Transporting Aucklanders: Capitalist Cars versus Socialist Trains.

The Man With The Plan: Auckland Councillor, Mike Lee, embraces the future of Auckland passenger transport.

WHY CAN’T WE get public transport right in New Zealand’s largest city? Visit any other world city and you will find buses, trams, light-rail networks and extraordinarily fast and efficient heavy rail services. Literally millions of people avail themselves of these services every day. Just imagine London, Paris, New York and Sydney without their light-rail services (both over and underground). Imagine Japan and China without their bullet trains. Then ponder the indefatigable prejudice of New Zealanders against anything that runs on rails.

To hear Kiwis tell it, you would think that everywhere else in the world trains have gone the way of the horse and buggy. That there is no modern city foolish enough to rely upon anything other than the private automobile to get its citizens from A to B.

Railways? Locomotives? Steel wheels? It’s all so very Nineteenth Century!

Where does this prejudice come from? The answer, as always, is a combination of economic, political and cultural factors. The combination of big oil, big auto and big construction companies had a huge vested interest in a post-war future than ran on roads – not rails. American industry was geared-up for the mass production of motor vehicles. The GIs who had bounced around in jeeps and lorries during World War II would be looking for a smoother ride in peacetime.

They would also be looking for homes in the brand new suburbs that were springing-up on the fringes of all the big cities. Increasingly, travelling to work in those big cities would be undertaken in private motor vehicles on vast freeways. In Los Angeles, just to make sure the future belonged to the automobile, the powers-that-be ripped up the city’s highly efficient light-rail network. The same thing happened in Auckland.

The demise of the railways wasn’t just about General Motors, Firestone and Texaco, however. There was a powerful cultural element to the automobile-centric post-war world. Ever since the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the popular vision of the future was one in which the ordinary man drove himself.

Invented in the late nineteenth century, the automobile has always been a symbol of individual freedom. Initially, the thrill of escaping at speed was reserved for the very wealthy. Thanks to Henry Ford, however, automobile ownership could be democratised. Progress towards universal car ownership may have been slowed by the Great Depression and the needs of the war, but the vision of vast freeways filled with cars – all travelling towards their owner’s suburban Shangri-La – which had enthralled those millions of visitors to the 1939 World’s Fair was simply too good a future for politicians to refuse.

Besides, the individualism which automobile ownership both encouraged and expressed offered a visceral political contrast to the carless proletarians of the Soviet Bloc. Packed into their precious “Metro”, the dragooned masses of Moscow were in no position to choose – let alone steer – their own path towards life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Road versus Rail thus became yet another Cold War stand-off. In a nutshell: socialists rode trains; capitalists drove cars.

Nowhere was this cultural-political dichotomy more thoroughly internalised than in post-war New Zealand. And nowhere in post-war New Zealand was the automobile culture, and all it stood for, more aggressively enabled than in Auckland. The rail-centric plan for Auckland’s post-war development which Labour and its radical state-planners had appended to the 1946 edition of Hansard (unearthed more than a decade ago by Dr Chris Harris) would have produced a very different city to the one our politicians are frantically struggling to retrofit in 2018.

The underlying planning assumption which would have guided the growth of post-war Auckland was that cities are, in essence, exercises in collective well-being – not individual self-fulfilment. Not surprisingly, National was having none of that. New Zealanders didn’t want the dreary socialism of grimy public railway carriages. What they wanted were bright new cars from England and America – Humbers and Fords. New vehicles and new horizons. Just like in the movies!

And so it has been in Auckland for the past seventy years. The denigration of public transport and public housing. The false characterisation of railway technology as uncomfortable and inefficient (just like socialism!) and the misrepresentation of automobiles and motorways as the only alternative that works (just like capitalism!). Even when the brute realities of urban engineering forced both central and local government to acknowledge the claims of collectivism they only did so reluctantly, truculently, inefficiently and stupidly. Even the Greens, rather than rub shoulders with the bus- and train-travelling working poor, devote their energies instead to promoting the solitary middle-class vice of cycling.

Lone voices of sanity in this sorry saga: the former Auckland mayor, Sir Dove Myer Robinson; the former chair of the Auckland Regional Authority, Mike Lee; are derided as cranks and dinosaurs. How could they not be? Both advocated staunchly for rail: the only mode of transport that offers Aucklanders the slightest hope for a sustainable urban future founded on collective well-being.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 September 2018.

