Kiwirail's asset revaluation - because Labour concealed the truth with accounting: UPDATED

Regular readers will remember that I’ve been long critical of the bizarre Treasury valuations of the social policy/heritage/commodity sector subsidy project called Kiwirail. So the latest report that this “asset” is to be revalued hardly surprises me. However, I am enormously dismayed at the unprofessional politically driven basis for valuation of this business which was instigated by the previous Labour government. It is one thing to throw taxpayers’ money at buying it back, another to hide what a real dud it is on the government accounts. Let’s bear in mind that neither Labour, nor the church of the Holy gRailway the Greens, have any interest in really showing what it’s worth.

So let’s start with the latest announcement. What does it mean?

The short version is “I told you so… again”. What was reported before has finally happened.

The land assets will remain under the NZRC, which has in fact been the case since 1 April 1982 when it was created. There was always a peppercorn rental of NZ$1 paid for use of the land under the rail corridor, which given that the Crown isn’t paid for the land under the road network, has always seemed an easy compromise in dealing with the thorny issue of valuing strips of land with little alternative use (especially roads, given land without access to roads has greatly diminished value). This should not be controversial, but let’s be honest about what the valuation of that asset should be – the market value of the land if sold. A study commissioned by the MoT valued it, in 2001, at NZ$462 million. This could be indexed to today’s values and priced, but I doubt it would top NZ$1 billion. Bear in mind this was never privatised in the first place, because every time TranzRail closed a rail line (which was rare), the corridor would, ultimately, be able to be sold by the Crown.  So the valuation was done professionally based on assumptions of the value of neighbouring land being applied, in most instances, to a narrow inaccessible corridor.

Yet the Annual Report 2011-2010 indicates land is valued at just over NZ$6 billion. This is quite absurd, so is the asset write down going to address this? Let’s continue.

The transfer of the other assets to a separate SOE is exactly what happened before the last privatisation, when NZ Rail Ltd was set up. The logic of this is clear, as the issues around rail land and its use are complex. Partly because of Treaty of Waitangi claims over Crown land, partly because the confiscation of past land under the Public Works Act means that if the land isn’t to be used for rail purposes, the previous owners or their successors must be offered the land back.

So the new SOE will be responsible for everything, other than the land, just like before. This is already raising the spectre of a new privatisation among those who treasure Kiwirail because they think it will be the saviour in the event oil prices and climate change suddenly decimate the viability of road transport.

Bill English states the total assets are being written down from NZ$13.4 billion to NZ$6.7 billion, this being both the land and the operations business. A simple halving of value, indicating a lot of in depth work was not done into this at all. The Kiwirail press release explains this further by saying that the non-land business will carry a valuation of up to NZ$1.3 billion “reflecting the revenue generated by it” rather than the current NZ$7.8 billion.  That's helpful in analysing this further.

The land component of the valuation seems to retain most of its book value, as it will be worth around NZ$5.4 billion, yet wont be expected to make a return on most of that asset (given the land under the roads isn’t expected to either). A small writedown of around NZ$600 million, but not nearly enough. Has the land under the rail network really shot up in value by a factor of 11 since 2001?  Kiwirail's Annual Report indicates that a professional valuation was done, no doubt in good faith. However, does that really reflect the market value of this land? If a railway line across a field, or behind some warehouses or houses is sold, are there really any other likely buyers beyond the neighbouring property owners? The discrepancy between valuations seems extraordinary, and I doubt whether valuations of railway corridors are done frequently enough in New Zealand to enable it to be equated to other such valuations.  

Setting that to one side, the valuation of NZ$1.3 billion for the operating business still seems wildly excessive. It was bought for NZ$665 million. How has it suddenly become worth double that since 2008? Is it revenue? Well no.

In 2011 it had gross revenue of NZ$667 million. It also got nearly NZ$345 million from taxpayers (yes you’ve spent more than a billion on this one and counting). However, its operating costs were NZ$567 million. Cool NZ$100 million profit before government right? No. Once you remove roughly NZ$60 million in subsidies for operating Auckland and Wellington passenger rail services, you’re down to about NZ$40 million. Not so good then.

Bearing in mind that the NZ$345 million from taxpayers is a capital grant to replace and renew some assets, you’ll also see it’s clear this isn’t a sustainable business able to renew its capital.  Otherwise it would take out debt that would be repaid over the depreciated life of those assets, which of course is not going to happen (but Treasury of course has taken out debt to pay for the nationalisation and all of the capital grants).  Bear in mind also that the market valuation when Toll Rail was nationalised was only NZ$435 million. Has the government really trebled the value of this business even though it has never paid a dividend yet? 

