Transport minister Chris Bishop has offered to study Wayne Brown’s beloved Meola Reef bridge – but only if the council pays half, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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“$106 million is a lot to spend on a crossing that does not exist,” Amelia Wade wrote in The Post this morning. Even more striking, she wrote, is to spend that much and still not be ready to decide where to build it, “or whether to build it at all”.
Yesterday, The Post reported that consultants have now billed more than $106m for work on a second Waitematā Harbour crossing. And when prime minister Christopher Luxon and transport minister Chris Bishop fronted up later in the day, they offered little more than a promise that they had gathered plenty of information – but remained no closer to a final decision.
Avoiding past mistakes
The Transport Agency has sent a barge into the harbour for seabed testing, analysed over routes and traffic data, and its board has formally endorsed a tunnel as its preferred option, according to the Herald’s Katie Bradford and Adam Pearse.
Instead, ministers have ordered another year of work on a detailed business case that would finally settle the crucial questions: what gets built, how much it costs, who pays, and how it gets delivered. RNZ noted this means the project is still deep in pre-planning, more than two years after the government started questioning a $35-45bn tunnel proposal inherited from Labour.
Bishop insists this is not indecision but a deliberate effort to avoid repeating past mistakes. He told journalists the crossing will probably be “the largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever undertaken in New Zealand” and that getting it right matters for the country’s “reputation as a modern, functional, first-world country,” according to RNZ.
Giving Wayne Brown enough rope
Wayne Brown has spent years taking shots at the government over the harbour crossing, and now, according to The Post, it has called the mayor’s bluff.
Brown’s long-held preference is a bridge from Point Chevalier across Meola Reef to the North Shore. He is so invested in the idea that he apparently keeps a map of the reef on his phone, ready to show anyone who will listen. Bishop acknowledged the Meola option has been examined before and dismissed, according to RNZ. But the Government has offered to co-fund yet another study, capped at $1m, if the council is willing to match the contribution, RNZ reported.
That puts the onus squarely on Brown. He must now persuade his councillors to find $500,000 in an already stretched budget to test his pet project. Brown is sceptical of the earlier studies, backing his own engineering judgement over what, according to The Post, he sees as tunnel-obsessed Wellington bureaucrats.
An ‘announcement about an announcement about a study about a study’
The move allows Bishop to say he is honouring the Auckland City Deal and taking Brown’s idea seriously, according to 1News’s Justin Hu. It gives the mayor one final opportunity to demonstrate his proposal has genuine merit. And if councillors vote against funding it, the government can’t be accused of killing the idea.
Bishop said the goal was a “final definitive view” – either confirming Meola Reef as a viable option or ruling it “out pretty heavily,” The Post reported.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins was, of course, scathing. He described the press conference as an “announcement about an announcement about a study about a study,” RNZ reported. “They can’t make a decision about a decision. These are not serious people,” he said. But, Hipkins confirmed, Labour would not scrap the process.
Christopher Luxon defended the approach, saying the government was “genuinely trying to do this differently,” and took aim at earlier governments (including National under John Key) for producing “lovely A3 glossy picture[s]” of tunnels without doing the hard work on costs and deliverability.
