The GPS does seem pretty dumb – like it’s specifically set up as a way for the government to meddle in transport decisions.

The GPS is the mechanism Labour came up after the transport select committee repeatedly blocked every attempt to remove the clause “when preparing the NLTP the board shall act independently of the minister” from the Transit NZ Act and it’s successor the LTMA and to insert something a bit more precise than “when preparing the NLTP the board shall have regard to government policy”.

The reason they were so determined to do this was because when they cam to power they discovered that Transfund’s 1999/2000 budget had allocated most Transfund’s non-maintenance funding to a number of major projects that would continue to absorb three-quarters of Transfund’s non-maintenance funding for the next two years, thus gazumping the government’s plans to divert a big chunk of that money to PT. Hell hath no fury like a politician scorned so it’s no great surprise that the government ‘declined’ to re-appoint the chair of Transfund, banned the 70 year old practice of approving funding for multi year projects without having all the money in the bank at the start of the project, then subsumed Transfund into the LTSA (whose only connection with transport funding was it’s Chair, Dr Jan Wight who is now Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and has a degree in sustainable transport), then they introduced the LTMA with it’s expanded priorities. Then they finally introduced the GPS requirement last year.

That was definitely one step too far as the original reason for placing the highways scheme under the control of a board rather than a government department was that voters in the 1920s could still clearly recall disastrous consequences of the way that the Seddon government had abused rail construction funding to influence marginal electorates and they didn’t want a repeat of that with the new transport rural system.