Thomas Coghlan

Fuel taxes are not increased with inflation, so they lose their relative value if they're not increased.

If fuel taxes kept pace with inflation, they'd be about 20 cents a litre higher now than they are already.

And there is just no chance that fuel taxes are going up 20 cents a litre any time soon.

Hell no.

Yeah, I'd put good money on that not happening.

And as our politics has become a bit more sort of fractious, I guess, politicians have pledged tens of billions, actually, in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of projects from this fund, which it lacks the money to pay for.

So by 2030, the fund is estimated to be spending $6 billion a year more than it will receive in revenue.

It's actually difficult to overstate how vast that sum of money is.

It's about one Dunedin hospital every six months in money that the fund currently doesn't have and it will probably need to get that funding from the Crown which means that the money that the Crown would usually spend on building things like a new Dunedin hospital would have to go towards propping up this fund because it is so oversubscribed with new transport projects.

Of course that's probably not going to happen

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.

There's good reason to believe that councils might be on the hook for something here if the policy is very successful and new services need to be put on.

That's been left kind of unaddressed by Labour.

And again, that might be a good problem to have because it might mean that there's less wear and tear on the road so councils can cut spending from road maintenance and put it on public transport.

In terms of who left this $6 billion a year hole, one of the reasons why this is sort of quite an interesting one for political people to observe is

is the $6 billion a year figure comes from a document that was published by this government when this government unveiled its transport plans.

So the issue at the heart of this is probably due to an expensive road building project called the Roads of National Significance that are up and down the country.

There are quite a few of them and they are very, very, very expensive and they are getting more expensive because infrastructure costs are going crazy.