Thomas Coghlan

The problem is that the fund is essentially very much over-pledged, vastly over-pledged, and in the next few months we are probably going to see a bonfire of promised transport projects, which will be kicked out to the never-never, effectively cancelled, and eventually we're probably going to have to see fuel taxes rise as well.

It is a very grim cocktail of broken promises and tax hikes.

So Labour's modelled this using analysis that was done by Auckland Transport a little while ago about a proposed fare cap up there.

They think it will cost $65 million a year, which a lot of people have thought is on the sunny side, but it might be sort of in the ballpark.

The big problem is where that money is coming from.

And it's coming from something called the National Land Transport Fund.

It is a fund that is full of the money that you pay when you fill up your car or you pay your road user charges or you get your vehicle registered.

It's seven odd billion dollars a year spent from the fund.

And the problem is that the fund...

The fund is essentially very much over-pledged, vastly over-pledged.

And about 10 years ago, the fund more or less paid for itself.

So you would spend the National Land Transport Fund on some public transport subsidies.

You'd spend it on giving money to councils to help maintain the roads, your local street.

If there's a pothole, some of your fuel tax money goes to filling that in.

You'd spend some of the money on building a new highway.

So our big new highways are paid for by our fuel taxes and road user charges and the like.

And about 10 years ago, what we spent from the fund, or actually when it was sort of set up, it was set up at the very end of the Clark government, all the way back then and in the early years of the key government, it paid for itself.

The money that you pay in fuel taxes paid for the spending.

In the 2020s, we have gotten rather ahead of ourselves in our politics and our politicians on both sides of the House have pledged vastly more spending from the fund than the fund has the ability to raise.

As fuel got expensive, politicians didn't raise fuel taxes enough.