National: Building the future, or building in the future?
Sunday, 12 July 2026
Vernon Small is a former Labour Government advisor and journalist.
OPINION: An election policy for the next three-year term is a promise. For the three years after that it’s a plan. For the third term it might qualify as an aim.
Beyond that? At best it’s a slogan.
As laudable as long-term planning is, especially when it comes to high-cost long lead time infrastructure schemes, a pipeline of projects starting in 10 years’ time barely deserves the voters’ time of day.
A clear political vision it might be, but it can so easily become an unfunded mirage.
That was the reality Transport Minister Chris Bishop faced on Thursday as he tried to draw up a new timetable for the “very ambitious” Roads of National Significance roadmap set out in National’s 2023 campaign.
For instance, Wellington’s Petone to Granada Link, which was to start as early as next year, has now disappeared over the 2035 event horizon with a cost of about $2.5b. A snip at the equivalent of 10 Korean-built Cook Strait ferries.
To tweak National’s campaign message, it’s now more about building in the future than building the future.
The pre-election estimated cost of the 13 projects then in sight was $17.4b. That blew out to up to $31b, while the cost of the whole 17 projects now on the drawing board is likely to come in at over $50b … and climbing.
It’s not that you want to be too harsh on Bishop and other MPs - or that cost blow outs are unusual. Politicians like to stand on the deck, shielding their eyes as they scan the distant shore.
But for context, how much trust would you now put on a promise made back in 2017 - let’s call it KiwiBuild - to construct 100,000 affordable homes over a decade? Or to build light rail to Mt Roskill and on to Auckland Airport by 2021?
Not to mention the possibility of a change of Government wrecking the long-laid plans of politicians to, say, have a couple of Cook Strait ferries in service sometime this year.
If National deserves to be pilloried for its gross underestimation of the cost - and overestimation of the value and timetable - for its major roading projects, Labour is yet to publicly wrestle with its biggest fiscal demons.
They include how to pay for (or redefine the estimated $11b cost) of the pledge to reinstate the previous pay equity regime. Not to mention how the smoke-and-mirrors of its Future Fund will work - given any dividend income it uses from assets transferred to the fund is income lost to other government spending.
Despite the Simeon Brown-led cries at every new policy release of “more taxes, more debt, Labour profligacy”, so far, its election promises have been far more modest than National’s campaign manager would have you believe.
It is not so much an abandonment of the “small target” strategy employed by Labour until the Budget and more a continuation of it in a well-targeted holding pattern until the big-ticket items are addressed.
The smaller promises so far revealed cost in the region of $1b a year and include annual costs of $40m for its solar heating programme, $65m (or is that $120m?) on its public transport $20 a week fare cap, $75m to scrap prescription charges, $21m to extend cervical screening, $57m for its apprenticeships boost programme and the biggie - $550m for three free visits to the doctor.
Funding for those comes from a combination of reprioritisation and its limited capital gains tax, estimated to raise an average of $700m in its first year.
None of that looks unaffordable, or particularly extravagant, contingent on capital gains delivering the income Labour expects.
But these are early days.
There’s always some unexpected spending revealed during an election campaign, which is still more than two months away.
Yet with Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ promise to keep a tight rein on the annual operating budget, you get the feeling that for the next three years National’s biggest fiscal vulnerability - its love affair with capital spending on motorways - has largely been addressed. That’s in part thanks to the Infrastructure Commission’s warnings about the drain on capital spending from new large-scale roading projects at the expense of maintenance.
With Labour things are not so clear.
Yes, there are the unresolved details around its pay equity and Future Fund policies.
But they are known unknowns.
What remains to be seen is now much more spending the party is prepared to commit to big-impact cost-of-living relief during the election campaign.
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