Solid stuff, Brendon. The cost of imported vehicles and petroleum has long been a major cause of New Zealand’s more or less perpetual economic malaise. As far back as 1980, when there were 3.1 million New Zealanders as opposed to 5.0 million today, the economist Eric M Ojala was already pointing out that the cost of petroleum imports was equal to the earnings of the entire NZ meat industry (!). All that frozen lamb etc that so many people regarded as the backbone of the NZ export economy, and still do, was just keeping us in petrol and Diesel, that was all. Oil prices were high then but even so there are nearly 2/3 as many of us again now. The paper in which Ojala states that is linked here as one of the Commission for the Future papers archived by the McGuinness Institute: https://www.mcguinnessinstitute.org/commission-for-the-future/.

Ojala’s observation illustrates a wider point, which is that for comparatively small isolated island nations without a massive industrial base, a “wannabe Fordism” based on imported vehicles and fuel makes no strategic sense.

It would be different if we had more of our own oil wells, ten times as many people and huge car factories that made vehicles from scratch. Then a pro-car policy would have been a stimulus, not a drain.

But in any case, climate change necessitates a rethink as well. A rethink that also dovetails with ‘Clean Green’ and ‘100% Pure’ New Zealand, brandings and aspects of our national image that the road transport sector hasn’t contributed a thing to.

Tourism NZ’s “Active Considerers” database also indicates that ease of getting around inside NZ is a top issue for many who are actively considering travel to New Zealand.

Well, at the moment you either fly domestically and miss out on the scenery, or hire a vehicle and take your chances on unfamiliar left-hand-drive mountain roads, or get crammed into a bus.

160 km/h tilt trains on main lines, similar to the one between Brisbane and Rockhampton in Queensland, would be a game-changer, though the tourists probably wouldn’t insist on such speeds. An average of 100 km/h, the open road limit, would probably be fine: Auckland and Wellington are about 660 km apart by rail and road so that’s six and a half scenery-filled hours, a lot less demanding in engineering terms.

Also making sense would be revival of the line from Dunedin to Kingston through all that Lord of the Rings Country for which the alignment already exists, albeit now in the form of the Otago Central Rail Trail, which could still exist beside the new tracks. And of course the last bit to Queenstown could be done on the lake steamer Earnslaw, once more, just as it was back in the day.

I guess if we hadn’t abolished the Commission for the Future back in the 1980s, most of this would have been pointed out thirty-five years ago, as opposed to being pointed out in 2020.