Ilovethebomb

10% for the next 25 years is an insane amount of money, and no way will it be cost effective.

We have a habit in NZ of completely over-speccing projects, then either cancelling them or never proceeding in the first place. It's what we did with the ferries, it's what we did with that idiotic cycle bridge idea, the Petone-Grenada road... And now this. Which will get binned the moment a Labour coalition takes over.

The spec for the Petone-Grenada road initially called for it to be 100 km/h end to end, which is completely over the top considering the terrain the road would traverse.

At least the Melling Link project seems to be moving.

He is a very strange dude, isn't he?

I find it hard to imagine that being small change to anyone, but I can see someone writing it off as a loss.

You may be thinking of the cycle bridge across the harbour, they spent fifty mil or so on that, mostly on consultants.

Wellington light rail was to be run along existing streets, so the amount of land purchased was going to be very low, I think most of the land purchased wastes to be for the new tunnels.

I honestly can't explain what happened with Wellington light rail, they did public outreach and surveys almost ten years ago, had overwhelming support for both light rail and a secondary Terrace and Mt Vic tunnel. The council was taken to court over the flyover project, and then... Nothing happened for about a decade.

I'm honestly at a loss to explain it.

I disagree with you there, the sunk cost fallacy is a real problem, and we are very much prone to it. If light rail had been under construction already, there would have been a solid case to make for keeping it, but Wellington had been planning and consulting for nearly ten years without laying a single piece of track.

The ferries were perhaps less of a good idea to cancel, but the whole project was massively over speced, in my view. One vessel would have been almost the same size as their entire current fleet.

Between income tax and sales tax when they spend it, the government will probably see half of it anyway.

Exactly what I thought, nobody is going to own up and say it was theirs.

I'd love to know how that much cash ended up in a ceiling space though, someone must know it's there, but has decided it's not worth the risk to come back and get it. Or they're in prison.

To be fair, Labour made an absolute pig's ear of almost every infrastructure project they had a go at during their term, it seems a bit churlish of them to complain about National turning around and building roads.

If they and our councils had actually been competent at delivering infrastructure, we'd have trams in Auckland and Wellington, new ferries arriving next year with new terminals waiting for them, as well as better rail infrastructure.

But no, that's not the world we live in unfortunately.

Definitely very strange.

It's owned by Westland Mineral Sands Ltd, although I'm not sure if that means they are the legal owner, or lease the vessel. It's very odd, that's for sure.

Yes, the amount of excise added to fuel is public information.

Also, our fuel market is quite competitive, as long as you have one of the independent retailers in the area at least. Someone will be the first to move, and the others will follow.