PETER WILLIAMS: Aotearoadcone

Aah .. Australia. The Lucky Country, the Big Brown Land with its seemingly limitless supply of valuable minerals waiting to be extracted from that vast interior. It’s hard not to be envious of a nation with its agreeable coastal climate and all those perceived economic and employment opportunities waiting to be exploited.

It cannot be any surprise that with New Zealand in an economic funk, much of it of the Labour government’s making between 2021 and 2023, over 47,000 New Zealanders decided to up sticks and move to Australia in the twelve months.

Yes, 17,000 came the other way but the net loss of population to our nearest neighbour this year means a town the size of Blenheim has left the country.

I’m just back from my second holiday there this year. One was near Melbourne and the most recent other on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane. Apart from the balmy weather in Noosa, the starkest difference between here and there is … road cones.

I know that might read like a trivial observation but we all know this country is infected with them. We’re Aotearoadcone.

I’m probably over sensitive at the moment because a chunk of State Highway 8 near where I live is being resurfaced and it means every time I have to drive to our nearest town of Cromwell I’m susceptible to a fifteen minute delay while I wait for the red light to turn green and a Fulton Hogan pilot vehicle guides us through the road cones. The most galling part of this project is that after starting three weeks ago it’s continuing through to December 19 on a road that seemed in perfectly good condition anyway.

(On top of this, a couple of weeks ago the local lines company did some work on power poles at least ten metres off the road but because their vehicles were parked on the road side, road cones and traffic lights were still deemed necessary. Therefore on a 20 kilometre trip to Cromwell I was forced to stop three times!)

A week in Noosa meant a return trip from Sunshine Coast Airport at Maroochydore, about thirty minutes each way. The roads were beautifully surfaced with what I’ve always known as hot mix bitumen. There’s probably a more technical name but it’s not the noisy chip seal common on most New Zealand roads and which is being used in the extensive road works currently going on in my neighbourhood. Nowhere on those drives to and from the airport did I see a road cone, a repaired pothole or any road works gangs working.

During the week we took a day trip to Caloundra, about 60 kilometres south. It was another easy drive through a combination of suburbia and state highways. We had an identical experience. Smooth, consistently surfaced hot mix roads with no repairs, no road cones and no works gangs.

What’s their secret?

I remember once, a generation ago in the days of the infamous Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, his government had a Minister for Main Roads. I even remember his name - Russ Hinze. Perhaps the State government still has such an appointment.

But it suggested that back then, and probably now, Queenslanders took roads seriously. They realise their importance as the most efficient method of transporting people and goods around a country with a comparatively sparsely located population.

It would seem that Queensland takes the attitude with roads that if you’re going to build them, you build them properly and ensure the foundation and the surfacing won’t require remedial work just months after opening. Compare that with Transmission Gully, north of Wellington, opened only three and half years ago and already requiring over $30 million worth of repairs this summer.

But we have a history of this. Nearly thirty ago a section of the Waikato Expressway just south of Pokeno through to Mercer, opened to much acclaim. Within weeks the road was suffering indentations and needed a patch-up with motorists being diverted. Even now, that part of State Highway 1 is far from smooth, or it was the last time I drove it about 5 years ago.

But after a week of a road cone-free life I was quickly back to reality. Arriving home at Queenstown Airport you only have to drive a kilometre to the massive Frankton intersection construction site. For some reason this project will take four years and will surely cost more than the original budget of $250 million.

Then came my one hour ride home past Lake Hayes and through the Kawarau Gorge, State Highway 6, a busy road by a river which seems to constantly suffer from pot holes and instability. After the perfection of South East Queensland highways it was a sharp reminder that we either don’t have the money to do it right and for keeps or we’re incompetent and can’t.

Or is it that the massive profits reported by the likes of Fulton Hogan and Downer are generated by the need to repair roads regularly?

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Subscribe to Peter William's Substack here