I have recently had a series of emails with Duncan Webb as Minister of SOE’s about Railways and taking them into a new place as a single entity.
My argument is that we need to invest seriously in public transport. As Minister of SOE’s he has the power to promote the return of the Railways to becoming one organisation, again. Instead of competing units. In this city the Railways workshops trained excellent engineers for generations. Thus, supplying staff for engineering businesses in Christchurch.
Duncan basically must resist the neo-lib rubbish which established the split in the Railways in the Douglas/Richardson eras. It appears that the kaupapa of that period continues to live on in the minds of the Ministry which advises him.
The debate about rail is shallow and the Tuesday Club will be addressing this matter soon.
In an article in Stuff Something National won’t be putting ‘back on track’ | Stuff.co.nz there are some worrying matters. A Select Committee has recommended that a special focus be placed on passenger rail. I applaud that but the routes are all in the North Island.
The committee suggested that KiwiRail could, in the not too distant future, start running affordable passenger trains between Auckland and Tauranga, and also Wellington and Napier.
It also recommended that two existing services be expanded. The committee said officials should investigate whether an overnight sleeper service between Auckland and Wellington could restart, and called for the Capital Connection between Wellington and Palmerston North to extend its run north to Fielding.
The only mention of the South Island was:
“Then we have areas like the South Island as an example, which had quite low infrastructure in place. And so that would need a lot more work to get off the ground,” he said.
Who gave them this advice? Is it publicly available? Is Local Government responding to this nonsense?
We need advocates for South Island rail systems. Will Minister Webb become this advocate? Surely, he doesn’t believe in the rulings by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson who set in place the disastrous system we have right now.
The National Parties arguments show that Douglas and Richardson are still their mentors. Here’s what they said:
National Party transport spokesperson Simeon Brown said public transport planning should be left to councils or private business.
That’s great. Fob it off to Local Government and then hammer them for making the rates too high.
He then quotes the fact that the rail journey from Hamilton to Auckland is uneconomic:
Brown also questioned if some of the proposed routes for early scoping would actually be feasible.
“There needs to be a business case put forward. There needs to be patronage, and I imagine for some of the services proposed, for instance Napier to Wellington, there would be very few people making that journey on a daily basis,” he said.
The inquiry found that despite Te Huia carrying about 250 passengers each day, its fares only covered 13.4% of its operating costs.
I wonder how many times Simeon Brown assesses the economics of the “profitability” of a road? Let us take Transmission Gully as an example, pushed through by his National Party predecessor Stephen Joyce. It had a benefit/cost ratio of .6 before the project started and it cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than budgeted and was open years after it was supposed to…….and Simeon questions rail journeys at a time where we must become less dependent on our cars.
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