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Home > Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive > Heather du Plessis-Allan: Wayne Brown and Michael Wood's truce on Light Rail isn’t a trivial matter


	Podcast:		Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive
	Episode:		Heather du Plessis-Allan: Wayne Brown and Michael Wood's truce on Light Rail isn’t a trivial matter
	Category:		News & Politics
	Duration:		00:02:21
	Publish Date:		2022-12-12 07:52:30
	Description:		Turns out, Wayne Brown is the guy who says one thing before the election and then says something else afterwards. I was a little surprised at the weekend to see Auckland’s mayor has struck a deal with Transport Minister Michael Wood to call a truce on transport, quit the fighting, and let each of them get their pet projects done. Wayne Brown’s pet project is the Port. He wants to move it, the Government’s not been as keen, but under this truce he’ll be able to work away at that. And what’s Michael Wood’s pet project? Light Rail. Trouble for Wayne is that this is what he said about Light Rail on 16 September: “That’s a project that fails to explain what problem it’s fixing.” “I think the Government will be delighted that I can kill it off.” That’s unequivocal. He said he was killing off Light Rail and now he’s not doing that. This isn’t a trivial matter, Light Rail is expensive. At last count, it could be headed towards $28 billion dollars. You could build Dunedin’s new hospital twenty times for that amount of money. And it’s a dog. It’s not fully underground like it should be, it’s not headed to West Auckland where the houses are like it should be, it’s not even on the right kind of tracks to hook up with our existing trains and the new trains going in the loop under the city. I’m not an idiot. I know politics is about tradeoffs. But if you’re going to do deals, you don’t want to be the guy who has to eat dirt to make the deal. And he just did. He broke his word and gave the Government effectively permission to keep wasting millions on consultants for a project we might just call off at the next election. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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