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
Auckland’s stadium decision is non-sensical — and the rest of the country is just as bad
We are about to spend more public money on more single-use stadiums to host fewer events for fewer people. Melbourne worked out the answer twenty-six years ago.
Grant McLachlan - Column
Apr 294 min read
Going out — but staying home
New Zealanders eat out as often as Melbournians and drink as much. So why are the cinemas, stadiums, concerts and racecourses emptying out? The answer is not just money. It is time, fuel, congestion and exhaustion.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2721 min read
The naming rights fire sale
New Zealand taxpayers and ratepayers have wasted more than a billion dollars building three stadiums — and handed the corporate branding rights away for what amounts to small change. There were better options - demonstrated in Melbourne and Los Angeles - but nobody in this country took notice.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2537 min read
The rot in New Zealand sport hosting
This is the story of an attitude problem masquerading as an economics problem.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2416 min read
The Bullshit Economy
New Zealand has constructed an elaborate economy out of its own inefficiencies.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 1725 min read
The economist who can’t see what he doesn’t want to fix
Oliver Hartwich says breaking up the gentailers won’t cut your power bill. He’s right — but for the wrong reasons. The real solution is one his funders would never allow him to propose.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 1617 min read
The gift you can’t refuse: How naming-as-performance is failing Maori culture, public infrastructure, and the Treaty alike.
New Zealand's infrastructure is being renamed not to locate people, but to perform cultural partnership — through a gifting process that forecloses dissent, rewards commercial relationships, and quietly hollows out the very culture it claims to honour.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 1518 min read
PenLink won’t solve ghost congestion
The Northern Motorway between Silverdale and Oteha Valley Road is plagued by near-daily ghost congestion — phantom jams with no structural cause. The culprit is not the road. It is the driving habits of the very residents who have spent decades lobbying for PenLink.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 23 min read
Auckland’s missing motorway has been hiding in plain sight for seventy years
The Eastern Motorway — State Highway 17 — has a vacant number, protected land, and a proven funding model. All it lacks is a government with the wit to act.
Grant McLachlan
Mar 314 min read
The $16 billion battery that runs on electricity it doesn’t have
There is a particular kind of infrastructure madness that only becomes visible once you draw a map.
Grant McLachlan
Mar 306 min read
Rivers of wasted power: How New Zealand's three great hydro systems underperform their physical potential — and who benefits from the gap
If the Waikato/Tongariro, Clutha, and Waitaki hydro schemes operated to its potential, it would eliminate the need for coal and gas generation - and lower electricity prices substantially.
Grant McLachlan
Mar 2441 min read
Why aren't we there yet? The road New Zealand already replaced — and the one it should replace next.
The Manawatū Gorge closed without warning. Nine years and $824M later, we had a new road. The Remutaka is showing the same signs. Do we act now — or wait for the hill to make the decision for us?
Grant McLachlan
Mar 33 min read
