justice that revolves around dealing with the source of harm at its very core. “I’ve seen people that you did not want to cross paths with: gang members, serious recidivists, violent offenders rehabilitate and become functioning members of society,” he says. “I saw that take place in the community.” He points to the incarceration approach taken by Norway where community rehabilitation and restorative justice for offenders is emphasised, and putting people in an institution is an absolute last resort. They also have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. That kind of approach here would see a redirection of the billions of dollars a year that go to prisons, to community providers and supporting people to make sure their basic needs are met.

“As a society, we’re so wedded to this system and the idea that if we let go of it, we might lose something,” says Forward-Taua. “Actually, the only thing we would lose is a system that oppresses and continues to subjugate people.”

But wait there's more!