One guess as to why Opposition Finance spokespeople haven't asked that - because they fully supported this destruction of taxpayer wealth.

So the valuation continues to be generous in market terms. Kiwirail, if sold, would not go for the sort of money on its accounts, even if it continued to get hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and grants every year.

The use of replacement cost as an asset valuation gives a false impression of the value of an asset if it to be sold, simply because it does not generate sufficient revenue to justify ever replacing the asset on the scale (and in the same way) as it was originally acquired.

My previous post on this was right.

Kiwirail is not an “investment” in its current form, but rather an emotionally laden piece of heritage that mixes some commercial elements, some local public policy elements with a lot of hyperbole and wishful thinking.

Debates about pouring taxpayers money into it need to be based on some market based accounts, accounts that might actually show it can generate a reasonable rate of return based on what it could be sold for – but which wouldn’t ever justify the money poured into it so far.

For that reason, given both National and Labour have thrown over a billion into this taxpayer owned bonfire, and the Greens are just gagging to throw billions more at it, means that having debates based on reasoned balanced analysis are absent when most of those involved prefer conspiracy theories around corruption, hyperbolic evangelism about rail “saving the economy” and economic illiteracy.

Most of my past posts on this subject are summarised in this one, on what it would take to make the railway a viable business.

It includes the following ones:

-  The Greens posted a link to a great presentation on Kiwirail, which actually destroys most of their own self-generated myths about the business.  I link to it here.

-  Where is the rail network viable?

-  Bill English admits the rail network is virtually worthless

Another good read is this from Ross Clark which explains that the "failure" of rail privatisation is because there are some serious questions about the viability of rail at all.

UPDATE:  I know this article has been linked to by a couple of forums.  Please read the articles at the bottom and indeed the presentation I linked to here. You can romanticise as much as you like, and I have a stack of Rails magazines from the 1980s and 1990s, and the NZ Railway Observer as well, so I am a rail enthusiast at a personal, emotional level, but the hard economic facts are that rail is an expensive way to move goods given the high capital costs of the bespoke equipment and infrastructure.  Only when volumes are high, frequent and over long distances do the fuel and personnel advantages start to offset this.  It's about economics.  In the US, rail freight succeeds in spite of serious undercharging of trucks on untolled interstate highways, in NZ Road User Charges contribute to a very different picture.

Northern Gateway toll road - politics over reason

I've had a fair few years experience of consulting in the transport sector, and one of the most basic tenets of establishing fully electronic free flow tolling systems is enforcement.  So the news that the New Zealand Transport Agency is finally going to get around to recovering fines for recividist toll violators on the Northern Gateway toll road made me laugh at how a state body can so egregiously ignore collecting money for the use of a service, when the incentives are so badly wrong.

The Northern Gateway toll road north of Auckland is a political creation though.

You see the Clark Administration had decided to take the ever so brave and bold step to allow tolls to be introduced on new roads, with authorisation by Order in Council.  The Land Transport Management Act, which included a wide range of measures including the politicisation of land transport funding priorities and removal of a common approach for economic appraisal of state funding of all modes, included the provision on tolling.

This created two imperatives.

Firstly there was the question of what would be the first agency to apply to toll a road.  The choice was between local government in the form of territorial authorities (and two councils at the time had toll road proposals in the pipeline) and the then Transit New Zealand, which of course was a central government Crown entity responsible for the state highway network.

Transit was determined that it should be in charge, being a central government body and Transit Chief Executive Dr. Robin Dunlop found just the project.  It was then called ALPURT B2, and is the road we all know as the Northern Gateway today.  It fitted the bill from an engineer's perspective in that it was the northern motorway extension that should have been built after the Albany to Orewa section, but which was delayed for RMA reasons.  This delay meant that it could now, suddenly, be treated as a stand alone project.

From a tolling perspective, practically speaking, it seemed to fit well.   It is a bypass of an existing slower and longer state highway, so conceptually users would pay to save time and fuel by using the new road.   

From Transit's institutional perspective it provided a "ready to go" project that could be tolled, especially since there were no others anywhere near "as good" for tolling.  In New Zealand, most road projects are neither big enough nor involve stretches of motorway without interchanges for tolling to be practical without it diverting large numbers of users onto other routes.

Transit not only wanted to have the first toll road, it wanted to be responsible for all future toll roads, because of the need to establish a whole range of functions and activities it hadn't undertaken before - in particular customer service and billing.

