Maritime Union: Nat's transport funding plan sends NZ backwards

Maritime Union of New Zealand media release 25 March 2009 The Maritime Union says the Government's transport funding plan is an environmental and economic travesty. The National Government has changed spending commitments of the previous Government and and released a statement on money it will put into developing land transport (including sea transport) for the next ten years. The new plan includes a three year commitment to spending over seven billion dollars on road related expenditure – and even includes $51 million for cycling and walkways. In comparison, it puts forward $1 million for "rail and sea freight" and $3 million for "domestic sea freight development." (Yes - the figure is million not billion.) That's about one cent on rail and sea freight development for every twenty dollars on roads. Maritime Union General Secretary Trevor Hanson says that over 99% of New Zealand imports and exports arrive by sea yet this transport mode was receiving enough money to pay for a few lifeboats. Mr Hanson says the environmental and economic security outcomes of pouring all its resources into more and more roads were staggering. "Does anyone in this Government have their head around the fact that the world is on the brink of an unprecedented energy crisis?" He says that reliance on road transport made New Zealand completely dependent on secure supplies of cheap oil – something that will seem like a bad joke in ten years time. "The only people who will be celebrating this are the boy racers." Mr Hanson says around the world Government's are quickly moving to develop low impact, energy efficient infrastructure as the reality of climate change, peak oil and energy insecurity sinks in. "The world has changed, but here in New Zealand the new Government has invested a thousand times more in the most environmentally damaging, energy wasteful transport modes than the transport modes of the future, shipping and rail." Mr Hanson says the lack of training, infrastructure and investment in coastal shipping has left an island nation in a state of complete vulnerability. "The role of coastal shipping in the future of our ports has been a major discussion point in the transport industry, but seems to have been entirely missed by the Government." The Government says it wants to reduce road accidents, but is planning on increasing the amount of heavy transport and passenger cars on roads, which would obviously increase risks to motorists. "Building more roads means encouraging more traffic in a vicious cycle that will only end when the cost of petrol causes economic meltdown. We need to get heavy freight off the roads and onto coastal shipping or the 'blue highway' and its natural partner rail." Mr Hanson says the previous Government had finally acknowledged the role of shipping with its Sea Change strategy, but the National Government had dropped the ball and shown a mentality that was a generation out of date. He says he believes that road transport lobbyists had taken control of the Government's agenda due to their political connections and the plan amounted to a multi billion dollar subsidy to trucking operators. The statement that the Government wants to rebalance in favour of transport options 'realistically available to New Zealanders now' show this is a document without vision or forward thinking, says Mr Hanson. The only reason that road transport is a realistic option is that it has billions of dollars of taxpayers money poured into it, he says. The Maritime Union would be working to get changes to the plan.

Electric rail in jeopardy because petrol prices too high!

by Ondine Green

After decades of sabotage and delay it's finally been agreed by all parties that Auckland's rail network needs to be electrified for the needs of people and planet. So it's absolutely stupid that the Auckland Regional Council has been forced to approve a budget without provision for buying electric trains in the coming year (see http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10516091)

The Labour government declared in 2007 that Auckland could have electric rail - but only if ordinary Aucklanders paid up to 5c extra per litre of petrol for it. Now the petrol tax is in political doubt because of skyrocketing oil prices. Yet Labour refuses to consider any other options for funding. So, in other words, Auckland's electric rail is in jeopardy because petrol prices are too high! This is of course the stupidest Catch-22 situation ever. It's precisely because oil is in short supply (and going to get shorter) that we need electric rail, and other sustainable transport, as soon as possible. Aucklanders might be wondering whether the Labour government actually wants Auckland to have electric rail. It's possible that windfall profits from petrol price gouging have blinded them. Perhaps they really don't care if Auckland chokes on its own congestion and pollution. A government with working people's interests at heart would immediately guarantee all the funding needed for Auckland to have an efficient, comprehensive electric rail system within five years. This should be paid for out of general funds, not by putting an extra tax burden on working people in Auckland, most of whom at the moment don't have a real choice but to use their cars to go to work. The nasty Nats aren't any better. Maurice Williamson says he wants electrified rail "somehow". "Somehow", in Maurice's book, always means what are euphemistically called "Public-Private Partnerships". Maurice wants the government to subsidise big business to build our rail network - and then to make a profit off it indefinitely. But the profit motive is exactly what got us into this mess. The reason we need electric rail is precisely because the corporate sector is infatuated with the car. All the experience of the 1990s - especially the debacle with our national rail network - shows that private enterprise just doesn't run public transport in an efficient or sustainable manner. Public transport must be owed by the nation as a whole, and run for ordinary people's needs, not the health of some balance sheet. Labour and National agree - Aucklanders being able to get about their city without having to burn expensive and polluting fossil fuels is not a priority for them. Isn't it time we had a better option?

