There has long been a frustration down south that Dunedin and the wider Otago region are treated as an afterthought by the bureaucrats of Wellington.
Recently, that frustration has crossed the line into outright absurdity. We are witnessing a mad distortion of fiscal priorities that values a few kilometres of northern asphalt over the lives, health, and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of southerners.
The reality of this double standard was laid bare by a recent 1News investigation. While the government continuously subjects the New Dunedin hospital to death by a thousand cuts, demanding absolute financial austerity and scaling back clinical services, it is simultaneously preparing to hand over a blank cheque for an un-needed mega-highway in the Far North.
As the former head of infrastructure at Health NZ Te Whatu Ora — Southern, I saw the early stages of these cuts and the stubborn, nonsensical insistence from Wellington that the hospital project couldn’t possibly go over its strict $1.8 billion budget threshold, set a decade before the project will actually be finished.
We were repeatedly told the country simply couldn’t afford it, forcing short-sighted design sacrifices that will compromise clinical delivery, not to mention operational costs, for generations.
But a glance across the Tasman reveals just how artificial and politically motivated that false ceiling truly is. In Adelaide right now, a remarkably similar-sized hospital project — the New Women’s and Children’s Hospital, featuring a similar bed capacity and delivery timescale — is currently being constructed with a realistic, transparent budget of $A3.2b (around $NZ3.9b).
Australia accepts what a modern hospital actually costs to build safely.
Wellington, meanwhile, prefers to starve the South, pretending a world-class facility can be built on a discount budget while it pours unchecked billions into the North Island roading network.
Worse still, they are hiding the true costs of those northern roads from the public.
The recent report reveals that the government is refusing to release the updated costings and the Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) for the Warkworth to Te Hana road. I had to Google where those two places were. Turns out it is a 26km strip about 60km north of Auckland and 100km south of Whangārei.
It is the first stage of the multi-billion-dollar Northland Expressway.
The Ministry of Transport and NZTA have actively blocked requests under the Official Information Act, citing ‘‘commercial sensitivity’’.
But there is only one logical way to read this secrecy: the economic value of this project is so abysmal that if the public saw the true numbers, it would be politically untenable for the government to proceed.
We already know that the last publicly available BCR for the project, calculated back in 2019, was a dismal 0.7.
That means even before the post-Covid construction cost escalations, the road was projected to return just 70 cents of value for every dollar spent.
Now, with recent estimates pushing the cost of this short 26km stretch toward a staggering $4b, that ratio has undoubtedly plummeted.
When you bring the scales of justice back down south and do a cold, hard analysis of value per person, the hypocrisy is staggering.
The new Dunedin hospital is the primary tertiary health facility for the entire Southern region, built to serve a massive regional catchment of over 330,000 people across Otago and Southland.
For a life-saving asset serving a third of a million citizens for generations, a $1.8b cap represents an investment of roughly $5000 per person served. Yet, Wellington treats this like an insupportable national crisis.
In contrast, look at the Warkworth to Te Hana expressway. Even under generous traffic modeling of 20,000 daily vehicles, pitting it against a projected $4 billion price tag means Wellington is effectively spending an astronomical $200,000 per daily vehicle for a seven-minute reduction in travel time through the Dome Valley.
For comparison, there are about 30,000 daily vehicles between Mosgiel and Dunedin, a distance of 16km.
Any plans for a $4 billion road improvement of SH1? Not a chance.
Four-lane expressways do not treat cancer, they do not reduce emergency department waiting times, they do not save lives.
We deserve a better path forward, and as the Opportunity candidate for Dunedin, that is exactly what I am fighting for. Opportunity wants to take the politics out of infrastructure.
Opportunity advocates for a fundamentally transparent, evidence-based approach to national balance sheets and infrastructure planning.
The path Opportunity offers involves shifting our national priorities away from blank-check highway projects and toward high-value, essential infrastructure: healthcare, regional equity, and public services, as recommended by the independent experts at the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission.
We must demand that the government stops hiding the true costs of its northern pet projects and starts investing our taxpayer dollars where they actually matter; in the health and future of our people.
• Dave Bainbridge-Zafar is the Opportunity candidate for Dunedin in this year’s election.
