Speedy rise to top proves problematic Luke Malpass

This coming Saturday the Ardern Government turns two. It took a long nine long years for supporters, who saw the party cycle through some pretty average leaders before settling on Jacinda Ardern.

The rest is history.

But the speed of Ardern’s ascension created a set of problems that have taken two years to become fully obvious. One of the first promises out of the block was to build light rail in Auckland.

Because Labour was polling so poorly under Andrew Little, Ardern had nothing to lose. But during the campaign, Ardern’s personal popularity wrenched Labour into a position where it would be able to form a Government. Promises that maybe hadn’t been that carefully thought through would have to be fulfilled.

The idea was popular: New Zealand has suffered a general infrastructure deficit for a long time, and an Auckland public transport one in particular. But the problem was that Ardern promised it would be built by 2021. Even if everything had gone to plan the timetable was heroic. And it hasn’t gone well. As political reporter Thomas Coughlan has written (on page 50), the process has been mismanaged, and Transport Minister Phil Twyford was seemingly bamboozled by a New Zealand Super Fund bid that, according to the chair of the NZTA, consisted of six Powerpoint slides.

Now, building won’t even start until close to 2021.

The worst thing was that as part of prioritising light rail and public transit systems, the Government stopped building any new roads that were in the pipeline.

In fairness not all the roads planned by the previous Government looked like the most urgent projects. But the idea – even in a carbonconstrained world – that New Zealand doesn’t need both new roads, tunnels and highways, as well as new public transport systems is perverse. This is a frontier economy, a new-world nation at the bottom of the world, with a growing population where people want to live. The Government has to plan for that; if it doesn’t like cars for climate change reasons it should get cracking on making electric vehicles cheap, easy and accessible, not just not stop building new roads.

The other problem caused by Ardern’s quick rise to power was that she inherited a bunch of smelly old policies from her failed predecessors that couldn’t be changed. KiwiBuild was chief among these – a scheme cooked up in 2012 by by then opposition housing spokesperson Annette King to help protect David Shearer from David Cunliffe. Shearer ended up yielding to the Cunliffe forces who led Labour to a dismal election result.

KiwiBuild always suffered from two problems: although the headline numbers sounded impressive – 100,000 houses in 10 years – it was a plan in search of a rationale and had no clear problem it was trying to solve. Second, it was always going to take many years to get enough scale in the New Zealand building sector and would be massively expensive to do so.

Labour had been told this for years, but it still proceeded on the basis that enough will power would overcome facts on the ground. These are the two biggest failures of the Government to date.

The problem for the Government is that they are clearly failures, whereas several of its policies that may be political victories, are still works in progress.

The speed of Ardern’s ascension created a set of problems that have taken two years to become fully obvious.