Transit, in full collusion with its "arms length funding agency" Transfund, subsequently Land Transport New Zealand (LTNZ), proceeded to blank out the history around this project.

ALPURT B2 as a highway project was originally costed at under NZ$100 million in 1999, but estimates of costs of big highway projects were not good a decade or so ago, and the massive increase in spending on roads undertaken by the last Labour government (especially after 2002 when the Greens were no longer necessary) had inflated construction costs.   Costs started heading towards $200 million.  The benefit/cost ratio of ALPURT B2 was good, over $3 for every $1 spent on it, but with cost increases that was being whittled away.   This was a good thing for Transit, LTNZ and the government because it enabled the impression to be given that ALPURT B2 would not be funded from fuel taxes and road user charges in the National Land Transport Programme like other roads.   With the RMA issues around the project getting settled, the issue of funding approval was going to come up.

This suited Ministers, because they had wanted the focus of the National Land Transport Programme to be on commuter motorway projects in central Auckland, such as Grafton Gully, the Spaghetti Junction improvements, Mt. Roskill extension of SH20, Upper Harbour Motorway and so on (don't talk about tolling motorways in metropolitan Auckland because that will cost votes, and means traffic stays on untolled roads).  

So whilst money was being dripfed into completing the investigation and design work for ALPURT B2, it was all set up so that the project would be deferred.  Bear in mind that it was still a high value project from an economic point of view.  Now, with the Land Transport Management Act passed Transit felt "obliged" to consider it for tolling, and so the project began to morph.

Transit decided that if it was going to charge motorists a toll to use a highway, it better not be any sort of highway, but be the best highway they had ever been on.  The original design for ALPURT B2 was to have inclines and curves that were not all to 100 km/h standard, because the geography of the area it went through would make it prohibitively expensive.  The biggest issue being what to do at Johnson's Hill.  The original plan was to have the road climb up it and go through a cutting.   That was seen as being inferior to trucks which would have to slow down excessively (especially if they are paying a toll) so Transit went about to pursue its other engineering goal - build a tunnel in Auckland.

Tunnels on state highways in New Zealand are rare, the geology makes them expensive to build compared to say Sydney, so they have never been good value unless absolutely necessary.  Transit had never built one in its institutional history, the last new road tunnel built having been the Terrace Tunnel in Wellington completed in 1978 by the Ministry of Works, which was justified because there was no other way to bypass central Wellington without building an eyesore along the waterfront.  

Transit saw the future as having many more tunnels.  There was already pressure to change the Victoria Park Viaduct widening project into a tunnel (which is exactly what happened), and the extension of SH20 to Waterview was also expected to have tunnels (and will).  So tunnel construction and operation in Auckland was something Transit was keen to get started, along with tolls.  See the focus of an engineering based government agency?

So it was decided that tunnels would be built.  Another "innovation" was to build a four lane viaduct  over the Waiwera River, even though the highway would have to narrow to two lanes directly to the north (and there was no prospects of funds to widen that in the near future).  It was also decided to build a viaduct over Nukumea Stream to smooth RMA negotiations.

Certainly a series of government decisions caused the costs of the road to blow out.  One early one was Labour's decision to remove the cost/benefit funding threshold which once encouraged Transit to ensure project costs were contained to get project approval.  The funding threshold was abolished, as the Clark government wanted a whole host of major projects approved.  A philosophy National has continued.

In engineering, projects can be "gold-plated" by including elements that are not essential, but which raise the cost.   Here, Transit was "green-plating" by arguing that the tunnel was less environmentally destructive than a cutting.   The additional cost? $85 million.  The Ministerial Advisory Group on Roading Costs in 2006 found "the Board papers (including resolutions) are silent on whether Land Transport NZ viewed the changes as justified. This does not appear to have been a rigorous review for what was a costly change to the project." No there wasn't.  However, cost effectiveness was already declared to be less important under Labour than it had been before, and this was about building a flash toll road "the first fully electronic toll road" in Transit promotional literature.

By now (2006) the cost of this road had skyrocketed to $359 million.  Bear in mind it was $82 million in 1997, had gone to $138 million in 2001, $218 million in 2004 and by 2006 had been green-plated to $359 million, including several million of costs of toll equipment on site.

Never mind, tolls will pay for it right?  Well no.  Prices can't be set at any level.  There is a revenue maximising level above which too many motorists will choose to use the parallel untolled route, and below which you're not really encouraging too many more to use it.   So when that was modelled, it came that at best, half of the cost of the road could be recovered from tolls.  The other half would come from a normal funding grant, paid for by fuel taxes and road user charges, in other words from all road users.  Yes, ALPURT B2, sorry, Northern Gateway toll road, is subsidised.

