When the man responsible for butchering our rail system through privatisation is now championing rail, you know the 4th hypocrisy of the apocalypse is upon us…
Richard Prebble: Rail is the only corridor left
Close down the railways is the advice from Treasury. The Minister of Finance says the cost of railways is “unsustainable”.I wonder whether if anyone from the treasury has driven up the southern motorway recently. I drive along the motorway regularly. As fellow drivers can attest the city’s arteries are clogging up.
The cost is huge. The OECD says the annual cost of traffic congestion in Auckland is $1.25 billion. An incomprehensible figure but most Aucklanders can put the cost into personal terms. The cost to me is that today to be sure of getting to a meeting on time I have to drive up to Auckland the night before.
What will happen to our roads if the freight that now goes by rail has to travel by road? The treasury says that is not a problem. Road freight pays Road User Charges that meets the full cost of roads. If road freight volumes increase then treasury says that will automatically fund new roads.
While the math is correct the answer is wrong.
It is not a question of money. Road funding is allocated on a cost benefit/ratio. But it has proved impossible to get planning approval for new motorways in the cities. Even if we reform the Resource Management Act, something that needs to be done, it will still not enable new motorways. The public is opposed to new inner city motorways.
…we need more rail, not less of it. We need motorways made productive by freight being moved off roads, not putting more freight on them. If even Richard bloody Prebble can see that, why can’t Treasury?
Left out of this conversation is coastal shipping as a means to transport freight between the main centers. Which as I believe does not require subsidies from the taxpayer and can transport a larger amount of freight than a train using two similar sized diesel engines as a locomotive.
Yes yes yes. Shipping provides large numbers of jobs with an enormous variety of new and old school skills. I tis a vital part of infrastructure in an island nation. Valuable industry for employing our young people without the initiative sapping training of the Navy which tends to dominate maritime employment.
+100…lol…Great Post!
re Richard Prebble…”When the man responsible for butchering our rail system through privatisation is now championing rail, you know the 4th hypocrisy of the apocalypse is upon us”…
at least he is admitting it!…
…maybe Labour will once more jump the rails it has been on since being rogered …. and get on the right track … and lead New Zealand out of the neolib abyss…(but maybe I am too optimistic…however it is a hopeful sign)
btw…the reason why Treasury cant see it is because Goldman Sachs is their advisor
Oh yes Martyn, a rather bitter irony for me too.
If you look at my avatar (the photo I use with my posts) you may recognise a large NZR Dx class locomotive. That’s what I was doing at the time this twerp Prebble started on his course of privatisation. I was an engine driver.
He was a real smart bastard, this Prebble, and he called it the “Save Rail” campaign, and boy did he suck us all in. I can remember marching through the streets of Christchurch to the Square in a massive show of solidarity with the trade unions involved. (Remember trade unions? They were the organisations that made sure our hours of work were not excessive and that our pay rates were fair and reflected our various skills.) My wife marched with me and I pushed my eldest son along in a pram. Many wives and families of the workers marched alongside them too.
At the Square this Prebble gave a huge fire brand of a speech on the importance of rail and of keeping it viable. Innocents that we were then, we cheered and cheered and believed he was going to stand for us.
He didn’t. We didn’t know or understand neolib politics then but we watched in horror as over 12,000 jobs went and the industry of the railway workshops was down sized and ultimately closed.
And the banker Robber Barons moved in.
The rest, as they say, is history. He got what he wanted.
He did get one thing from us he didn’t want. His nickname. We never referred to him as Richard Prebble from that time on. We had a more apt name,
“That bloody mongrel!”
I’m absolutely delighted he finds it inconvenient driving to town. I pray that it gets worse for him. And I sure as hell wish there WAS an afterlife because I look forward to giving him a hard time in the land of flames and sulphur!
Ahhhhh……yes…..Richard William Prebble.
One of the ‘fish and chips ‘ brigade of national traitors.
