Analysis: The Government announced nine new secondary school subjects this morning, developed with industry to ensure they meet employers’ needs. And assuming the new infrastructure subject aligns with existing NCEA courses offered through polytechs, one of the first things our aspiring young construction engineers will learn is about “communication and teamwork”.
Lesson one … Don’t steal the minister’s thunder by inadvertently announcing the opening date of Auckland’s brand new 3.5km underground railway on a 10-metre tall digital billboard, the night before.
“People have been asking me for years when the City Rail Link was going to open,” Mayor Wayne Brown said. “Now we can give them an answer!”
At a ceremony at Karanga-a-Hape Station this morning, the mayor and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop belatedly confirmed the news: the City Rail Link will open on Sunday, September 13. It is the literal fast-track that will connect some of the metaphorical fast-track projects that are dotting up around Auckland, as well as the rest of the country.
By transforming the dead-end Britomart terminus into a new Waitematā through-station, the 10-year, $5.5b project will enable trains to run faster and more frequently. “The City Rail Link will fundamentally change the way Auckland’s rail network operates, with faster journeys, more frequent services, and better connections across the city,” Bishop says.
The new railway is intended to open up areas of the city and adjacent neighbourhoods for development. Builders and financiers are embracing the opportunity, often by taking advantage of this Government’s fast-track process to bypass council planning and consenting.
Let’s take a ride along the rail route: the council’s big Downtown Carpark, 400m from Waitematā station, got fast-track approval just yesterday to be redeveloped into 55-level office and residential buildings.
Across the road, Port of Auckland has won a fast-track consent to extend Bledisloe North wharf and Fergusson North berth. There are a couple of proposed tower buildings in the nearby Wynyard Quarter, awaiting sign-off.
Across the urban canyon from the new Te Waihorotiu Station, the University of Auckland has applied for fast-track to build a new student centre and library.
Just past the new Maungawhau Station in Mt Eden is Eden Park, whose owners are seeking fast-track consent to rebuild it into a 50,000 capacity, retractable roof stadium, accommodation and commercial development.
Continuing along the East-West Line, we’ll pass the massive 40ha, 4000-home development that three Tāmaki Makaurau iwi want to build at Carrington, before we connect up with the Crosstown Corridor – a heavy rail route that starry-eyed Kiwirail bosses hope to build right across the Auckland isthmus.
Running almost parallel to the north, the NZ Transport Agency wants to build a rapid transport bus lane beside the north-western motorway, out to Whenuapai. And in another twist, Auckland Transport (which will be mostly absorbed into Auckland Council in October) has sought fast-track consent to remove 40-plus railway level crossings from the western and southern commuter lines.
That perhaps highlights the irony better than anything: that a council company is using the Government’s fast-track to bypass council planning and consenting, to speed up its infrastructure plans. This, when Auckland and many other councils opposed the fast-track passing into law.
These projects, clearly, are all being built on transport routes. Mostly, they can be reconciled with the broad vision enunciated in Auckland’s Unitary Plan (though that won’t stop opponents niggling over the details).
But there’s a mounting chorus from councils expressing concern about developers using the fast-track to get around plans that have been painstakingly negotiated by councils and their communities. Plans that recognise existing reservoirs, pipes and pump stations; plans that anticipate where the next substations and stormwaters will be built.
Just last week, Wayne Brown questioned the expertise of the fast-track panel that approved the 1200-home Delmore development north of Auckland, warning that ratepayers risked being left to pick up the infrastructure bill. The project involves trucking treated wastewater to Whangārei because Watercare will not be able to connect any water services to the area until at least 2050.
And I’ve discussed the problem with other mayors around the country: Matamata-Piako’s Adrienne Wilcock told me the decision on the 530-home Ashbourne development and accompanying 250-unit retirement village had been taken out of the community’s hands. It’s to be built on highly productive farmland, nowhere near existing amenities.
Waimakariri Mayor Dan Gordon told me of his strong opposition to a proposed Wolfbrook housing development on the Pegasus golf course; its developers plan to use the fast-track to force a plan change. He’s written to Bishop warning that using the fast-track process to undermine the council’s carefully developed plan for the Pegasus area and its infrastructure would be unacceptable.
Queenstown Lakes faces perhaps the biggest challenge of any district council. The deeply indebted district is drowning in fast-track proposals, with neither the space nor the borrowing headroom to build the supporting infrastructure. “We’ve probably got about 12,000 sections in fast track now,” Mayor John Glover told me. “There’s some concern as to how sustainable that’s going to be.”
But having been on the other side, applying for consents, he does have some understanding of why developers choose to bypass councils and go through the fast-track. “Sometimes, as a council, we’re quite difficult to do business with. If we were a restaurant and people had a choice to go and get their food somewhere else, we would probably have gone bankrupt by now.”
There’s the rub. Developers aren’t just choosing the fast-track in some baleful bid to escape public scrutiny or to avoid being answerable for the impacts of their developments on the community and the environment. Some may be. But mostly, they’re just doing it because the process is cleaner and smoother.
I caught up last week with Local Government Minister Simon Watts, and put this conundrum to him. “I make no apology for the Government’s policy around fast track,” he retorted. “We need stuff to happen faster in this country, and Kiwis are calling for that progress.”
And when we see Auckland Council and its own companies, Auckland Transport and Port of Auckland, choosing to put their own projects through the fast-track, it’s telling. Good urban planning is important, but so too is the efficient implementation of those plans. That’s where councils often fail.
I asked him whether there were any adjustments the Government could make to the fast-track process, to strike a better balance.
“Well, absolutely,” he replied. “The fast-track process and the panels are taking on board feedback.
“But we do need more infrastructure projects and growth in this country – the renewables projects, the energy generation, are critically important for our future growth. We need stuff to be happening at a fast cadence, but we also need to make sure we’ve got the right models in place to provide protections around the environment and to make sure we’ve got the community input.”
There have been very legitimate concerns about the fast-track: the numbers of big political donors ushered through the front door, the focus on mining and other extractive industries, the expert panels’ ability to disregard local plans, the sheer numbers of ticky-tacky housing developments approved in impractical locations when we were promised renewable energy …
But the worst fears have not been realised. In my view, we’ve seen responsible and sometimes courageous leadership by retired Environment Court Judge Jane Borthwick and the expert panels she convenes.
Witness Shane Jones’ frustration at seeing the Trans-Tasman Resources seabed mining application turned down. Or the robust scrutiny applied to Santana’s proposed open-cast goldmine in Central Otago.
Or the “grave concerns” expressed by retired judge Raynor Asher KC that have persuaded his expert panel to consider declining The Point solar farm, whose developers had done little to mitigate the risk posed to the critically endangered kākī/black stilt. “The panel has reached the provisional view that the adverse effects on the ecology of the site are unacceptably high and at risk of outweighing the benefits of the project,” Asher warned.
Do these sound like the words of a political functionary? No. These fast-track panels have proven they won’t simply rubber stamp the whims of their ministerial masters.
Although they don’t have to, the panel members have typically paid heed to district and city plans, called hearings and sought to hear from a wider range of voices than they have to, and taken their time to make tough decisions that can be sustained.
At a time when the most common criticism of infrastructure decision making is its volatility – politicians stopping and starting, chopping and changing – then the fast-track panels are providing some consistency and certainty.
So if the Government wanted role models for these secondary school students who aspire to careers in infrastructure, they could do worse than look to the fast-track scheme and its expert panels.
Though, like the billboard programmer who prematurely announced the opening date of the City Rail Link, their public communications may not always be what the ministers want to hear.