Now a fair argument can be made that everyone using the toll road also pays either fuel taxes or road user charges whilst on the road, a secondary argument is that those using the current road also benefit from the new one because of less delays, so this subsidy is not necessarily a big deal.   The state highway network at the time was self funding from revenue collected from users.

It was agreed that Treasury would raise some public debt to pay for the tolled component, to be repaid by the toll (after collection costs are paid).  That is what the toll is paying for.

However, that's not all.  Whilst the cost of building ALPURT also includes the cost of installing electronic tolling equipment, that isn't enough to implement tolls.   It also needs a transaction processing centre, customer contact centre, with accounts payable, receivable etc.  It also needs to connect to the motor vehicle registry to correlate images of number plates to vehicle owners for billing and enforcement purposes.

Now you might think that this all sounds perfect to be outsourced, besides the provision of access to the motor vehicle registry.  No.  Transit and LTNZ decided this would be a separate, bigger project, called the Toll Systems Project.  That would be over $60 million more, just to collect the tolls.

The philosophy behind this was empire building.  The idea was presented that this was the first of "a series" of toll roads (none of which Transit was very transparent about), and that a single back office billing operation would be the "most efficient solution".  However, there were a few flies in the ointment on that idea.

1.  It was after the 2005 election, and Labour had already surrendered to NZ First the only other viable tolling project in the country - Tauranga Harbour Link.  Without the number of transactions from that project, Northern Gateway would be an orphan.  Transit had identified no other major tolling projects likely to proceed in the next few years, with the Weiti Crossing project of the then Rodney District not looking viable and talk of Auckland congestion charging simply political suicide for now.  In short, the case for a single large bespoke billing system for lots of toll transactions had become nonsense.

2.  Given the lack of transactions, it wouldn't be viable to pay for the Toll Systems Project from toll revenue.  In other words, the Northern Gateway toll would not be able to charge enough to pay for the capital costs of the back office systems required to bill the toll.  The operating costs could be recovered, but the capital costs of tolling would have to be born by all other road users through fuel taxes and road user charges, despite there being no discernible benefits to them from doing so.

3. Land Transport New Zealand already long had a billing activity in house, used for paying road user charges, handling fuel tax refunds and motor vehicle and driver licencing transactions.  It saw advantages in taking on this function as well.

So what was decided by Transit and Land Transport New Zealand (which Labour subsequently merged, because it didn't believe in the accountability implied in separating a funder from a bidder for funds), was that the Toll Systems Project would proceed, regardless of the fact that only one toll road would open within the next five years or so, ignoring that the tolls on that road would not be able to contribute one cent towards the capital costs of the billing system.

So all road users in New Zealand have paid for a toll billing system run by the New Zealand government in house, for one toll road that will be, in part obsolete, by the time the next toll road comes about.

Therefore, it is hardly a surprise that the tolling system itself isn't incentivised to pursue debtors who ignore fines.  The fines themselves are not revenue for the toll system, but Crown revenue. Yet pursuing fines does mean that toll revenue increases because the incentive to evade tolls reduces considerably.   Curiously, NZTA's own reporting on tolling claims there is an "industry standard" of 10% evasion of electronic free flow tolling worldwide.  A fascinating figure, but it's wrong although it makes 4.3% look awfully good.  5% is average from my experience, so the performance at the moment is rather average.

Even today in 2012, the next toll road is likely to be Tauranga's Eastern Link motorway, with Wellington's Transmission Gully after that (and unlikely to open before 2020).  By then the infrastructure and systems behind the Tolling back office will be long obsolete.   In short, the Toll Systems Project was an abject waste of money.

A better solution would have been to cut ones losses and simply outsource the entire billing function for the Northern Gateway toll road, because it is not a big road, it only has around 14,000 trips a day on average.   Sydney's much maligned Cross City Tunnel manages around 30,000 vehicles a day, Melbourne's Eastlink manages 190,000 a day, Brisbane's Clem7 around 25,000 a day, Sydney's Harbour Bridge and Tunnel manage over 250,000 a day.  In other words, by global standards the Northern Gateway toll road is low volume, which makes a bespoke collection system even more absurd.  What's a bet that Vodafone, Contact Energy or Sky TV could have done it for them.   However, that would be an anathema to the Clark administration's opposition to anything that smells of "privatisation".  So instead we have what might be the only customer service and billing operation set up that hasn't been paid for by the people paying the bills!