What Would a Liveable City Look Like?

by Dave Holmes from Green Left Weekly 30 May 2008 (abridged)

When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful, and built and operated to serve their needs rather than those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them.

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$8 billion of public transport would fix this

Auckland's sprawling motorways – the Labour government wants to spend $8 billion on more of them, plus the odd harbour bridge and tunnel. Is this a government committed to making New Zealand carbon neutral?

And why isn't the Green Party kicking up an absolute stink about this madness? And why haven't Green Party leaders come out in support of free and frequent public transport?

That $8 billion could fund thousands of electric buses carrying people for free for decades. It would transform Auckland into a city to be proud of and drastically reduce this countries' carbon emissions.

What Would a Liveable City Look Like?

by Dave Holmes from Green Left Weekly 30 May 2008 (abridged) When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful, and built and operated to serve their needs rather than those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them. Today the destructive effect on the quality of urban life of the capitalist pursuit of profits before anything else is growing alarmingly: * Modern capitalist cities are absolutely dominated by cars and trucks. This leads to massive, life-threatening pollution and a vast network of roads and car parks that scar the urban landscape. People live on islands surrounded by seas of asphalt and concrete – 40% or more of the city surface is asphalt and concrete. The city creates its own, warmer climate. * Motor vehicles also directly kill and maim large numbers of people each year; still greater numbers die from the pollution. Vehicle emissions are also a major contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change that threatens humanity with utter catastrophe. * Public transport systems are weak and take second place to the motor car. Similarly, the great bulk of freight is carried by trucks not rail. * Developers, aided by governments, have created the appalling urban sprawl with all its ecological and social consequences (erosion of farmland, huge distances between home and work, etc.). The word “developers” is an appalling euphemism – capitalist sharks would be a more accurate description. * And now, in the name of urban consolidation, these same developers are being encouraged to build their often crappy-blocks of units anywhere and everywhere. * Then look at what the developers actually construct. Modern houses and buildings are generally not only hard to maintain but ecologically wasteful and often extremely unhealthy (emissions from building materials, plastics and cleaning agents). They could be designed differently – we could easily have ecologically sensible houses instead of the current extremely wasteful “McMansions” favoured by the building industry. * In the cities, public land – modest though it is – is constantly being alienated by greedy devoured in league with councils and city and state governments. * Not only are house prices soaring beyond the reach of most workers, but homelessness is growing sharply (estimated to be over 100,000 nationally) as governments refuse to build public housing and rely on the market to solve everything (preferring to give subsidies to people to rent from private landlords). * Shopping centres (malls and supermarkets) dominate much of city life. They kill most of the neighbourhood shops and force people to rely on cars to do their shopping. But these juggernauts are purely the result of the capitalist thirst for profit – they appear before us as facts of life; people never get to discuss what is really needed. Moreover, the ubiquitous shopping mall represents a serious privatization of social space – we all have to use them and they thus fulfil a social function but access and control is wholly in the hands of the private owners. * As the supermarkets and malls kill off many of the neighbourhood shops, their place is taken by chain outlets (7-11, Coles Express, petrol station shops) all offering emergency supplies at much higher prices. * Within the city we have the monstrous swelling of the city centre (full of truly ugly buildings all jostling for position) and the bleak wasteland of the sprawling suburbs. * In the 1960s, “decentralization” was a buzzword. Governments encouraged a modest movement of services and industry to regional centres. But today country towns and villages are dying as governments cut services and jobs and banks close branches. This has a multiplier effect. People move to the city (or at least to the big regional centres) and the rural crisis intensifies. * There is a movement back to some regional centres but ‹ under the wonderful capitalist system we have – it becomes a ghastly caricature of what is really needed. The rich and middle classes build holiday homes in coastal towns, forcing up prices and making life impossible for ordinary working-class pensioners and renters who have to move elsewhere. Peak oil and climate change On top of the all this, as the concept of peak oil and the eventual end of this finite resource laid down over millions of years gains currency, the fragility of the modern city is suddenly laid bare. The movie The End of Suburbia demonstrates very well how the American suburbs have been built on the automobile. If the motor vehicle as we know it goes – i.e., can no longer serve as mode of mass transport – then the urban sprawl becomes even more untenable and an alternative way of living becomes desperately urgent. Similarly, climate change has put a big question mark over the modern city. Effecting a drastic and rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a life-and-death question. In Australia, perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of climate change for the cities is the question mark over water