Last week the government announced plans to build two new tunnels in central Wellington to ease traffic congestion. One will be a second tunnel through Mount Victoria to improve the flow of traffic to the eastern suburbs and Wellington International Airport. The other will be alongside the existing Terrace tunnel to improve traffic flows into the city from the north. 

On cue, the Green Party MP for the eastern suburbs’ electorate of Rongotai, Julie Anne Genter, announced her vehement opposition to the plans. All the tunnels would do is encourage the proliferation of cars entering and travelling across the central city, (despite the fact there is no alternative) when the emphasis should be on getting cars out of the city and encouraging more cycling and reliance on public transport, she argued.

The Green leaning Wellington City Council and Mayor are already a national laughingstock because of the way in which their obstinate insistence on adding cycleways to the city’s narrow inner-city streets is driving businesses and customers away.  The Council has become so dysfunctional that the government appointed a Crown Observer this week in what looks like a forlorn attempt to get things back on track.

Genter's intervention last week over the tunnels plan was a chilling reminder to Wellington residents of how determined her Green Party Council colleagues are to thwart any significant roading infrastructure development in the city.  But it seems that that point was not lost on the National and Labour parties who have announced this week that they are working towards a bipartisan approach to infrastructure development.

Such an approach makes sense. New Zealand is widely acknowledged to have a significant infrastructure deficit because plans by successive governments over the years have often stalled due to a lack of long-term political agreement and the uncertainty that has caused. After a visit to New South Wales earlier this year the Prime Minister noted enviously that there was a long-term political consensus between the state’s Labor and Liberal parties about the state’s future infrastructure requirements that were not turned upside whenever there was a change of state government. It seemed then to be only a matter of time before he sought to broker a similar agreement between National and Labour here.

This week’s announcement that National and Labour have reached broad agreement on new rules for Public Private Partnerships they hope will attract greater investment in infrastructure development is a positive, if still conditional, first step. Much still needs to be done to flesh out the details, let alone identify, then bring to fruition, any specific projects. Although what National describes as “a slow tentative march towards greater bipartisanship on infrastructure” will take time, it is nonetheless encouraging. After more than forty years of political division on infrastructure projects from the Clyde Dam to the Puhoi to Warkworth motorway extension more recently, the joint recognition that what Labour describes as “swings in priorities each election cycle” are not helping resolve the infrastructure deficit is a welcome political about-turn.

It is probably just a coincidence that National’s and Labour’s broad agreement was announced just a week after the Wellington tunnels decision and the Green Party’s response, but it does change the political component quite considerably. A broad agreement between the two main parties, regardless of which one is in power at the time, will not only provide greater certainty to potential investors in future Public Private Partnerships, but will also neuter the ability of the Green Party to stymie the development of such projects.

On that basis, taxpayers might be spared repetition of the types of infrastructure delays that have plagued Wellington in recent years. For example, a short seven hundred metre inner-city bypass first proposed in 1963, was not built until 2007. The second Mount Victoria tunnel debate has been going on since Wellington International Airport opened in 1959. Similar lengthy debates have plagued infrastructure developments in other parts of the country.

At one level, this week’s agreement between National and Labour is a pragmatic recognition that there needs to be a better way to address the country’s current serious infrastructure deficit, and that carrying on as at present is no longer credible. It should also lead to a greater recognition among potential Public Private Partnerships investors that the New Zealand environment now looks set to become more conducive to such projects.

At another level the political advantages to both National and Labour are undeniable. For National, which is always been more infrastructure inclined, and its partners ACT and New Zealand First, infrastructure upgrades will now be able to be progressed with more certainty that they will not be upended by a future change of government.  Labour, for its part, will be less constrained than it has been in recent years to commit to future Public Private Partnerships.

However, it would be premature to pop too many champagne corks just yet. Politicians have a notorious ability to back out of agreements if the circumstances no longer suit them or become too politically awkward. Despite the apparent current mutual goodwill, the worth of this week’s agreement will only become obvious when the first jointly agreed infrastructure project is announced.

In that regard, the Green Party’s opposition to Wellington’s proposed new tunnels may prove to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.