Tell them where to put their road tolls and PPP!

PLEASE FORWARD TO YOUR CONTACTS
Below is a pro-forma submission you can use if you wish, to send a clear message to the government about your opposition to a privatised, tolled motorway tunnel planned for Auckland.

This ultimately affects everyone throughout New Zealand, the views of international capital are being specifically sought via this process, and submissions from people anywhere must be accepted.

Please delete this CAP preamble and send this twice, to:

Transit NZ, email: waterview.connection@transit.govt.nz

Then to:

Waterview Tunnel PPP Procurement Steering Group, email: waterview@treasury.govt.nz

Submissions to BOTH close this Friday, April 11, 2008. But asap if you can't by their deadline... they have till June 30 before their final reports go to the Government.

Thanks
Citizens Against Privatisation
Auckland
Ph 09 836 6389
0r 09 828 0238

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Submission On State Highway 20/Western Ring Route link Tunnel through Waterview, Auckland, aka the Waterview Connection Tunnel proposal

From - Name: .........................................................................................

Address: .................................................................................................

.........................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................

email: ................................................................................

Phone: ....................................................................

Organisation, if any: .............................................................................

I wish to make verbal submissions (May/June) -

Yes/No: ......................

The government is seeking to gauge the "market appetite" for a public private partnership (PPP) with road tolls for the SH20 tunnel extension to link the new Mt Roskill extension to the Manukau/Airport motorway to the North Western motorway at Waterview, Auckland.

Given that many previous consultations have repeatedly returned overwhelming public opposition to road tolls and privatised public services:

First, I am not hungry for free-market arrangements to gradually take over the running of New Zealand and I strongly object to these proposals.

PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP (PPP)

(the most common form of water privatisation worldwide, preferred ownership form also of transnational infrastructure/services companies for roads, schools, prisons, hospitals etc)

• I am totally opposed to any form of privatised roading.

• Roads should be funded from progressive taxation, based on the principle of ability to pay. Wealthy companies and rich individuals should pay more taxes - not be rewarded with this tax cut by any other name.

• According to Transit NZ's own written material, this motorway extension is designed primarily for freight use. There are no plans to make the roads safer for cars, or to lower road maintenance costs, by providing better rail freight options.

• It has never been proved that PPPs are either a sound economic proposition nor any more efficiently constructed and managed. On the contrary, international experience shows the opposite. PPP agreements invariably protect the state as well as the business signatories with commercial secrecy - so none of us would know what deals have been done - commonly, annual payments by the state to a PPP consortium, state-guaranteed inflation-protected minimum tolls collection - that we would be forced to pay for through more than a generation.

• If this thoroughfare for private profit didn't go broke beforehand - when it could be onsold to another bargain hunter for the remaining years - at the end of the 35-year proposed contract period the tunnel would be in need of massive upgrades - for which the PPP stakeholder would not be liable. This is what National and Labour call sharing the risk - it's all on us, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

• Since local and central government can obtain loans necessary for infrastructure at a more favourable rate than private interests - and a PPP would contract-out construction, with conditions, just as the crown now unfortunately would anyway - so-called guaranteed speed or innovation or efficiency don't exist. The lack of will to efficiently provide basic public services, remains that shown us by successive administrations since the mid-1980s.

• This appalling situation is not acceptable to me and must be reversed by the governments we democratically elect starting to do what we need and want.

ROAD TOLLS

• Road tolls are another user pays device which - like fuel taxes - impact most harshly on wage and salary earners, and particularly on those with fixed incomes.

• They are designed to shift the taxation burden from the wealthy to those who already spend their incomes every week on daily necessities - prices of which would rocket, solely to cover profits and the road tolls paid by freight companies.

• When business interests own arterial roading, any enhanced public transport is regarded as a threat to their profits. This has been experienced overseas as a limiting of improved public transport options, along with draconian regulations that prevent the use of alternative routes so motorists are forced to use the private tollway.

• Transit NZ proclaims that a full tunnel for the Waterview Connection is "the better and cheaper option" - but it is guesstimated to pay its 35-year PPP owners at least $1.89 billion to $2.3 billion. Back in 1996, this motorway connection link was costed at $70 million. That's right, that's extra cost to us all now of at least $1.82 billion! If it is so important to the Auckland, and they say therefore to the nation's economy, why wasn't it made a priority and built then? But the greater the importance this project does have, the stronger the justification, if we cannot prevent this motorway's construction, for borrowing and general taxes - not petrol taxes or government road tolls either - being used to fund it.

• According to Transit NZ's own written material, this motorway extension is designed primarily for freight use. There are no plans to provide better rail freight options. The businesses that would use this tunnel would not only recover the GST they pay on tolls, and pass tolls on in inflated prices, but would claim the balance as a taxable expense. The costs of a massively profitable new industry of privatised roads, for which the government says it intends this PPP to be the model structure, would be paid for entirely by the already struggling majority working class people.

• Transit NZ has developed a national Toll Strategy Project (TSP), supposed to be imposed first in Whangaparaoa as road tolls on ALPURT B2 and PENLINK - which is also threatened, this year, with a PPP. Toll debtors would not only be excluded from these roads, but would be prosecuted with the maximum possible fines for moving vehicle violations, according to promoters, the Rodney District Council.

• The most recent study of "road pricing", ARPES, supported in 2006 only by big business, central and local government, and totally rejected by ordinary people (80 percent of submitters), is still being considered, including by the current Royal Commission into Auckland Regional Governance and its Rates Inquiry recommendations component. Huge investment into more than a decade of government studies on road tolls says, kia tupato! beware! Their new world dream is of tolls on street corridors - fence to fence - GPS/satellite tracking of people on all streets and pavements, running, cycling, in pushchairs or wheelchairs, on skateboards or walkers. So exclusion from the street for unpaid tolls would mean house arrest and mass criminalisation...

• So-called public transport in the Auckland region is privatised, expensive, inaccessible, and unavailable: in peak hours only 7 percent of Aucklanders have access to it, with best prospects of improvement to only 14 percent by 2016, compared with Wellington's current 17 percent, and London's 85 percent before congestion charges were introduced there. We live where we can afford to live, and work where we can find work, except when deprived of it, and we travel daily as we must to jobs, education, for health or leisure, by whatever means we can sustain. Roads are a necessity of life. They're the way we get around, not a luxury, and not yet another means of robbing us.

• Mass opposition to road tolls continues to gain strength around the world. The people on the Isle of Skye defeated road tolls on the Skye Bridge in a nine-year struggle, and ensured no more road tolls in Scotland. Sydneysiders' boycott of the Cross City Tunnel and its tolls, overcame funneling and secret deals to bankrupt its PPP consortium in only two years, including a $100m loss by local Techscape owner, Bilfinger Berger. Two million people in the UK crashed a Downing St website signing a petition against their Labour government's planned nationwide road pricing and vehicle tracking policy. Ordinary people getting organised and local fightback have been the key to the scrapping of road tolls, whether state or private, everywhere they have been imposed.

• The working people of this country paid for from taxes and built every road - somehow, leaning on our shovels for what was once a living wage... Though the land beneath the roads has already been colonised and a price put on it, though it will remain no matter who says they own it, it is not available for highway robbery and despotism.

• I am totally opposed to tolls on roads.

• I am totally opposed to any Public Private Partnership in NZ.

I wish to be heard at an oral submission process in Auckland.

Signed: ........................................................................................

Date: ............................................................................................