Dunedin residents need to fight for the city's Hillside Workshops, Labour's Dunedin South MP Clare Curran says.
When KiwiRail announced about 40 skilled workers would be made redundant from Hillside last week it was a kick in the guts for Dunedin in more ways than one.
Forty skilled jobs, 40 families, 40 incomes paying tax lost. Forty possible extra additions to the dole queue. How does that make sense?
KiwiRail won't guarantee the future of the workshops. Instead it has clearly signalled there is no future for a rail engineering model that's about building and refurbishing our rolling stock.
Any jobs that remain will be maintenance and repair. Maybe not in Dunedin.
Those workers will either try to find other work, or head offshore. Hillside will likely close as early as next year.
Australian recruitment firms have recently been in Dunedin scouting for rail engineering talent.
Australia is investing in rail. Meanwhile, skilled jobs are being lost here because this Government won't invest in the local economy. That's the hard reality. Its decision not to invest is ideological, not economic.
When the Government said in the recent Budget 170,000 jobs would be created in four years, you would have thought they'd done a few calculations about where and how. Put on the spot in the Commerce Select Committee last week, Acting Minister for Economic Development David Carter said no analysis had been done on to which sectors those jobs would come.
Dunedin has been lied to. Transport Minister Steven Joyce said last Thursday KiwiRail must be able to operate without political interference, despite promising last May there would be plenty of jobs for Hillside workers.
This directly contradicts KiwiRail CEO Jim Quinn, who has consistently said he has to take a narrow commercial focus because of government policy. Someone's being disingenuous.
What's also disingenuous is the way the local National Party list MP has made sympathetic noises in his own patch, but is ineffectual at getting heard in Wellington. He is silent on this issue.
It makes a mockery of the attempts for more than 18 months by a group of about a dozen people from widely disparate backgrounds - MPs from across the spectrum, the Chamber of Commerce, the DCC, the rail union - who regularly meet to build a case for our rail manufacturing capacity.
Hillside is part of a cluster of about 70 engineering companies. With Hillside gone they will struggle and be depleted. These are skilled jobs. They can't and won't be replaced in this town.
The demise of Hillside is the direct consequence of KiwiRail not being allowed to bid for at least part of the $500 million for the electrification of the Auckland rail network, despite a comprehensive Berl economic case backing a local build.
KiwiRail sending the job for 300 new container flat top wagons to China North Rail last December was another nail in the coffin. It's now pretty clear the other 2300 wagons will be built overseas too - no doubt in China.
If reports are true that KiwiRail's and Mr Joyce's claims are fictional of a 25% difference in the bidding price between Hillside's and China North Rail's price on the flat deck wagons, then this is not just a local tragedy but a national scandal.
Reports from reputable sources are that the real price difference was closer to 15%, perhaps even less, and included an overhead of about 7% to cover KiwiRail's head office administrative costs, including executive salaries.
It doesn't sound right to me. But if true then there's been some convenient bookwork to make the price difference look a lot bigger. Let's have an independent review of the contract process so the public can be reassured.
I'm pleased the Dunedin City Council has produced a snapshot for the city's economic future. I hope it's not a document that sits on a shelf, but a living plan. I hope the city council considers the city's MPs to be key stakeholders in that process, because it's time the city's leaders and thinkers got together and committed to taking charge of our future. What industries do we propose to get behind and back?
How are we going to do that? When? I'd like to see our local business leaders, operators, our innovators and our city representatives step up and work together on taking charge of our own future.
A few months ago, when 10,000 Dunedinites got out on the streets and told the Government not to mess with our local health system by taking away neurosurgeons from our town, the Government backed off.
No-one else is going to stand up for us right now unless we do it ourselves.
I want to stand up for Dunedin. But we all need to stand together.
