IQ Business

Governments that have run out of luck get careless. Gerald Hensley’s recent fine memoir conveys the atmosphere during the last years of Robert Muldoon’s ministry as an increasingly sick man with no new ideas struggled to control his leaky ship. I readily recall the quixotic decision-making during David Lange’s final days. Now it’s Helen Clark’s turn. She lives from day to day as her ministers stumblebum about, seldom thinking more than five minutes ahead. Leaders in moments like this take on some of the dictatorial tendencies of the crazy Roman Emperor Caligula as they try to assert their authority over increasingly rebellious subjects. One such example of autocratic impulse is the decision that the Prime Minister seems to have made to erect a stadium in the centre of New Zealand’s busiest port so as to get the Rugby World Cup crowds out of her Eden Park neighbourhood. Rejecting advice about the difficulties involved, and operating by the seat of their pants, ministers seem set to spoil Auckland’s waterfront, seriously disadvantage the port that is directly or indirectly responsible for 20% of the jobs in the region, and embark on a project that in all likelihood can’t be finished in time for the World Cup unless every skilled worker in the Auckland region is diverted to its construction. It will be like building the pyramids.

This saga began 18 months ago when the Prime Minister flew around the world in election year to help get the World Cup for New Zealand. She succeeded. No thought seems to have been given to the 60,000 seat stadium that was a condition of the deal until Rugby World Cup minister Trevor Mallard looked at his watch and noticed the time was ticking by. The easiest and cheapest solution would be to make additions to Eden Park into which huge treasure has already been poured over the years. The Eden Park Trust Board has plans and timetables, and could do the job in time. Living two streets away, the Prime Minister realised with a jolt the cost of her electioneering. Instead of taking advice from other cities where stadiums are usually built away from the central city, options like the scarcely used Avondale Race Course were swept aside. Mallard descended on the waterfront. The difficulties of the site were carefully explained to him. Construction on an unstable ex landfill site from which nasty things still escape would be difficult and extremely costly. But he seems to have got it into his head that since the waterfront is in public ownership as part of the port it could be snatched without cost as a kind of Christmas present. Reducing the value of the asset from which the Auckland Regional Council is meant to extract revenue to assist with public transport is a mere bagatelle. That’s tomorrow’s problem. Why he worry?

With the time wastage that has already occurred, even completing Eden Park would be a rush. Getting the consents for a new stadium on the port land, and undertaking the huge stabilisation work that will be necessary, looks like the next best thing to impossible. Experts calculate that at an approximate cost of $550-600 million, it will be necessary for workers to build $1 million’s worth of construction for each available working day between the go-ahead and completion date. Already there is delay as the date for a Cabinet decision has been pushed back. The Eden Park Trust Board is left twiddling its toes, waiting for a decision. The impact of a new stadium on every other piece of construction in Auckland will be so vast that some of the country’s most experienced construction companies are reliably said to have already decided not to tender for constructing a waterfront stadium.

When Caligula spoke, minions jumped to attention. In what must rate as one of the silliest TV appearances of recent times, Auckland’s deputy mayor goofily announced his council’s endorsement for the new stadium, then added that his Labour-dominated council had no idea of the cost, the extent that ratepayers would be expected to contribute, the parking problems, or the immediate or long-term effects on the Port or the region. Coming on top of Auckland City Council’s own 24,000 seat, ratepayer-funded, and as yet unfinished arena across the road from the proposed new site, one is left with the feeling that those in charge of our national and local purse strings require the attention of men in white coats.