Indeed, it is hard to avoid the possible conclusion that it wasn't worth building as a toll road at all.  

However, it is done now, and a better option all up would be to sell it and the toll system with it, on the basis that someone else might be able to make a better go of operating it.   A utility company, for example, can do billing and chase debts far more effectively than a government agency.  Besides, as a privately owned highway it would still have a parallel state owned route through Orewa and Waiwera.  (Before some on the left get agitated, France is covered in privately owned motorways and almost all of the toll motorways in Australia are privately owned).

The bigger lesson is what a debacle can ensue when something as simple as a road project gets mired in politics and the institutional incentives of bureaucracies.   In this case we had:

- Politicians wanting to prioritise lower value roads over this one, but still wanting it built;

- Politicians wanting to allow tolls, but expecting a toll project to emerge to prove they were right in allowing tolls (but not the toll project in the electorate of the coalition partner);

- Central government bureaucrats wanting to take charge of running tolls and keen to find whatever project would be practical, ready to build (even if not exactly economically viable) for tolls, before a local authority did so (Tauranga);

- Bureaucrats wanting to build a tunnel and a really high quality road (because they are engineers who get excited about these things), so those paying the toll would be "wowed" by the road and it enabled them to silence the concerns of those objecting to the road because of environmental impacts, regardless of the cost;

-  Bureaucrats wanting to take charge of running a single national toll system because it enabled them to wider their remit and authority into customer service and billing, regardless of the fact that the billing itself couldn't pay for it;

-  Bureaucrats already running a kind of billing/customer service system wanting to widen their remit and secure more money to expand their operation;

- Politicians uninterested in pushing for outsourcing or private investment, bureaucrats not incentivised to push for it either.

Not one of these decisions was seen as creating consequences for the other, but the result has been well over $100 million wasted because of it, on one road project. 

Consider this, if the road was privately owned would there even be an issue of people not paying the toll and getting away with it on the scale currently seen?

Finally, the National government, to be fair, had nothing to do with any of this, because it was all over bar the ribbon cutting when the 2008 election happened.  This was a Clark Administration special.   However, it is rather poor form for the Nats to not contain things now. I have three simple recommendations:

1.  Put the Transport Registry Centre of NZTA up for sale (with the toll system) keeping data management of the driving and motor vehicle licensing databases in-house and separate.
2.   Require NZTA to outsource provision of tolling services for any future toll roads by competitive tender;
3.   Put the Northern Gateway Toll Road up for sale (or even lease for 50 years). 

Not everyone on public transport would have driven

I saw a press release from the government's uber agency on land transport (set up by the Clark Administration to get rid of the funder-provider split that saw decisions split between government agencies, making them difficult to control directly) New Zealand Transport Agency that seemed otherwise innocuous.

It is about a series of bus lanes opening in Christchurch on the main highway south of the city (curiously it links to a website that hasn't been updated since 2010 -  Christchurch has changed since then, and there is no map of the lanes actually opening - well done).  I'm not particularly objecting to the bus lanes, they may well make sense here.  What caught my eye was this absurd statement:

"A full bus equates to 40 fewer cars on Christchurch roads"

Pardon me, but this is unadulterated bullshit, whatever way you look at it.

Even if we assume that a full bus really is a full bus (people seated and standing), it might at best have 70 or so passengers.  The only way it could mean 40 fewer cars on the roads is if everyone on that bus would have driven a car or ridden in a car with someone on that bus.

That assumption is quite ludicrous.  

If a bus doesn't operate, there are two broad options for the user.  Travel by another means or don't travel at all (which can include changes in destination).  To assume all bus users would drive, or ride a car driven by someone on the bus is nonsense.   

Yes, some would.  

However, some would catch a ride with someone who is already driving.   That isn't adding a car to the road.

Some may bike, some may walk. Both of those options are environmentally preferable to the bus.

Some will decide not to travel at all, and may undertake the trip purpose elsewhere.  In the longer term, it may mean people relocate to a place closer to work, or choose a different job.  Not all trips occur regardless.   It is false to presume all bus trips are commutes.

In other words, to grossly simplify transport mode and trip choice options as being "catch public transport or drive a car" is to exaggerate the importance of public transport.  It is one option.  It can attract people from driving, but many users are those for whom driving isn't a reasonable alternative in any case.

If people are attracted from cars to buses, then all well and good.  Given the bus companies and their passengers are getting allocated a third of the road "for free", you'd hope it does work.    However, let's not pretend buses are full of otherwise drivers.  

