Govt's 100-day plan scrapped projects — and $2 billion invested

The projects canned during the Government’s 100-day plan had about two billion dollars in taxpayers’ money already spent on them — prompting calls for cross party collaboration on infrastructure and longer electoral terms to help ensure value for money.

More than $1.2 billion was spent on Three Waters; Auckland light rail had $229 million sunk into it; Let’s Get Wellington Moving $167 million; the polytech merger Te Pukenga $121 million; reform of the Resource Management Act $136 million; $44 million was spent to run the Māori Health Authority; and $36 million was spent on investigating hydro power at Lake Onslow.

"These things are the price of democracy, you’ve got political parties that have widely divergent views on some of these things," said economist Michael Reddell.

He said the sweeping reversals provided a key lesson for any government.

“If you want to make far-reaching reforms in this country, you need to do them early in your electoral term, get them embedded. And when you do, it’s much harder for a new government that comes in to reverse them.”

It’s unclear exactly how much is pure waste, but $165 million went on consultants and contractors for two projects alone — Auckland light rail and the Three Waters reform.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said it’s the coalition Government that’s wasting money with its scrapping.

"If someone builds a house to say 80% and the next owner comes along and says I don’t like that house I’m going to knock it down and start again, who wasted the money? The person who built the house that got knocked down or the people who knocked it down?” he said.

The finance minister disagrees.

"Labour needs to take responsibility for pouring vast sums of taxpayer money into go nowhere projects," said Nicola Willis.

Not a metre of light rail track in Auckland was laid. The Government argues cancelling it saves $29 billion.

In Wellington, a pedestrian crossing, roundabout and changes to speed limits were among the minimal progress made under the Let’s Get Wellington Moving transport project. Property was also bought up for future development.

"Not all the money is wasted. Some of that money around Three Waters was grants to local authorities which will probably be spent on water projects. But the 400 bureaucrats they had in the department of internal affairs, sure, that's money down the drain unfortunately," said Reddell.

Money was also sunk into redundancy payouts. The two chief executives of Three Waters Colin Crampton and Jon Lamonte received $710,000 between them after being in the job less than a year.

But AUT construction professor John Tookey said contractors have to factor in risk when taking on a project, technical as well as political risk.

"The type of individuals that you're going to get on board are not going to metaphorically speaking bet their mortgage on a scenario where they could have their employment pulled from under them at the drop of the hat," he said.

Tookey said getting “longevity” was key to delivering infrastructure.

“This is not getting the baby bathed so to speak. We have to transcend individual parliaments.”

He suggested cross-party support for projects and longer electoral terms.

“It would be nice to have some level of co-operation and collaboration going forward. If we could build the mandate of the infrastructure commission for example into the genuine allocation of funding for the future.”