This is a guest post from Robert Fletcher
It appears that the government’s claim “record” transport investment into Canterbury through the 2024-27 National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) is false.
Like many Cantabrians I was somewhat let down by the recent 2024-27 National Land Transport Plan. It continued the trend of Canterbury getting back lower proportion of investment than it seemed to put in, over multiple years, and seemed to lack progress on the big projects that greater Christchurch desperately needs as a fast growing city.
One piece of spin helping to obscure this is that inflation means that a decrease in real levels of funding can nevertheless be a ‘record’ in nominal terms. A press release from Simeon Brown boasted that “A record $1.8 billion for transport investment Canterbury through the 2024-27 National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) will boost economic growth and productivity and reduce travel times“. A very similar statement was made in the releases for other New Zealand regions.
Given this, I was curious how funding compared to past periods, especially the post-earthquake rebuilds, and started looking for historical data. Unfortunately, it is a frustrating topic to research, with a particular challenge being that old links are often broken and not archived. The data was easily accessible at one point, not anymore. This led to my mystery – had anyone in NZTA or Simeon Brown’s office actually checked that 2024-2027 was a (nominal) ‘record’?
A document I did find on the 2015-2018 NLTP aggregated the regional totals differently from subsequent plans. Greater Christchurch ($1.575 Billion) is separated, with the rest of Canterbury included in the “Southern region”, however this Greater Christchurch number seemed suspiciously high.
I sought the answer with an OIA request to NZTA. Unfortunately, the initial response simply repeated the $1.57B number. Subsequent follow-up correspondence with them led to this source. However, it seemed to confirm my suspicion. Adding up the numbers indicates $1830m was planned for 2015-18, compared to $1811m planned for the 2024-27 NLTP. Once this was pointed out, the only further response from NZTA was to highlight that 2015-18 figure included separate Crown funding (they did not provide numbers) to complete ongoing earthquake recovery work. Interesting context, but ultimately not relevant to the claim of spending under the respective NLTPs.
So, as far as I can tell, the claim in Simeon Brown’s press release, and repeated in media articles, is false. Either they accidentally compared all of Canterbury to just greater Christchurch in 2015-18, or to be more cynical, simply copied and pasted the text about ‘record’ investment in the press release for every region. I’m happy to correct this if anyone at NZTA (or elsewhere) can come up with conflicting data, but having contacted them already I doubt this exists.
For anyone wondering: in similar announcements by Phil Twyford for the 2018-2021 NLTP, there was a small decline in funding relative to 2015-18 ($1.7B). In this case there does seem to have been care to not describe this as a record, in contrast to other regional press releases.
TALKING TRANSPORT 