Of course in Auckland it's even more ludicrous, because there it is trains that in part attract people from buses - but that is an uncomfortable fact the railevangelists would prefer to sideline - that many of the people riding public transport are not people who would otherwise hop in their own cars and jam up the roads, but people who wouldn't travel otherwise (and are getting a heavily subsidised trip for the privilege).

Why do the Greens get such an easy ride? Part Two - 50 questions that should have been asked of the Greens

As I wrote previously, it appears the Greens are having a media honeymoon.  However, is this justified?  Do the Greens not have policies that could be seen as controversial?  Do their MPs not make statements that deserve further scrutiny?

Well I have composed a long list of questions I think journalists should ask, and more importantly questions YOU should ask your local Green candidate, especially if you are thinking about voting Green.   You may wonder if the Greens are quite so cuddly and inoffensive as the media makes them out to be.

So here it is - 50 questions to ask the Green Party (and one light-hearted one at the end)

My only other question is, why hasn't anyone else been asking them?...

Does your Treaty of Waitangi policy that “All claimants to have the opportunity to have their land and resources returned to them” include claims of private land?  If not, why is that not clear?

Do the Greens still believe Sue Kedgley’s claim that it is wrong to “shift responsibility for health and improving diets from the state to society and to convince people that public health is all about personal responsibility"?  If so, how do see the state leading responsibility for people changing their diets, how would the state adequately replace personal responsibility?

What are “all reasonable steps to prevent immigration numbers and the sale of land to rich immigrants from having an adverse impact on Aotearoa/NZ and its Taonga.”?  How can they have an adverse impact?  What is a rich immigrant?  What will an immigrant do to land than a locally born New Zealander wouldn't? 

How does the Green Party plan to implement its policy to ”Minimise exposure to electromagnetic radiation especially for children and pregnant women”?  How many TV and radio stations would you shut down?  Will you want to close wifi networks at schools and home?  Will you demand children and pregnant women not use laptops, TVs or any other electrical appliance?  Will you demand all homes with children and pregnant women to be outside mobile phone coverage?  Does the party understand how pervasive EMR is and has been for decades?  Does it understand that visible light is electromagnetic radication, and if not, how can anyone trust the Greens on science in other fields?

Do the Greens still believe it is ok to frighten people about non-ionising radiation from mobile phone towers, despite the complete absence of evidence about negative health effects? Is it appropriate for the leader of a major political party to engage in name calling when someone calls him out on not scaremongering Radio NZ transmitter sites, which emit more of the same type of radiation and have done so for decades?

Do the Greens still believe there is a media conspiracy against them on this issue because telcos advertise in the media? What evidence do they have of this?  Could it just be that your science is extremely flimsy and the media refuses to engage with such ignorance?

Do the Greens trust potatoes still, or do they stand by Jeanette Fitzsimon’s press release of 1999 that it was then "the last Xmas when you could trust potatoes"?  Wasn’t all of the fuss over genetic engineering in 2002 just scaremongering?  How many people have been killed, hurt or harmed by genetic engineering anywhere in the world? 

What do the Greens mean about  “Recognise ancestral land ownership in rural areas” for Maori?  Why shouldn’t private land owners in rural areas be worried?  What will you stop them doing?  What isn't recognised now?

What did Catherine Delahunty mean when she said that the Pakeha nation is "racist"?  Does she stand by her use of the term “genocidal spindoctors” to describe National Party speechwriters in 2005?  Does she stand by her hope that Maori will be the largest cultural grouping in New Zealand by the late 21^st century?  Is this also Green policy?  Why is it that other parties don't care about the ethnic composition of the country?

When Catherine Delahunty said “We have plenty of beaten women; gutted communities and whanau living in state housing that have never had proper electricity or water supplies. But lots of Pakeha are drinking wine and surfing, and they say so loudly without saying a word, would you please shut up about the connection between racism and poverty” is she blaming Pakeha for Maori women being beaten up?  Why are Pakeha who drink wine and surf to blame for beaten women?

Do the Greens agree with Catherine Delahunty when she describes Pakeha as having "colonial privilege" even if they were born in New Zealand?  At what point can Pakeha be described by Catherine Delahunty as being equal to Maori as New Zealand citizens with equal rights, if ever?  Do you think Pakeha voters of the Greens know that you believe that?

