The Ministry of Works trained generations of architects and engineers and built infrastructure to a standard that corporates like Fletcher and Downer have never reached, but its worst tendency was running bulldozers through landscapes with no consultation or cultural awareness. https://twitter.com/andersen_ellen/status/1285851780530626588

Side note: Rogernomics is the underlying reason for nearly all infrastructure problems in NZ, through both direct and indirect effects that persist to this day.

When NZ’s legacy govt departments were sliced up then sold off at bargain prices, their social and technical role in NZ’s economy was completely overlooked.

Works and Electricity were places that provided deep job training for uni graduates who would go on to become the experts leading construction, engineering and manufacturing companies all over NZ while Railways trained generations of machinists, engineers and mechanics.

Nowadays, contracts go to the lowest bidder, projects are run by careerist managers without deep low level experience delivering quality infrastructure and major contractors are running marginal business models on the verge of collapse, while spending fuck all on R&D or training.

And then Railways. Their role in providing job training in regions where there was no polytechnic was never recognised. Although notorious for wastefulness and unproductive older lifers resisting change, the organisation was not beyond reform.

But the end result was the one of modern NZ’s most embarrassing strategic failures, running the national network into the ground, noping out of finally completing electrification, failing to extend infrastructure, mothballing hundreds of km of regional lines and closing services.

People often blame the government or ministers for failing to build things. It’s an appealingly simple narrative but it doesn’t get close to explaining the full scale of why NZ can’t have nice things like urban light rail or a functional nationwide passenger train network.

Not only is the situation shaped by the chasm between policy and implementation which ministers dare not cross, but also by the economic and social structure of the contractors and local bodies which surround the government and absorb any attempt to change things.