Matthew Hooton has decided to focus his lazy eye on the growing insanity of the tram to Mt Roskill:
If the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then Transport Minister Michael Wood’s announcement of an Establishment Unit for light rail makes him certifiable.
The same officials, from the same agencies, will do the same analysis, based on the same basic facts and assumptions, that they’ve been doing for a decade. Despite their best efforts – and those of the investment bankers and project managers at the Super Fund and CDPQ Infra – no one has been able to make the engineering, economics, environmental impact, politics and construction plan add up.
Wood’s Establishment Unit will be governed by a board consisting of the chief executives of the Ministry of Transport, Waka Kotahi (previously the New Zealand Transport Agency), Auckland Council and Auckland Transport. This is the same lot that has delivered both the shambles in Auckland’s transport network generally and the fiasco over light rail specifically.
NZ Herald
Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop doing it. Michael Wood is supposedly a rational person, but for some reason he thinks that if he says light rail is possible then it will happen. This is the same lunacy that saw Jacinda Ardern and Phil Twyford declare that they could build 100,000 homes in ten years.
This project may well snuff out the smouldering career of a journeyman politician:
The problem is, if such advocates have already failed to make a plausible case for the project over the last decade, why expect them to succeed over the next six months?
In reality, no one expects they will. Treasury, Infrastructure Commission and Auckland Council all advised Wood that his process will not succeed. The Machiavellian theory is that the Government set up the process precisely to drive a final nail into the light-rail coffin. With costs speculated to be anything between $6 billion and $20b, that may be why Finance Minister Grant Robertson has allowed the Establishment Unit to go ahead.
Such guile and reputational risk-taking seems unlikely by Wood personally. His whole life has been about carefully climbing Labour’s greasy pole, for reasons ultimately known only unto him. His political patron is Phil Goff.
Like his mentor, Wood has never been known to hold strong opinions on anything, except for those authorised by party HQ. His defenders call him “stolid”. His critics prefer “hollow”. The most tragic scenario is that someone has convinced him, against all evidence and for their own political ends, that his Establishment Unit has some chance of success.
Like his calls for bans on penis shaped lollies?
That pledge is yet to be honoured, so I expect that, like the pledge, his light rail dream will founder on similar rocks.
After a lifetime of standing in Phil Goff’s shadow, it seems that Michael Wood’s career will cast an even bigger shadow of failure on Mt Roskill.
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