Do the Greens agree with Kennedy Graham when he said “The political rights we enjoy today are to be calibrated by the responsibility we carry for tomorrow.”?  What political rights does he think should be “calibrated” and what does he mean by that?  When he said “Individual freedoms are no longer unlicensed, but henceforth subordinate to the twin principles of survival and sustainable living”, what freedoms do the Greens want to “licence”?  What individual freedoms must be subordinate?

Don’t the Greens think Kennedy Graham flying to London to discuss climate change at taxpayers’ expense is remarkably hypocritical?  How many more long haul flights will Green MPs seek to undertake to support fighting climate change and why?

Does the Green Party still share the view of Sue Kedgley that “We need to challenge the doctrine of free trade and accept that people's right to food, to be free from hunger, must have priority over an ideological fixation on allowing market forces to prevail at all costs” so abandoning New Zealand’s long standing bi-partisan trade policy goal of opening up markets to its agricultural products?  Does it share her view supporting the official French policy to effectively continue the EU’s highly subsidised highly protectionist Common Agricultural Policy?  Does it believe that free trade actually really means highly subsidising exports?  If so, why? What future do the Greens see in New Zealand's farming sector if farmers face a world that is protectionist, subsidised and engaging in "food sovereignty" policies?  

Why is it good value for taxpayers to have spent $1.3 billion on a railway that private companies would only have paid a quarter of that for?  Why do you think the private sector hasn't bothered investing in it, despite you being convinced of "peak oil" and that the end of mass use of the private car and road transport is nigh?

Do the Greens still think that it was appropriate to blame the Brisbane floods on climate change linked to the coal exported from Queensland, as if Queensland was getting its just desserts?

How do the Greens think that making membership of student unions voluntary “takes away choices”?  Isn’t it the exact opposite?  Would you think differently of student unions if they had been  hot beds of free market capitalist and pro-entrepreneurial activism?  Doesn't this make you claims about believing in human rights superficial?

The Greens want to force electricity companies to generate a proportion of their power from expensive renewable sources.  In the UK a similar policy is estimated to be putting up prices by an average of 50% in real terms by 2020, with a fully privatised sector. How much will this policy of renewables put up power prices to New Zealanders? 

When Metiria Turei says “We need to get smokes out of our homes and out of our shops” what will you do to achieve this? Do you really want to stop the sale of tobacco products altogether? Why don’t you have the same attitude towards marijuana?  Why don’t you think tobacco smokers should be left alone? 

Do the Greens still believe Don Brash wants to smash Maori culture and force women to be subservient?  Do you have any evidence for such exagerrated claims?

How will the Greens “Support equitable access for Māori to secure employment and decent wages”? How do Maori not have equitable access?  Who is stopping them? 

Do you think Maori can be racist? Why do you think people of Maori descent should be given different political structures from those of other citizens? Why do you think this should be constitutionally entrenched?  Why should the accident of your birth determine how the state interacts with or consults with you?

How does offering Maori the same democratic rights as all other citizens shut them out of participation?

What examples do the Greens have of “unnecessary production and consumption”, and how do they propose to curb them?  Will this mean banning the production and sale of certain goods?  If so, what ones?

What products will be banned when the Greens implement their policy to  “Require domestic and imported products to be durable and recyclable”? Does this mean every producer of goods that are neither will be regulated out of business?  Does this mean no New Zealander could import a product that is neither durable nor recyclable?  Doesn't this ban anything perishable?

What exactly is "hugely harmful" to the public in private companies being contracted by local government to manage water services?  Where in the world has this proven to be the case?

Does the Green party still believe all of the Cuban government’s claims that its health care system is fantastic?  Is it in the habit of believing the official reports of one party states that imprison political dissidents as mental patients?  Why is Cuba exempt from the sort of scrutiny on human rights that the Greens apply to China or Burma?

Why do the Greens think parental choice of schools is a myth?  Why do they think the state always knows what’s best in education?

When you want to “Ensure all new houses and buildings fully comply with disability access requirements unless specifically exempted.”  Will this mean anyone building a house on a hill about a road having to build a ramp or lift unless they get a special exemption from a bureaucracy?  Wont this make it prohibitively expensive to build homes anywhere that isn't on flat land adjacent to a road?  Wont this just increase the price of homes and reduce the supply?

When the Greens want to regulate broadcasting and the press with an authority that will “have the power to impose appropriate sanctions against media outlets in cases where it can be clearly demonstrated that it has exhibited wilful or negligent abuse of power and by doing so has either visited material harm on another party or pursued its own self-interest at the expense of the public interest.”, what examples of the media pursuing its own self interest do they have in mind? Doesn’t this mean introducing newspaper censorship in New Zealand for the first time in decades?

