Getting ferries on the cheap isn’t the right answer either

There is a golden rule that guides politicians after a change of government: nobody is listening to what the lot who have just been thrown out have to say. Certainly not now, and probably not for a while. The time for excuses about bad decisions, budget blowouts and service failures is over.

Politicians have an unparalleled platform during their time in government and ample opportunity to explain on the campaign trail. Their parties lose when anyone except the most die-hard supporters have turned off the phone. They’re not going to turn it back on for a long time.

It’s a lesson Labour is relearning the hard way after one of its worst-ever election results.

Forget sideshows like Winston Peters and his crusade against te reo Māori. Labour lost because a majority of voters felt like it had lost control of spending and the economy.

So nothing that has come out since the election is a surprise. But the revelations of multibillion-dollar budget blow-outs, loose spending and unfunded promises are a series of body blows to the legacy of the Ardern/Hipkins government all the same.

And that’s only a couple of weeks into the new government, or before the books have even been fully opened, which is what will take place next week with the end-of-year fiscal update and Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s mini-budget.

The auditor-general has already issued a scathing assessment of Labour’s $15 billion NZ upgrade and shovel-ready programmes, finding that there was little to no rationale or paper trail for much of the spending, and it wasn’t even clear where much of the money ended up.

Treasury advice, meanwhile, has revealed that some of the projects promised by Labour were unfunded and undeliverable.

Expect the news to be even worse when Willis opens the books.

This is a period of high danger for Labour; the revelations that are yet to come could well and truly sink the chance of any sort of legacy as a safe pair of hands on the tiller of the economy, and dash hopes of a short stint in Opposition.

It will be hard for Labour to come back from.

It’s also perfect cover for National to roll back all of Labour’s pet projects.

The Interislander fiasco is just one case in point; it’s obvious that New Zealand has unique characteristics that make a gold-plated ferry service between the North and South Island desirable, if not mandatory. While we can debate whether KiwiRail over-reached with a bespoke option to accommodate railway tracks when alternatives would have sufficed, the guiding criteria shouldn’t have been cost alone.

Our resilience to extreme weather, earthquakes and even volcanic eruptions has been tested and found wanting over and over again. The Wahine disaster, meanwhile, is a reminder of how treacherous that stretch of water can be, and still is, for a vital freight corridor and passenger ferry carrying thousands of people across the strait every day.

So Willis’s choice of words about opting for a Toyota Corolla ferry service rather than a Ferrari was unfortunate. It also epitomises the story of New Zealand’s increasingly dilapidated infrastructure.

As a country we’ve mythologised the number-eight-wire, she’ll-be-right mentality to such an extent that we balk at costly solutions when a bodged option might suffice.

But cheap isn’t going to cut it any more. We have a tsunami of infrastructure decisions rushing at us and it’s going to require some tough choices about our priorities.

The brutal reality is that we can no longer be the country we want to be, or politicians tell us they aspire for New Zealand to be, by continuing down that path.

As a country we’ve mythologised the number-eightwire, she’ll-be-right mentality to such an extent that we balk at costly solutions when a bodged option might suffice.