New Zealand Doesn't Need A "Developers' Charter".

The Never-Ending Suburban Dream: Dr Nick Smith's purported determination to make housing more affordable by "reforming" the Resource Management Act has been widely derided as little more than a National Party recommitment to the urban development model of the 1950s and 60s. In short, to quote Peter Dunne, "a developers' charter".

THE LAWYERS and the environmental lobbyists are already gnawing at Dr Nick Smith’s proposed changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA). Forewarned by the National-led Government’s first, abortive, foray into environmental law reform back in 2013, a forearmed Opposition has this week re-joined the battle with renewed energy.

 

The United Future leader, Peter Dunne, has warned against turning the RMA into a “Developers’ Charter” – a potent political riff upon which his parliamentary colleagues have been only-too-happy to extemporise.

 

Has the Prime Minister, rubbing shoulders with 1 percent of 1 percent of the 1 Percent at Davos, given equal heed to the venerable Member for Ohariu? Given that few politicians’ appreciation of middle-class New Zealanders’ tics and tells is stronger than Mr Dunne’s, if John Key isn’t paying attention to him, then he should – and soon.

 

Not that, in the brutal numbers game that determines whether a piece of legislation succeeds or fails, Mr Key needs the endorsement of Mr Dunne. The parliamentary arithmetic of environmental law reform requires no complicated figuring. The Act Party’s grace-and-favour MP for Epsom, David Seymour, has already signalled (well in advance of any actual shouts of “Division called for!”) that he will be supplying Dr Smith with the single vote necessary (in addition to National’s 60 votes) to ensure the passage of the Government’s environmental reforms.

 

Which is, when you think about it, extraordinary. With sixty MPs, National’s current parliamentary caucus is, by historical standards, a large one. It is also slavishly obedient.

 

Outside of the armed forces and large private corporations, it is remarkable to find a group of sixty strong-willed individuals who can be relied upon absolutely to do exactly as they are told. Especially remarkable when doing exactly what they’re told could very easily cause the seats that a number of them hold to change hands.

 

Readers of a certain age will recall National Party MPs like Mike Minogue and Marilyn Waring, Simon Upton and Ruth Richardson, who were willing, in the absence of any acceptable compromise, to cast their votes against their own Government’s policies.

 

It has been a very long time indeed since a National Party politician “crossed the floor” in any kind of procedurally meaningful context. For many years now absolute caucus discipline has not only been assumed – it has prevailed.

 

Such robotic compliance is not good for the health of National’s caucus; the wider National Party organisation; nor, ultimately, for that of parliamentary democracy itself. Voters need to believe that there are at least some MPs whose definitive allegiance is to values and principles more enduring than the arguments of their Party Whip. On matters crucial to both the social and the natural environments, the practice of representative democracy should rise above the crude calculations of purely partisan arithmetic. It should be about reason and science; about being persuaded by the evidence and securing the greatest good for the greatest number.

 

Replacing New Zealand’s much admired RMA with a “Developers’ Charter” would be about none of those things. On the contrary, it would be about using the legislative process to advance the interests of a section of New Zealand society which has, for more than sixty years, grown extremely wealthy (and dangerously influential) by convincing the National Party to continue following a model of sprawling urban development, based on the single-story detached dwelling and the private automobile. As a template for sustainable urban growth, it was already out-of-date when the First National Government adopted it in 1949.

 

Economically-speaking, the model only works by transferring vast public subsidies into the bank accounts of the private land speculators, property developers, builders and roading contractors who are its indefatigable champions.

 

Unfortunately, the greed of this corrupt system’s beneficiaries has led them, like all racketeers, to jack up their prices to unaffordable levels. The consequential crises, both social and environmental, are dominating the headlines.

 

The solution to the problem of unaffordable housing is not to gut the RMA, as the urban-sprawl lobby would have us all believe, but to make it fit for the purpose of managing the introduction of a more rational, sustainable and affordable model of urban development. Since this model will, inevitably, require massive investment from the public, it must also be answerable to the public.

 

Peter Dunne understands this – even if Dr Smith and Mr Key do not.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 January 2015.