PPP is acronym for "pork barrel"?

State-owned Enterprises Minister, Trevor Mallard, was thinking out loud on TV the other night and suggested the new Kiwirail's locomotives could be assembled in New Zealand. I did not see the Agenda program, but the reportage of it conveys a whiff of policy on the hoof. A bright idea, now go follow it up and see if it floats.

Without thinking too hard, I can think of several reasons why assembling the locos locally would be a good idea on its own merits: skill retention, reducing exposure to forex risk and a certain amount of protection from technology changes dictated elsewhere....as well as the opportunity to innovate locally.

National's Gerry Brownlee opposed the idea, conjuring up images of "the glory days of NZ Railways, which everyone knew was a huge waste of taxpayer resources."

In Brownlee's view it seems we either don't make the locos at all, or we are recreating the Railways Department. He sees nothing in between.

Brownlee also said "this smacks of pork-barrel politics" because one of the rail workshops that might do the work is in Trevor Mallard's local electorate.

On that basis, no government contracts should be awarded in Auckland without over 20 local MPs (and several list) being accused of pork barrelling. Same goes for Welington, Christchurch and Dunedin.....and all those rural seats held by National, I suppose.

Clearly stupid. But par for the course from Brownlee who too often falls off the far end of the "stupid people" meter at my house.

Brownlee hasn't thought this through. Nothing new there. National is the party who want to download state services and functions to the private sector via Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). It seems more than slightly bizarre and hypocritical for Brownless to be accusing anyone of "pork barrel" politics when National will be handing out state-funded contracts like lollies from Santa's elves at a Christmas parade.

The thrust of National's approach to public services is to allegedly reduce cost to the taxpayer by giving contracts to their supporters in private business to deliver the service. If there have been any funder / provider situations that really ended up saving money and providing better service, I've yet to see it. The contract management and compliance monitoring costs create an entire new bureaucracy that National then describes as waste. Ask any local body, or ARTA, how much they spend while "saving" money on funder / provider management overheads. Why don't we have unified ticketing on Auckland public transport? Why don't the bus routes integrate with the trains? The list goes on...and it comes back to the failings in the funde / provider model National wants to convert everything they possibly can over to. A big trough full of tax money for private business to feed on and effectively not acountable to the users of the service.

Given what Brownlee says, Naitonal's policy can only be seen as pork-barrelling by design....and thousands of new jobs monitoring the pork.