supplies. Achieving water security and sustainability is a burning issue. To date, the main response of state and federal governments has been to go for big-budget projects (in Victoria, a desalination plant and a diversion pipeline to take scarce water from the equally drought-affected Murray-Goulburn irrigation area in the north). Arguably, such responses do not address the real problem and will actually make it worse. For instance, Victoria’s projected desalination plant will be a major emitter of greenhouse gases. All in all, climate change calls into question many aspects of our current urban existence: * The motor vehicle culture that big business has foisted on us is no longer viable (if it ever was). If declining fuel supplies and ever-more-expensive petrol costs don’t kill it off, surely climate change will. Public transport systems will have to be developed to replace it. * The urban sprawl especially characteristic of Australian capital cities – which compels people to travel vast distances to get to work – will have to give way to some form of consolidation. The growth of the city centre and the bleakness of much of the suburbs needs to be overcome. A much better spread of jobs would mean that people didn't have to travel vast distances to work. * Over time the fetish of the quarter-acre block – the equivalent of every family owning its own car – would start to ease and eventually disappear as people realized that denser living with radically improved public amenities (parks, transport, services) had a lot to offer (as it does in some European cities). * As currently constructed, our houses and buildings embody huge amounts of water and energy and considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, their actual operation is characterized by a high and unsustainable energy and water consumption. * Climate change will put our food supply under extreme pressure. What foods we eat, how they are transported and distributed will become important questions. As well as finding ways to guarantee our food security, reducing the water and energy consumed in the whole process will be vitally important. * We need a much more uniform distribution of the population over the countryside. At the very least, the cities must get smaller and the country towns grow. But, unlike what is happening today, this needs to be done in such a way that jobs and services move out also, transport access is maintained and actual living communities are created. In time, the traditional isolation of the countryside would disappear along with the swollen capital city with its bloated centre. In this regard socialists reject the current developer-driven model whereby green field housing estates gobble up precious farmland and create McMansion-style ghettos on the fringes of the city, isolated and with few amenities, a trap for the less mobile and a terrific burden for those who have to travel vast distances to work. We can surely work out something much better. Abandon affluence? As an aside, Ted Trainer, in his 1985 book Abandon Affluence, had a lot to say on the modern city. But his non-Marxist, radical green framework marred a lot of the useful points he made. He saw “over-consumption” by the West as the source of the global ecological crisis. In his book he bases everything on reducing consumption. Marxists, of course, see the fundamental problem not as “over-consumption” but the capitalist drive for profits ahead of all else; achieving a relative material abundance is essential if humanity is to leave class conflict behind and achieve full communism. With modern technology, it would be quite possible to achieve relative material abundance and – by improving production processes and eliminating the wastefulness of capitalist production and society – at the same time actually reduce our ecological footprint massively. One can say generally that the West consumes too many resources but this obscures the reality that these are class-divided societies and a large proportion of the population doesn’t consume very much at all. For example, in the United States there is a huge internal Third World which radically under-consumes the necessities of life. They are not responsible for the reckless extravagance of the US – that should be sheeted home squarely to the ruling capitalist plutocracy. While we oppose the wasteful use of resources and while we too are opposed to capitalist consumerism, posing the problem in terms of reducing consumption as such is wrong and would be political suicide for the socialist movement. For instance, supermarkets, for all their capitalistic form, are actually a tremendous labour – and time-saving convenience. The liberation of women and the whole working class has many aspects; a key one is reducing drudgery to the minimum. We want to go forwards from capitalism, not backwards. Trainer’s city of the future has a very definite reactionary, feudal, labour-intensive feel to it, but even allowing for this rather basic weakness, he does paint a thought-provoking picture of the new city, with the old freeways and roads dug up, with vegetable gardens where the factories once stood, etc. Monstrous beast in the room Making our cities livable and grappling with peak oil, climate change and sustainability are really one and the same thing. Ideally, we would have a big discussion, develop a rational plan and then organize ourselves to implement it. If we were, say, a small community living in ancient times before the development of class society, that is exactly what we would have done. But today, the problem is not that the population has grown but that the economy on which we all depend – the productive apparatus and everything associated with it – is not owned collectively by society, but by a tiny handful of capitalists. Working people’s labour operates the means of production – in that sense it is social – but only a few per cent of the population privately own it. This is the monstrous, slaving beast in the room. At every turn of the wheel it has to fed. Its ravenous