NZ 2023 Election Thread

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#3148255 16-Oct-2023 19:13

quickymart:

https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2023/10/16/old-zealand-beats-new-zealand-election-2023-winners-losers-predictions/ A lengthy election post-mortem from Bomber about why it went so wrong for Labour this time.

From want Ive read and heard on the election coverage on Saturday night, Global Covid govts were kicked to touch. Auckland felt aggrieved by their lockdowns. Election bribes which happen every election. Inflation, whether thats vastly caused by Labour and not anuthimg else, or has "some" global influence, the public doesnt care they want or need cash, understand that.

But end of the day NZ has the same basis we have always had. No natural resources that we can dig out and sell, we just have the tax take. The vast majority of our Govt expenses are always baked in, what they call "supply" The little bit left is a surplus. Not really a lot we can do with that. Personally I feel that analogising NZ to a low/medium family works. Not poor, but limited. A new TV, a re roof, plumbing or wiring is a real problem, they cannot just cash up and do it. They can tickle away over the years, but house maintenance wise if left, it will bite. Same as housing, infrastructure, health and education are biting us now. You cannot just fix that as its decades in the making, so no new Govt will matter. Chip away (pun not intended) as there is no real other option. Past Labour and new National have the same cards (Tax take and supply expenses) so no gain there. Those who endure more costs or who benefit from gains will just switch. Then switch back.

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#3148265 16-Oct-2023 20:31

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/election-2023-what-gets-axed-under-the-national-led-government/SOBF2RP6LBA4RDJIMQHCWQSXV4/

Honestly, I can't see a great deal here to get very excited about. While some of these things could (right) be dropped, a good portion of the rest is going to cut into a lot of areas that will impact me personally. Not impressed.

GV27

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#3148268 16-Oct-2023 20:38

tdgeek:

Labour wanted light rail. Didnt happen. IIRC National doesnt want it either. A big cost for a small impact. If LR was in our 4 main centres and 4 others, and there was some form of penalty for not using it (tolls, pargoodking, lack of parking etc) Im all for it. But it will cost If I was told it will cost me $6 a week in extra tax to pay for it, even though I would rarely use it, I'm all in. Greater good. But it needs to service NZ. Normal, ideally electric rail between centres and small centres and tourist detentions, Im all in, greater good, even though not a personal good. Although if I can tiki tour around NZ relying on EV trains and EV buses, thats the future

Caveat: I am a huge advocate for light rail and want to see it back across basically all of Auckland.

Labour promised light rail but they enabled a huge monstrosity that was light rail in benefits but metro in cost and construction timelines. So if they wanted, they had a funny way of showing it.

What I'm hoping is that before the plug gets pulled, ALR massively downscales the whole thing to get it over the line and we at least end up with a design or a decent route based on surface running and retaining the community connects (e.g. Mangere town centre) that the stupid metro version was skipping to run alongside the motorway instead.

I mean, it would never get approved, but then there would be some development work on the actual project that Auckland will need eventually one day. There is close to nothing worth retaining about the current plan, and the fact this is the most recent update tells you how well their propsoal actually stacked up:

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2023/06/22/light-rail-back-to-the-surface/

Just casually abandoning six years of (admittedly little useful) work to go back to... the original surface level proposal. If it wasn't for it being a means to an end (the end being underwater tunnels across the Harbour) then this would have been fine the whole time and we could have even had a branch up and running by now.

Amazingly, people seem to think dropping this awful project will result in more emissions due to traffic, despite there being zero chance something this costly and expensive would ever get built. Something smaller, simpler and divorced from the Harbour tunnels is the way to go. Hopefully it doesn't take long for someone to figure that out.

alexx

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#3148276 16-Oct-2023 21:08

tdgeek:

Labour wanted light rail. Didnt happen. IIRC National doesnt want it either. A big cost for a small impact. If LR was in our 4 main centres and 4 others, and there was some form of penalty for not using it (tolls, pargoodking, lack of parking etc) Im all for it. But it will cost If I was told it will cost me $6 a week in extra tax to pay for it, even though I would rarely use it, I'm all in. Greater good. But it needs to service NZ. Normal, ideally electric rail between centres and small centres and tourist detentions, Im all in, greater good, even though not a personal good. Although if I can tiki tour around NZ relying on EV trains and EV buses, thats the future

Surface level light rail is affordable and used in many parts of the world, but after the NIMBYs almost had a heart attack at the thought of something resembling a tram on the historic SUV carriageway of Dominion Road, Labour panicked and decided that they'd make it go underground at 2-3 times the price.

We still need alternatives to just adding more and more cars and the problem has just been kicked down the road for the next Labour government to have six years of meetings and do nothing (probably).

#include <standard.disclaimer>

ezbee

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#3148283 16-Oct-2023 22:23

My understanding is that the underground proposal was as a result of Auckland backlash to above ground.

Given roads are so narrow and Dominion Road, which had problems way back accomidating the tramline.
But then if the tramline had not been ripped up we would have had decades of electric trams to get used to it.
Like Melbourne, but Melbourne has wider roads for these ot start with?

I expect 'above ground', to 'ground' to a halt in acrimonious protest at narrow track hemmed in by historic untouchable buildings.
Wayne Brown is already hinting that buses, talking to his old mate that ran Aucklands largest Bus company?
Constant delay would not be a bad thing as he would not have to deal with share of costs hitting Aucklands rates?

