User pays privatisation vs common good – time to rethink our philosophy on roads?

This mutation of a road policy that National have trotted out slashes public transport infrastructure and is a naked attempt to push poor people off the roads!

This is user pays privatisation of our Roads, exactly as TDB warned you!

Bernard Hickey is scathing…

Simeon Brown’s road-taxing bait-and-switch
Govt unveils unmentioned $50m rego fee hike & fuel tax hike from 2027 to raise $650m and help build 15 new motorways; Funding for cycling, biking & walking slashed; Climate impact unmentioned

…he’s right!

Simeon only mentions Climate Change twice throughout  his 43 page ‘plan’.

NZ is one of the few countries that sold our public transport systems and the nonsense underfunding of our public transport system sees entire rail closures because it’s too hot…

Thousands affected as dozens of Auckland trains cancelled due to hot weather

…this heat that shuts down underfunded Rail networks is also eroding the ground with huge rainfall…

Discovery of 3m cavity closes part of state highway in Tauranga

Barely a year after the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle, we are seeing what catastrophic climate change looks like in real time as roads develop mass erosion caused by extreme rain dumps caused by climate change.

We don’t have the adaptation capacity because we refuse to tax the polluters more.

You appreciate things are only going to get worse from here on in right?

Despite the climate denial from the Right in NZ, it is real and it is here now.

The $14billion dollar damage of Cyclone Gabrielle and our inability to rebuild highlights how little resilience we have in our underfunded system…

National’s response to all these threats to our roading infrastructure is user pays.

When the Boomer King Wayne Brown is struck dumb by the Government destroying the hopes of public transport infrastructure in our groaning gridlocked city, you know shit just got real.

I kept asking questions to candidates about roading privatisation during the election debate series because the obviousness of where National’s roading platform led to seemed an important issue, but it never caught a wider focus.

Now we not only get the privatisation, but we get the pain of user pays inequality.

It’s all stick, no carrot.

What the petrol tax did was generate revenue from as wide a group as possible to fund infrastructure, National have dumped that in favour of privatisation of roads with tolling and congestion taxes that will burn the poor with no expansion in public transport infrastructure to provide alternatives.

Remember our subsidisation of public transport was supposed to be an emission reducing tactic as well, so by dumping them will not only make gridlock more likely, it will produce more emissions that are feeding the climate change extremes we are watching burn our country this Summer.

So we open the taps on immigration (250 000 in a year) and rather than build the infrastructure for that level of migration, we simply impose user pays as the solution???

Whatever decision is cooked up will be for the benefit of a Right wing donor somewhere.

We are in the age of consequences now and we will choke on our denial.

Look at these numbers…

…road crashes were 4% of GDP!!!!

Our roads should not be privatised and they should not by made user pays. Roads should be seen as a common good with huge state investment focused on climate change adaptation, better engineered for safety and vast upgrades for public transport.

Nothing National have planned here will solve anything in the short term, medium term or long term.

This is simply about pushing poor people off roads and hoping no one notices.

 

 

 

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