A squandered opportunity

Late last year, in the face of economic bad news, the government announced a massive $12 billion infrastructure spending programme to keep the economy ticking over. Given shortages of housing and public transport, and the pressing need to decarbonise our economy, this could have been a massive opportunity to fix some of our problems while pointing New Zealand in a better direction. Instead, the government has squandered it, with a package consisting almost entirely of big roading projects, often with benefit-cost ratios of less than 1 (meaning that the costs outweigh the benefits, even when using NZTA's dodgy accounting). Oh, there's some money for rail, but its all just catch-up spending, with nothing transformational. Electrifying the gaps in the main trunk line? Linking Christchurch to its exurbs with commuter rail? Nope. Instead we just have more roads, so trucks will have a quicker journey.

Meanwhile, the government is spending all of $10 million on decarbonisation. Whoop-de-fucking-shit. This is chump change on a government scale, and it shows how little they care. Supposedly there's more in the pipeline, but in total they're planning to spend only 1.6% of this package on making New Zealand ready for a carbon-free future. As for solar and wind farms to put Huntly out of business, or more electric charging stations to boost electric vehicle uptake, or state houses with solar roofs as standard, of course not. Its environmental tokenism, nothing more.

It may achieve its economic stimulus objective - but paying people to bury money in the ground and dig it up again does that. The question is what else it does: whether we get lasting assets, and whether they're worth having. And in this case, the government has spent money to put us on track to a high-carbon future rather than a low-carbon one. It is a squandered opportunity and a complete failure of imagination.