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#3148284 16-Oct-2023 22:53

UK's Guardian takes a look at what might survive from Labour's government legacy

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/15/some-of-jacinda-arderns-legacy-in-new-zealand-is-safe-a-lot-of-it-isnt

and what will not.

tdgeek

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#3148299 17-Oct-2023 06:46

GV27:

Caveat: I am a huge advocate for light rail and want to see it back across basically all of Auckland.

Labour promised light rail but they enabled a huge monstrosity that was light rail in benefits but metro in cost and construction timelines. So if they wanted, they had a funny way of showing it.

What I'm hoping is that before the plug gets pulled, ALR massively downscales the whole thing to get it over the line and we at least end up with a design or a decent route based on surface running and retaining the community connects (e.g. Mangere town centre) that the stupid metro version was skipping to run alongside the motorway instead.

I mean, it would never get approved, but then there would be some development work on the actual project that Auckland will need eventually one day. There is close to nothing worth retaining about the current plan, and the fact this is the most recent update tells you how well their propsoal actually stacked up:

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2023/06/22/light-rail-back-to-the-surface/

Just casually abandoning six years of (admittedly little useful) work to go back to... the original surface level proposal. If it wasn't for it being a means to an end (the end being underwater tunnels across the Harbour) then this would have been fine the whole time and we could have even had a branch up and running by now.

Amazingly, people seem to think dropping this awful project will result in more emissions due to traffic, despite there being zero chance something this costly and expensive would ever get built. Something smaller, simpler and divorced from the Harbour tunnels is the way to go. Hopefully it doesn't take long for someone to figure that out.

I know you are! :-)

AFAIK no one really wants it now? For the 15B how many will benefit? Was that plan to cover a LOT of Auckland or just a few key routes? Selfishly does the public want a huge investment that helps just a relatively few commuters in one place?

Agree, something smaller and simpler is the way to go, that reigns in a LOT more commuters. If that demolishes houses, tough. If there are above ground rail that peeps dont like, also tough.

GV27

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#3148300 17-Oct-2023 06:52

tdgeek:

AFAIK no one really wants it now? For the 15B how many will benefit? Was that plan to cover a LOT of Auckland or just a few key routes? Selfishly does the public want a huge investment that helps just a relatively few commuters in one place?

Agree, something smaller and simpler is the way to go, that reigns in a LOT more commuters. If that demolishes houses, tough. If there are above ground rail that peeps dont like, also tough.

It should never have been $15b. Not even close to that. Other countries manage a per-km cost that is far below that. The $15b figure comes from an exercise that was meant to close the gap between surface and metro to the point where it would appear like it was worth just skipping straight to Light Metro.

You can how out of step our modeling costs were for light rail here:

https://i0.wp.com/www.greaterauckland.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/LR-vs-LM-Cost-per-km-Present-Value.png?w=940&ssl=1

"I know some of the costs for projects in this graph have increased since I first made it but even $200 million per km seems more than reasonable for Auckland to achieve. At that price, a line from Britomart to Mt Roskill would come in at under $2 billion with the total cost for city centre to Mangere at around $4.5 billion.

In fact based on $200m per km, the entire network shown above of City Centre to Mangere, Northwest and Crosstown LR could be delivered for about $9.5b, that’s still about $5 billion less than the tunnelled light rail option and I would bet, if modelled, would provide far greater benefits than a single gold-plated line."

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2023/02/02/government-confirms-a-light-rail-rethink-possible/

MikeB4

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#3148303 17-Oct-2023 07:13

The new government has some huge legacy bills to pay from the Covid period. Major project expectations will need to lowered considerably.
Promised reforms in the public sector could result in high numbers of job losses and that will flow into job losses in the private sector. This will impact the money supply for the incoming government. Their choice will be pay now with higher taxes or borrow and send the bill to our mokopuna.

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#3148305 17-Oct-2023 07:19

MikeB4: The new government has some huge legacy bills to pay from the Covid period. Major project expectations will need to lowered considerably.
Promised reforms in the public sector could result in high numbers of job losses and that will flow into job losses in the private sector. This will impact the money supply for the incoming government. Their choice will be pay now with higher taxes or borrow and send the bill to our mokopuna.

Post Covid is already factored in. Higher taxes aren't allowed. So we are reducing taxes. And have all these projects as well. Easy. Well, I can do math, it doesnt seem easy to me, but it gets votes, thats all that seemingly matters.

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#3148306 17-Oct-2023 07:23

alexx:

Surface level light rail is affordable and used in many parts of the world, but after the NIMBYs almost had a heart attack at the thought of something resembling a tram on the historic SUV carriageway of Dominion Road, Labour panicked and decided that they'd make it go underground at 2-3 times the price.

Just another symptom of 2020 Labour being so terrified of losing their majority that they chose to do bugger-all with it, causing them to (massively) lose their majority. I just don't get how they couldn't see it. There was only one way the vote was going to go from there! Ugh.

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MikeB4

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#3148309 17-Oct-2023 07:30

We seem to be in the Muldoon era of borrow and hope wth the attitude of if it all goes cattywampus it is someone else's problem.

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#3148310 17-Oct-2023 07:35

According the The Herald (TM, pat pend), considering how Labour apparently achieve so little the new bunch seem to have found an awful lot to repeal.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

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#3148313 17-Oct-2023 07:50

Does National actually have any policy other than undoing what Labour did?

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

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#3148315 17-Oct-2023 08:10

Rikkitic:

Does National actually have any policy other than undoing what Labour did?

It will only be 1/3rd their policy. It is going to be an interesting eight months while the interim government attempts to deal with chaos then the hoardings go up again.

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