THE PRESS FRIDAY, JUNE 17, 1988. Hidden policy on roads

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 12

THE PRESS FRIDAY, JUNE 17, 1988. Hidden policy on roads

In conjunction with the transfer of the National Roads Board from the control of the Minister of Works and Development to the Minister of Transport, the Government has smuggled in a new policy on reading. The Minister of Transport, Mr Jeffries, made the first public reference to the new policy at the Local Government Association conference in Christchurch this week. Henceforth country roaids that are classified as uneconomic — a term that has not been defined — will no longer receive money from the National Roads Fund for maintenance. The responsibility for maintaining these road will now be shared solely by the territorial local authority and the landowners on the road. This sudden departure from the established principles of the National Roads Board seems to be a fait accompli. Had the Government offered the proposal for public discussion before settling on it as official policy, it would not have wanted for sound arguments against the change. Without consultation, the Government has chosen to dismantle altogether the traditional partnership between ratepayers' and road users, and has confirmed that the motoring public will be used increasingly as just another source of taxation revenue for whatever schemes the Government has in mind. Mr Jeffries made it'pretty clear that he favours National Roads Board funds being siphoned off to subsidise public transport systems, for instance. In the meantime, the run-down and deterioration of one of the country’s chief assets, roads, seems inevitable.

Any country as reliant on road transport as New Zealand is needs sound roads. The cost of seriously neglecting the country’s roads could be great in both lives and higher transport costs. To let the country’s roads deteriorate, or to fail to make improvements, would result in many hidden increases in the costs of transport. Passed on down the line, these would appear in ways as curious as the housewife paying more for the lamb chop at the butcher’s. There is a sound case for high and steady spending on the country’s roads as a matter of national importance. When the Government’s proposal to pinch pennies comes down to detail, the scheme is fraught with contradiction and complication. Mr Jeffries backed the new policy with the assertion that “no-one has an absolute right to have huge sums of money spent on a road used by 14 cars a day.” No-one could challenge this. But Mr Jeffries explained this comment by referring to an instance in which the National Roads Board had been asked for $BOO,OOO to improve a bridge on a road used by an average of 14 cars a day. The National Roads Board, however, declined the application. The money was not spent; the system worked and the National Roads Board clearly established that there is no absolute right to huge sums of money for little-used roads. The significance of this seems to have escaped the Government and Mr Jeffries offers no examples of extravagant spending as opposed to optimistic applications. He would be on safer ground if the National Roads Board were deeply in debt and running up vast bills. It is not. In the financial year just ended, the National Roads Board concluded operations with a surplus of $lO5 million. This money is not available for road works this year, however, because the board cannot carry over unspent revenue. Because it is a section of a Government department, rather than a State-owned enterprise, the board cannot keep the money, which is absorbed instead into the Consolidated Account. The main reason the board had a surplus was that some local authorities are too hard-pressed financially to

complete their reading programmes and are unwilling to hit their ratepayers harder for the money. As a result, the subsidy from the National Roads Board for these works is underspent.

These same rural local bodies that already are unable to fulfil their maintenance programmes are the ones that will be hardest hit by the new policy. Wallace and Silverpeaks Counties, in the southern South Island, are two that are in this category and yet climate and terrain accelerate the deterioration of roads in that region. Nor can it be said that the country’s ratepayers are not pulling their weight in spending on roads. When the present, shared funding of the National Roads Board was set up in 1953, ratepayers were expected to contribute 25 per cent of the board’s income. Ratepayers are now contributing something like 35 per cent of the total reading bill to make up the shortfall in the contribution from the Government’s taxes.

This is not because motorists are paying less in taxes, such as road-user charges and petrol tax, but because the Government is retaining more and more of those taxes for purposes other than reading. The Consolidated Account already takes more from fuel taxes than goes to the National Roads Board. Having restricted the amount that the users of roads contribute to their development and upkeep — by siphoning a large cut of the taxes off for other spending — the Government now seems to be saying that some roads should not be maintained because motorists are not contributing enough. The inescapable response to this is that the Government should restore to the National Roads Board, for spending on the roads, the $250 million or so that the Government retains each year for other purposes from the $450 million collected in fuel taxes; or that the $l2O million a year collected in vehicle licensing and registration fees should again be devoted to the National Roads Board budget, as was done before 1968 when this money also disappeared into the Consolidated Account. It is nonsense, of course, to argue that all the money raised by taxes on motoring should be spent on roading. Taxes levied on road users do not belong to the motorist any more than taxes, levied on other readily identifiable groups in the community belong to them. But when the Government proposes extreme application of the user-pays principle, it invites uncompromising demands from those who have to pay as to how their money should be spent.

Mr Jeffries gives no indication of what might be termed “uneconomic” or who will judge this. Some might argue with justification that, at almost $BOO,OOO a year in upkeep and avalanche protection, the 61 kilometres of road between Te Anau and Milford is an uneconomic stretch of road. Others would say that the tourist traffic it carries compensates the country in other ways and produces revenue for the tourist industry far removed from Fiordland, which is a vital part of the tourist system. What, then, of a country road that serves only a few houses, but is also used by several logging trucks each day, bringing out timber for manufacture or export? And what of the roads, forsaken by the National Roads Board under the new policy, if residents or local authorities maintain them entirely at their own cost? Are they not entitled to a toll payment from outside users? The changed policy is bad; it is messy; it is repugnant to the establisheed practice of shared responsibility; it threatens to run down an important asset; it invites disastrous repair costs in later years. It should be reversed.