One of the original subversives.
One of the ones who used the Labour party to legitimise their treasonous neo liberalism ideology before abandoning Labour after the damage was done and running off to join ACT and become its leader from 1996 to 2004….
Ahhh … yes….Richard William Prebble.
Only ONE of a small bunch of bloody mongrels who wrecked this country…
Goldman Sachs advises Treasury on sale of state assets…and on private investment opportunities…Is NZ rail being starved of taxpayer funds so it can be sold off privately and made into a private rail network.? ( the way they have done in Britain?)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4730668/Big-benefits-seen-in-State-asset-sales
http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/briefings/2014-commercial/bim-14-commercial.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail
“Goldman Sachs is one of the largest infrastructure fund managers globally, having raised more than $10 billion of capital since the inception of the business in 2006.
The primary focus for GS Infrastructure Partners (GSIP) is on investment opportunities with the following parameters:
Sectors including transportation infrastructure (such as airports, ports, railways and roads) and utilities infrastructure (such as electricity, gas and water networks and conventional/ renewable contracted power generation),….
http://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/investing-and-lending/direct-private-investing/equity-folder/gs-infrastructure-partners.html
…..Interesting also that Bill English did not front this on Nine-to- noon recently but used instead Joanne Black ( who used to be Bill English’s secretary) to front jonkey Nact government policy of financially gutting NZ rail, in an era when all other countries are looking to expand rail services….GUTLESS!
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201761880/kiwirail-on-notice-what-is-its-future
“The government has put KiwiRail on notice, giving it two years to identify savings and reduce Crown funding required. What is the future of the rail network and what is its importance to regional New Zealand? The Hawkes Bay Regional Council. Regional leaders are fighting to retain rail links, and in Hawkes Bay to re-open its rail service. The Napier – Gisborne line was mothballed back in 2012 after it was washed out by a major storm. The Hawkes Bay Regional Council is fighting for its resurrection and has put up five-and-a-half million dollars to part fund the line. Liz Lambert is the Chief Executive of the Hawkes Bay Regional Council. Lawrence Yule is the mayor of Napier and chairman of Local Govenrment New Zealand. Joanne Black is the spokesperson for Kiwi Rail.”
…and now the Brits want to nationalise their railway companies again!
(….while NZ Treasury, Goldman Sachs and jonkey Nact want to de -nationalise and sell off NZ rail)
This from Naomi Klein ‘This Changes Everything’ on climate change:
“a British poll released in November 2013 found “voters of all politics united in their support for nationalisation of energy and rail…66% support nationalising the railway companies while 23% think they should be run privately.” One of the most surprising aspects of the poll was the amount of support for nationalization among self-described Conservative voters: 52% favored taking back both the energy companies and the rails.” (p.128) ref. Will Dahlgreen, “Nationalise Energy and Rail Companies, Say Public,” YouGov, November 4, 2013.
Brilliant stuff chooky & Martyn. & co,
JS Bark also hit the nail on the head.
Christ, I drive twice a month from North Gisborne district to Napier and have never had an accident yet in ten years,
Govt warns a trebling of trucks inside ten years
.
But even now with the rail closed we all have seen a massive trebling of trucking increase on that NZTA statistics show on this poor quality narrow winding State highway 2 road that we now have almost had several major head on crashes with these huge monster trucks now that anyone with less experience on these dangerous roads will loose their lives.
Only because of my true vigilance and experience of driving this road am I here to write to you tonight friends.
Only last week the poor condition constantly found on these roads with large potholes wrecked my front suspension in my vehicle a large station wagon.
When treasury claims roads need to be funded more well send them on this road and they will clearly see that those roads under base is to soft for heavy trucks (as roading engineers have told us) they will believe that the only way out is to remove this excess of road freight back on to rail, or the engineers state that the roads need to be ripped up and solid concrete reinforced 600mm slabs need to be placed under the entire roading between Napier and Whatakane, at a cost of 60 to 130 billion.
