RoNS backdown: Chris Bishop cleaning up Simeon Brown’s mess

Thursday, 9 July 2026

OPINION: On July 22 last year Chris Bishop received a briefing which went against everything the National Party had been saying for years.

The document was not from the Labour Party, some woke consultancy, or a union, but from the Ministry of Transport. It told him the $50 billion Roads of National Significance (RoNS) programme National had campaigned on didn’t make sense.

“The RoNS projects are relatively low value,” the officials wrote.

“Initial information indicates all RoNS projects have BCRs [Benefit Cost Ratios] under 3.0, with some BCRs below 1. The low value for money of the RoNS projects means that any benefits to economic growth and productivity would likely be outweighed by the financial burden placed on households.”

Read more:

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The officials also noted the whole programme ran counter to the National Infrastructure Plan that Bishop’s Infrastructure Commission was cooking up, which pushed for the Government to focus its limited infrastructure expenditure on keeping what it already had in good nick, not building brand new things.

It’s unlikely this was news to Bishop.

Since becoming transport minister in January last year he has spent a lot of time preparing the ground for what he had to do on Thursday: Admit that the RoNS his party campaigned on in 2023 were not happening in anything like the same form.

The Post already revealed in April that the RoNS would no longer be gold-plated four-lane expressways. Bishop has been saying for months ‒ particularly since the Iran War ‒ that there was more investment committed in the National Land Transport Programme than current fuel taxes would ever be able to meet.

Bishop is in the invidious position of having to front this backdown to a policy package he did not create. It was Simeon Brown who committed National to this package of RONs ahead of the election, including promises of start dates that looks wilfully ignorant in hindsight. A whole swathe of RoNS had promised start dates within this term but now have no construction date committed to whatsoever. And the costs, as Labour predicted at the time, are off by billions.

It was Brown who as transport minister delayed the petrol tax hikes booked in for this term that were needed to even start to meet those costs. And it was Brown who signed off on the incredibly ideological 2024-2027 Government Policy Statement on National Land Transport that made state highways the be-all and end-all of transport spending, with major petrol tax hikes supposedly kicking in from 2026-2029.

It is the revenue gap that at the end of the day has forced Bishop’s hand here. There is simply no appetite for fuel taxes to go up by 49c a litre to pay for roads that most experts think are largely not needed. The case for doing so when the roads we do have need so much more investment to stay operational was becoming harder and harder for the serious actors in the Cabinet to explain. How can you seriously criticise Labour for its woeful delivery record last term and any unfunded promises now when you have such a huge unfunded and undelivered batch of projects attached to you?

That this embarrassing backdown is more Brown’s fault than Bishop’s does not exonerate Bishop. Bishop was campaign chairperson in 2023. As a Wellington MP he was happy to talk up “spades in the ground” on the Mount Victoria tunnel this term ‒ a promise he now explains away by saying that spades are technically in the ground doing preparatory geotechnical investigations.

The actual project? NZTA says it will be “Progressing to pre-implementation/implementation” at some point in the 2030s. No start date for construction is promised.

As we head into the new election period, Bishop’s and Brown’s roles from 2023 are switched. Bishop is now transport spokesperson and Brown campaign chairperson. The realities of Government often make second-term campaign promises a bit more subtle than those in the first term. Jacinda Ardern went from promising KiwiBuild in 2017 to promising “getting through the pandemic” in 2020. As National starts to reckon with something like its own KiwiBuild, will it lower its promises too?