appetite must be satisfied ahead of any human need. What it wants – profits – is not what the rest of us want: meaningful action on climate change and other social problems. For example, in Victoria right now, the big-business-oriented Brumby ALP government is moving at high speed in the opposite direction to what is needed to confront peak oil and climate change: * Rather than a massive program of fitting all dwellings with water tanks and recycling systems, imposing conservation targets on industry and agribusiness, and establishing the infrastructure for large-scale storm water capture, it has signed off on the desalination plant and the northern pipeline – bonanzas for big business but a disaster for the rest of us. Water bills for ordinary households are projected to double within five years. * Rather than a program to phase out our disastrous dependence on brown coal and make the switch to renewable energy, the state government is intent on pursuing the mirage of “clean coal” technology. Power prices are also set to double for ordinary users over the next few years. * It refuses to put the necessary resources into public transport, which exists in absolutely infuriating and permanent crisis; instead its program is roads and still more roads. Now it is inching towards a truly insane monster road tunnel under Melbourne¹s general cemetery. Not even the dead are to be left to rest in peace! * It is going ahead with a radical dredging of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay that threatens to lead to the flooding of low-lying suburbs at high tide. And all this is so that bigger ships – laden with yet more consumerist crap – can transit the bay. * It has given the go-ahead to GM canola. Brumby’s utterly ludicrous comment was that this was giving the consumer “choice”! The consumers don’t want this sort of fake “choice” – they want safe foods. GM was given the green light to give a profit bonanza to Monsanto and a few big exporters; the rest of us will pay the price (an increase in allergies and who knows what other long-term health damage). Public ownership and planning In order to grapple with the crisis of climate change we need a total mobilization of society and a drastic, rapid reorientation of our entire economy. But to imagine that anything can compel a horde of profit-crazed corporations to be “responsible” is utterly fanciful. The commanding heights of the economy must be in public hands. * Socialists call for the nationalization of the entire energy sector. This vital infrastructure must belong to the community – whether it is in federal, state or municipal hands. The charter of this sector must be to phase out the fossil fuel power plants and make the “big switch” to renewable energy as quickly as possible. * The public transport and freight systems must also be in public hands. The aim must be to achieve a rapid, substantial reduction in the use of motor vehicles. The roads should be kept safe; apart from that, massive investments must be poured into rail, trams and feeder bus systems. * The automobile industry should likewise be nationalized. The car plants should be retooled to produce public transport stock and renewable power equipment. * As the crisis of climate change bites deeper, food security will become a big issue for society. We can’t leave the bulk of the distribution system in the hands of profit-gouging supermarket chains like Coles and Woolworths, that exploit small suppliers and consumers alike. They too should be brought under public ownership. * The banks, which underpin the capitalist economy, should be nationalized and a single state bank created. This would guarantee bank workers’ jobs, provide services and generate funds for the reconstruction of the economy. Economic planning based on public ownership of the means of production has tremendous power Of course, the capitalist class has immense power and wealth and will not give it up without a tremendous struggle. Only the growth of a vast popular movement, solidly based on the great working-class majority, can succeed. The development of a movement to fight for meaningful action on climate change will at the same time prepare the political conditions for a workers’ government which will finally bring the economy under collective ownership and control. This – and only this – will enable us to begin to construct a society based on the fulfilment of human needs and living sustainably in harmony with nature. Dave Holmes is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist tendency within the Socialist Alliance in Australia. This article is based on a talk presented at the Climate Change - Social Change Conference in Sydney in April, 2008. The conference was organized by Green Left Weekly.

Auckland bus operators threaten investment strike

From a NZ Herald report:

Auckland's main bus company is upset at the level of controls over its business which the Government is offering regional councils through legislation tabled in Parliament yesterday. Transport Minister Annette King says the Public Transport Management Bill will provide tools to regional councils to improve bus and ferry services, and to give passengers, local and central government, and taxpayers better value for money. [...] In signalling the legislation in February, Ms King acknowledged it would not go as far as giving the authority the power to pocket all bus and ferry fares, and then to pay transport operators fees based on passenger numbers, in the way it now manages urban rail services. She heeded industry concerns in acknowledging that a similar service model for buses and ferries might lead to "some problems" through a potential withdrawal of investment by commercial operators.

Note that this threat of a capital strike passes without comment in the same press which gets a case of the vapours whenever workers even think of withdrawing their labour. Note also that the NZ Herald believes that encouraging unnecessary and inefficient competition between public transport modes is a good thing.