This road is 400kms long through some of the most mountainous regional areas of NZ.
To reinforce concrete a double laned road as this should be by international standards would cost a projected 2.7 times the single lane option our roading engineer estimated.
So to make a world class truck highway here we are told the cost would be at least 130 to 300 hundred million dollars when the Treasury wants to not pay four million dollars to reopen the Napier to Gisborne railway to lower the truck volumes on this road they should be fired for incompetence, as I would if I didn’t save the country from bankruptcy.
The whole irony of this is that the NZ Institute of Professional Engineers has estimated that rail pays for 77% of its costs to repair its rail use, private vehicles pay 66% of their cost to maintain roads while rad freight pays only 53% of their wear of the roads so the taxpayer subsidises road transport but treasury says we shouldn’t subsidise the public railway????
This makes no sense to keep publically funding private trucking and not our public railways.
Absolutely correct Cleangreen.
There is room for all modes of transport; in fact it is essential that there are all these modes, each specialising in what it does best. A lot of the energy of this debate is dissipated by each mode becoming factionalised so that they end up defending their own existence by attacking the others. I’ve seen it before. It is a divide and conquer approach. If the modes united and presented a clear expression of need for all of them and how they might slot in together they would be an unignorable (?) voice.
Why shut down the public owned railways? I can only guess that as was the case in the closure of the Nelson branch railway all those many years ago, the backroom deals were/are simply too lucrative to some individuals to let slip by.
Back then it was a National government with most of its ministers having large shares in Nelson Transport, the enterprise that gained the most from the loss of the railway.
Check just who has shares in what now. It may well answer that question. We have already had a number of significant National Party government members having very clear conflicts of interest in their ministerial portfolios and their investment portfolios.
If it smells like corruption…
‘Mad Dog’ Prebble is a curious fellow alright, and I make no apology for sinking to paparazzi depths–it is on record that his two marriages involved women from the Pasifika community with multiple children from previous partners, yet he has never fathered one. Other perfectly good parents never conceive children either but for a man of his generation it indicates an interesting psychological makeup.
He scabbed on his “save the rail” tour shtick and put Labour Party Auckland Central members through the mill until Sandra Lee beat him, his ACT precursor “backbone” club successfully further factionalised the LP, so the guy is a flea
however if a few recent sentences of his state the obvious about rail so be it–that a long narrow country in the era of peak oil needs to extend its rail infrastructure not curtail it
Unless you have access to his medical files, it is literally below the belt to ascribe his childlessness to anything above it. The man is despicable enough without resorting to that sort of thing.
After reading the mentioned Nat Herald item, my first reaction is that its time Treasury got put back into its place. It is not the executive council of government, it is a government department. It looks at the here and now of money matters. Long term sustainability with an eye to its affect on the environment is totally lost on Treasury. But of course this government is pretty much a rubberstamp for Treasury. If Treasury says “jump”, National asks “how high?”
If you want New Zealand totally at the mercy of a bunch of tunnel vision bean counters then vote National, because that’s what you always get.
yeah but; the structural legislative underpinnings of neo liberalism have to be rolled back such as the Reserve Bank Act and various treasury “settings”, when Labour/Green support such a move on the back of wide popular pressure there will have been progress made
the Nats often say they are not hard right etc but they don’t have to be, Rogernomics laid the basic platform for them, having said that, this term 3 ShonKey govt is sure pummeling as much infrastructure and public service as it can
I nearly died laughing when I read this. Prebble just went and busted the hypocrisy meter, it couldn’t take that kind of weight.
I suggest people in Wellington beep their horns every time they pass Treasury on The Terrace and boo them when they are walking by.
Ever feel like things are going around in circles….?
Gabriel Makhlouf and JK obviously share the same ideology. Is it likely he was appointed to reinforce Key’s climb to dictatorship?
Comments are closed.