Last week the Government released their draft GPS. Like a lot of things they do, it has a very boring name but a lot of interesting content, if you can fight your way through the numbers and bureacracy-speak to understand the real-life implications.
The GPS is a statement from the Government to Waka Kotahi Transport Agency laying out what high-level results they want to purchase with their $70 billion odd transport funding, and the relative priority they want put on competing aspects such as safety, access, health, environmental damage, urban amenity, freight efficiency etc. etc. It’s then Waka Kotahi’s job to design a programme of investment that will achieve those results. In theory it only has to be done every 6 years, but up till now it’s been done every 3, in line with the election cycle.
Several peculiarities around the timing of the GPS does make this one particularly odd. It was written by Labour who are currently ruling on their own. National have said that if they get in they’ll tear it up and write their own one. Even if Labour manage to get back in, it will be in coalition with the Greens, who have said there are elements of this GPS they hate. So whatever happens on election day we’re probably going to have a different looking GPS in a few months time.
Despite that, I’ve spent the time now reading through it so thought I may as well write a quick summary to save others the time.
One other interesting sub-plot is that the initial prep-work for this was led by transport minister Michael Woods, together with his associate minister Kiri Allen, both sitting under Jacinda Ardern. Early documents signalled that this work had a very strong environmental focus. However, in a very short space of time, all three of these ministers moved on, all for completely different reasons.
Long story short, David Parker came in as minister at the last minute, and was almost immediately joined by associate minister Damien O’Connor, both under Chris Hipkins. They’ve now released a document that looks quite different.
So what’s in it? Well first thing I noticed was that it’s long, and it’s filled with pictures, compared to previous GPS’s. I decided to investigate this further. Below is the page count and picture count of each of the 6 GPS documents that have been released since the 2008 reforms, starting with the black and white text-only initial documents.
| GPS | Page Count | Picture Count |
| 2009 | 30 | 0 |
| 2012 | 32 | 0 |
| 2015 | 52 | 1 |
| 2018 | 68 | 10 |
| 2021 | 59 | 12 |
| 2024 draft | 76 | 13 |
There’s 76 pages filled with text and beautiful pictures, but I’m just going to skip straight down to a page near the end containing the budget table, in line with the Joe Biden quote: “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
Here’s where they have instructed Waka Kotahi to put the money over the next ten years.
I’ve done up a graph comparing this GPS’s budgets to previous GPS’s. I had been waiting for Greater Auckland to do this as they always used to, but they seem to have bigger fish to fry at the moment. So here’s my attempt. The numbers show the total spend in the first 3 years, using the mid-point between the lower and upper brackets.
Almost every activity class has had its budget increased, some by a lot. The exceptions are investment management and safety.
But that in itself doesn’t say much about the relative priority given to each. So I’ve also done a table of the proportion that each activity class gets of the overall funding.
You can see that the proportion of money being spent on each activity class has, in some cases, been very consistent over all six GPS’s. State Highway maintenance has stayed between 16 and 18% for the last 18 years. Local road maintenance between 14 and 16%, although seems to be on a slight downward trajectory. The big movers are public transport’s proportion steadily growing, walking and cycling growing (albeit from practically nothing), rail growing (although again from practically nothing), and state highways steadily dropping (albeit from ridiculously high levels during the RONS/austerity years).
A couple of other ways of visualising the same data.
Another thing that stands out is that the Minister has added in a list of pet projects he wants to see built. He admits that he has no business doing this, but evidently decided to give it a nudge anyway.
Trying to get away from pork barrel politics was one of the the big reasons for setting up Waka Kotahi Transport Agency in 2008 as a completely separate organisation from the Ministry of Transport. This was to try and make project selection a technical decision, rather than just ministers picking projects they think will be vote-winners without knowing if they’re actually good ideas or not. But it never really worked. I don’t know what the answer is to fix that though.
As a final point, I just want to reiterate what the National Land Transport Fund is supposed to be used for, because I keep seeing pundits getting this wrong. The National Land Transport Act specifies what the money has to be used for. It lists out the broad range of activites below:
Note that it never says anything that anyone could ever interpret as “the NLTF is to be used only for roads”. Or even “mostly for roads”. In fact it says the exact opposite – the NLTF isn’t allowed to be spent solely on roads.
If you drill down further to Section 20, it says that spending has to be consistent with a bunch of criteria, one of which is the GPS.
And finally it says that the GPS must specify the “results” that the Crown wishes to achieve from their investment.
Additionally the GPS may include objectives, policies and measures, if the Minister wants it to.
In contrast, opinion pieces like this and this, although not necessarily explicity saying it out loud, seem to be written under an unspoken assumption that the NLTF is supposed to be spent on roads, and things like rail and public transport are some sort of questionable departure from what it ought to be spent on. This isn’t legally the case and never has been – the entire system was set up on the premise that these things would be funded from the NLTF. It’s fine to argue the merits or otherwise of us having this set up, but you can’t deny that that is the set up we currently have.
All up, my personal feel is that this is a fairly tepid GPS, mostly just retaining the status quo. It says all the right things up front about the unprecedented climate emergency we are in, but then the budgets are little more than BAU adjusted for inflation. It does take a few steps in the right direction, but these seem small. Personally I would have liked to see a greater appetite for change.
TALKING TRANSPORT 