Walker’s words are worth a commission
Hamish Walker spent three and a-half hours in Queenstown traffic and wrote a column about it. By his own account, he is “selling around two houses every month” to people leaving town because of the traffic.
Grant McLachlan
2 days ago3 min read
Four spokesmen, one script, no answer on the bill
Bridges, Hartwich, Abernethy and now Genesis’s own chief executive have all run the same defence this winter. Watch what happens whenever someone asks them a number.
Grant McLachlan
5 days ago3 min read
Were Auckland's 1950s planners right about the Eastern Motorway all along?
Greater Auckland's own archive of harbour crossing options shows the road the city chose not to build. What has gone up in its place — a bus corridor here, a shared path there, a stalled industrial link somewhere else — is proof of what was lost, not a substitute for it.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 298 min read
Should Christchurch City Council tear up the Wolfbrook Arena naming rights deal?
Ratepayers built the arena. Two developer families have since put their name on it. Between them sits a Commerce Commission refund, two Financial Markets Authority warnings, a High Court finding, and a fast-track bid the Government itself has now declined.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 249 min read
ACT’s small-state pitch is a big-state con
Andrew Ketels wants a leaner public service. Follow the money and it is his own client base that keeps getting bigger.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 234 min read
Next Auckland harbour crossing needs a rethink
Chris Bishop's new business case looks like more delay. It is actually the government admitting the data behind the last one was never good enough.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 193 min read
The bed tax blames the tourist for a problem speculators and tradies built
A tax on absent strangers won't fix a housing crisis fuelled by untaxed capital gains — and Queenstown Lakes still doesn't know who its heaviest water users actually are.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 193 min read
Is fast-track backfiring on National?
Hawke’s Bay, Canterbury, Queenstown, and Auckland ratepayers are being asked to carry the infrastructure bill for growth their own councils tried to stop.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 153 min read
Why fixing New Zealand's electricity market would wipe billions off the sharemarket
Contact Energy's record profit is being reported as a winter windfall. It is closer to the going rate for a market built to protect scarcity.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 113 min read
Have engineers caused the ballooning of big projects?
Blaming the profession lets the real cost driver — a broken delivery model — off the hook.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 73 min read
Why is Queenstown asking the public to fix a mess it approved?
A resort town let ribbon development swallow its only roads, blacklisted the journalist who exposed its wastewater failures, and is now asking the public for ideas on how to fix what its own decisions caused.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 213 min read
Two Crown companies just spent $3 billion crossing Cook Strait separately. Why not one tunnel?
Transpower and KiwiRail are both 100% owned by the same shareholder. They didn't even talk.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 234 min read
The Super City failed. Why Hawke’s Bay council mergers will be a disaster.
Wellington wants Hawke’s Bay’s councils redesigned by 9 August. Auckland already ran this experiment — and the man now advising Hawke’s Bay on the redesign is the one whose mayoralty set Hastings on its debt path in the first place.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 97 min read
Why does New Zealand spend more than almost anyone, and build so badly?
The familiar excuses — too little money, too few people, an awkward geography — do not explain why New Zealand’s infrastructure is late, incremental and over budget. The real cause is a system built to be defensible rather than right, and nothing this government has planned will change it.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 2810 min read
Is the Greater Auckland campaign against the Northland motorway fighting waste — or causing it?
Greater Auckland calls Warkworth to Te Hana the most expensive road the country has ever built. But picking off the single hardest stage of a staged corridor, weeks before a contract is signed, is exactly how you manufacture the incrementalism the group says it opposes.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 198 min read
The roads we can’t afford, and a plan that will stall them anyway?
The National Infrastructure Plan is right that the country cannot pay for the roads it keeps promising. But its remedy — defer, stage, build later — is the very stop-start it was written to end.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 173 min read
The Bullshit Budget: who actually believes these numbers?
Arbitrary cuts, heroic forecasts and no map to the surplus — a Budget engineered to win a week of headlines before anyone does the maths.
Grant McLachlan
May 313 min read
Who is the state really housing?
How New Zealand’s great housing experiment turned from sheltering the poor to subsidising the people who profit from them.
Grant McLachlan
May 3010 min read
The kids who lit matches in the mine
A motorway extension, a mortgagee golf-course sale, a $40,250 donation and a rezoning bid — all inside the same fortnight. Horncastle and Brooks aren't the canary in the mine. They're the kids who lit matches inside the underground network Auckland built.
Grant McLachlan
May 247 min read
Days, not decades: Auckland already has the data to settle its bridge argument
The Mayor and the Transport Minister are arguing about whether to put a bridge or a tunnel parallel to the existing harbour crossing. I crunched the data that they ignored and modelled the solution.
Grant McLachlan
May 137 min read
