Something useful on its way for old girl and new industry
THE $60 million government handout to Dunedin from the $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund for projects that will be kicking in about election time next year has not pleased everyone but the whingers are always with us, aren’t they?
Those of us who are not looking to buy a house are confused when it comes to talking about millions of dollars and when it comes billions we are flummoxed. The Government’s $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund, assuming the figure is based on New Zealand and not American usage, is three thousand million, about enough to buy a couple of thousand houses in Auckland.
Anyone who gets $60 million from the PGF has thus managed to snaffle 2% of the available funding. Dunedin has 2.8% of the country’s population so the whingers will be muttering darkly.
Nevertheless, the boost to the city is welcome. That Hillside may now survive has emotional as well as economic benefits. In 1946, there were 1200 staff there and their descendants have special memories of the place.
Before we became a Chinese client state and relied on that country for initially a bit dodgy rolling stock and locomotives, almost 200 locomotives were built at Hillside in the glory days, but even the proposed maintenance and upgrading work looks a lot better than closing the place down.
As for the emotion of Hillside, look no further than engineer Graeme Sayer, a thirdgeneration Hillsider, who commented, ‘‘Hillside’s an old girl. It was sad to see the old girl go down; it’s good to see her come back again.’’
How many heavy industrial sites have earned such an affectionate name as ‘‘the old girl’’? Over 30 years ago, I caught something of that affection when I recorded memories of longserving Hillside men Bill Burns, Geoff Miles, Alby Watson, Gordon Kitto and Norm Peacock. Ian Dougherty chose a perfect title for his history of Hillside, More Than
Just a Place of Work.
There may come new generations of Hillside workers with special memories, but none who can remember watching the rugby at Carisbrook from the roof of their workplace. Those newcomers will be too few to match the support local pubs had from Hillside custom.
The longgone Oval and more recently closed Fitzroy and Southern all had their railway regulars. It will be some time before the full benefits of the investment will be seen, but announcement day itself, with politicians popping up rather like Moses bringing the tablets down from the mountain, must have been all rather emotional for embattled Dunedin South MP Clare Curran.
Maybe there were tears in her eyes when she commented that ‘‘it was pleasing to deliver on a promise made to workers seven years ago. We said goodbye to them that day, but we said we would never give up.’’
They’ve made films based on words like that. If Hillside can get itself up and running before any change in government, it may even survive yet another attempt to close it down.
Some of the PGF money carries no nostalgic or emotional overtones. There’s $10 million going to the establishment of a Centre of Digital Excellence, something I know nothing about. Of course, it has nothing to do with producing wellshaped, nicely groomed fingers. It seems it’s all to do with the gaming sector.
Perhaps the TAB was moving its headquarters to Dunedin as part of the much touted but seldom seen ‘‘decentralisation’’ politicians talk about at election time? No, it’s something else, though I’m not sure what.
But when you have Enterprise
Dunedin and the New Zealand Games Developers’ Association throwing around sentences like ‘‘it’s not just about coders, but graphic designers, artists and storytellers. There are lots of pathways to get into games development’’ and ‘‘the announcement of Dunedin as a digital hub was a game changer for the New Zealand tech industry’’, you can be sure something useful is happening, even if it needs to be explained to a generation whose experience of digital games is the Space Invaders of the 1970s. In the intervening 40 years, I suppose, things have become a bit more interesting.
The waterfront makeover gets
$20 million, well short of the requested $100 million, suggesting we may need four more terms of a Labour Government to get the thing finished.
We face big problems here. Five terms is far too many for any government but if we pull the rug from Labour, the Bridge to Nowhere may be exactly that.
In the meantime, with the All
Blacks in disarray and Australia winning the netball, the PGF handout is a welcome morale booster, even if not universally applauded here in Patearoa.
When we heard that a provincial fund was being set up, joy was unconfined. Who could be more provincial than us? What would we do with our $20 million or so? Now, we will never know.