Why do the Greens fear foreign investment?  Do you share this fear of New Zealanders owning land and businesses in other countries, if not why not?  Why do you want to welcome refugees and migrants from all and sundry, but if anyone from another country wants to own a business, you treat them like the devil?

More specifically, what was the security threat posed by a Canadian company buying a New Zealand airport?  Should the British government be fearful that New Zealand company Infratil owns Prestwick Airport near Glasgow for the same reasons?

The Greens repeatedly criticise the trade choices made by New Zealanders in such banal terms as “swapping water with China”.  What exports do the Greens want stopped? What imports do they want stopped? Why do they think they know best what people should sell and buy?

Does the party’s support for taxpayer funding of the voluntary sector not make it the state sector?  Why should taxpayers be forced to support political advocacy groups?

What are the implications of “Requiring the inclusion of environmental science and ethics in all study programs.” involving science education?  Why is this relevant to physics for example?

What does “Support legislation that increases the reliability of the Internet” mean?  How do the Greens propose improving the reliability of a disaggregated global network by a law passed in New Zealand?  Can you pass laws to fix most problems?

Why do the Greens think that if central government doesn’t tell primary schools how to teach arts,science, technology, or physical education, that the schools are incapable ofknowing what or how to teach?  Does only the Ministry of Education know how to write a curriculum?

How many other traffic laws do the Greens endorse breaking besides walking on a motorway?

Do the Greens still stand by the view of Sue Kedgley that heavy freight be forced to go by rail?  Do the Greens still believe it is ok for their MPs to make speeches that are full of errors, hyperboles and misrepresentations?

Does Russel Norman still think that if customers of a shop want plastic bags, the shop shouldn’t offer them?  How is that democratic decision making?

Does Russel Norman stick to his belief that the London riots were caused by poverty, not opportunistic criminals seeking designer goods and electronics?

Do the Greens support the view of their blogger “Toad” that democracy doesn’t have to be secular, or liberal, and that it’s “ok” if democracies start a war if the people support it?  In which case, would the Greens support a Christian theocratic state that sent troops to Iran if it was democratically elected?

If the Greens think there should be fruit in schools, why don’t they set up a charity to raise money for it?  In fact, why don’t they ever advocate people raise money themselves voluntarily rather than make taxpayers pay?

When you expect that “significant time for environmental education” will be included in the teacher training curriculum, what should be excluded from the curriculum to allow for this?

Why do you think small business owners should be criminalised because they want to open on a religiously based public holiday?  How do owner-operator shops with no employees exploit people by merely opening their shops for people to choose to enter?

Why is it that a New Zealand Government following the US when a Republican is a President is “imperialism” but when a Democrat is a President, New Zealand should follow the US which is “leading the way”? Isn't it just about what policies you like and dislike? 

Why do you dismiss electric cars so flippantly, but treat electric trains as being the saviour to all of Auckland’s transport problems?  What proportion of trips in Auckland do you expect will be by train by 2014?

Do the Greens still support a Hamilton-Auckland train service, even though it would be slower than a bus, lose money and the local authorities wont pay for it? 

What’s Green about banning foreign ships that happen to be going from port to port within New Zealand as part of an international voyage, from selling empty space to carry cargo around New Zealand –when the ships would still be sailing regardless?  Isn't that policy just about pleasing militant  maritime unions?

The Greens paint a picture of the environment getting worse,and Russel Norman selectively quotes the Environment 2007 report from the Ministry for the Environment to support stopping road building, even though the report does not say that and provides plenty of facts that are inconvenient such as “Home heating is the main cause of air pollution in populated areas in the winter”  yet the Greens beat up on cars and trucks. The report also said  “Levels of PM10 particulates at roadside locations in Auckland appear to have fallen over the past 10 years”.  Why does a party that purports to be about the environment ignore good news about it?

Do any of you laugh at Catherine Delahunty’s tweets too? Like “Despite the pretty words and new clothes am hoping new puppy at white house will stop killing afghanis and funding Israel wars on Palestine"?

So ask yourself if the Greens DO get around 10% of the vote on Saturday, how much they might have got if a few of those questions had been asked over the campaign, or the past few years, and why the mainstream media seems to have its tongue up the Green Party's proverbial.  Moreover, ask yourself why the National Party hasn't been doing that - is it because it has seen this party as a partner?  If you're planning to vote National, how will you feel if that is exactly what happens?

P.S.  Go here, register instantly and tick an up for this post if you like what you see, it seems the obvious people have been doing the opposite (and I have inspired over 100 comments there).