How long till the next disaster?
Sunday, 23 June 2024
Tracy Watkins is editor of The Post and Sunday Star-Times
Opinion: This is what an infrastructure crisis looks like.
A broken down, past its use-by-date ferry runs aground after an apparent steering failure, and cuts a critical transport link between the North and South Islands.
A key power pylon tips over, plunging a region into darkness.
The prime minister’s air force plane — also long past its use-by date and a vital piece of Defence Force kit — is embarrassingly grounded as the PM prepares to lead a high-level trade mission.
Right on cue, the capital reminded us it’s got its own basket-case infrastructure to deal with, a leaky pipe erupting in spectacular fashion in the CBD on Saturday, delaying traffic and sending up chunks of pavement.
Government minister Simeon Brown must be thinking that when it rains, it always pours. On Friday, in his capacity as energy minister, he was briefed on Northland’s widespread power outages and observed: “A pylon should not just fall down.”
He might have added on Saturday after arriving in Picton in his capacity as transport minister: “And passenger ferries should not just run aground either.”
Let’s add to that list; water pipes shouldn’t just erupt; a cold snap shouldn’t overload the national grid; and the country’s biggest city should be more resilient to floods.
In the case of the Interislander, we even saw it coming.
The ageing ferries have been been increasingly unreliable in recent years.
Brown told reporters he was “disappointed” in KiwiRail’s handling of asset maintenance; code, presumably, for years of deferred maintenance.
Given the thousands of passengers carried across the strait each day, and the critical two-way passage of freight, that should be a huge concern.
It’s not quite a threat that heads will roll, but the KiwiRail board is on notice.
KiwiRail, in its defence, had ambitious plans for a multibillion-dollar project for new ferries and new landside facilities that were scuppered by the incoming Government when it discovered the scale of cost blowouts.
But they wouldn’t have saved it from Friday’s disaster; they were not due to arrive for another couple of years. KiwiRail had a duty of care to keep the existing ferry fleet safe till then.
The Government and Opposition will spend the coming days pointing fingers and bickering over whether cancelling the new ferries was the right call.
But they all need to look in the mirror.
There seems to be no part of our infrastructure network that hasn’t been neglected for years, that isn’t in need of billions of dollars to bring it up to scratch; no transport line, or pipeline, or network that has not been the subject of years of warnings that we’ve underinvested for too long, and that eventually something will break.
What’s criminal is not that we continued down that path despite all the warnings, but that we’re always so unprepared when things do eventually break.
That’s not the fault of one government, but successive governments; it’s the product of years of underinvestment, of infrastructure projects being politicised, and politicians who take shortcuts to power with hip-pocket promises rather than doing the hard yards finding bipartisan agreement on projects that have no immediate pay-off.
They avoid it because there are no votes in it.
So we have bike lanes, or motorways; road tunnels or light rail. And each year the priorities change; hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into scoping projects goes nowhere.
When are our politicians actually going to start leading, and talk sensibly about what the country needs, not what will buy them votes?
And how many disasters will it take before that happens?
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