Direct route through gorge needed

If there were serious geotechnical issues, then why wasn’t this picked up months ago?

The Manawatu Gorge is so important to this part of New Zealand that NZ First attended the Woodville public meeting one week after campaigning there.

We resolved to be back and that’s more than what can be said for the minister of transport.

Simon Bridges rolled into Woodville a full week after the community meeting but not before telling the rest of the country first that he believed the gorge was stuffed. Even then, the best he could promise was a decision ’’before Christmas’’. We’ve seen snails move faster than Minister Bridges.

The National Party does not want to know, as shown by the NZ Transport Agency being left to answer the music at the public meeting and the indifference shown by the MP for Wairarapa.

For the businesses and workers affected by the gorge, this is their Christchurch, Kaikoura and Edgecumbe, all rolled into one.

The NZ Transport Agency did not build this vital road, but the region’s forebears did in 1872, when times and technology were a lot more trying than today. Coming across the Saddle Rd tells us that it is not holding up at all well. The only ones winning from the gorge’s closure are the wheel alignment specialists as the Saddle Rd breaks up.

Now does anyone think for a single second that Aucklanders would be treated this way? Or the people of Wellington would accept the Ngaio Gorge Rd being permanently closed?

As people from Manawatu, Tararua, Wairarapa and Hawke’s Bay are forced to drive over Third World roads, what do they see on television? National ministers cooing over architectural and artistic elements built into Auckland’s $1.4 billion Waterview Tunnel. Another $1.7b of their taxes, and counting, is being poured into the Auckland rail tunnel at an incredible $500,000 a metre.

It is not right and it must change.

Yet it should never have come to this. If there were serious geotechnical issues, then why wasn’t this picked up months ago, or when the other slips struck in 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011 and earlier? And how does it explain why the railway line in the same gorge and geology continues unaffected?

Based on work that’s been done to date, whatever solution the experts arrive at will have at least nine figures attached to it.

In saying that, we’ve become increasingly immune to spending vast sums of money whenever it comes to modern public works. New Zealand’s longest tunnel contains a railway and runs 8.9 kilometres through the Kaimai Ranges. Opened in the late 1970s, it was built by the old Ministry of Works at a cost of $57.1m, or $363m in today’s money. Fast-forward to 2012 and the transport agency has costed a 5.38km tunnel through the Manawatu Gorge at $1.8b – about one-third less distance but five times the cost.

So maybe it is not what we are building, but how we are building that is driving up costs. What is beyond doubt is that engineers must arrive at the right solution while the Government’s job is to restore State Highway 3 linking Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa and Tararua in the east with Manawatu, Whanganui and Taranaki to the west.

There must not be some halfbaked bodge-job that’ll land us back in this mess within a few short years. We need to invest properly and the most effective route is the one that goes directly through the Manawatu Gorge.

If any road in New Zealand is a ‘‘Road of National Significance’’, the Manawatu Gorge is it. And if people genuinely want real action, then some of them are just going to have to change how they vote.

Winston Peters is the leader of NZ First and the MP for Northland.