Fast-track bill can only get back on track through climate mitigation

Opinion: It would be a brave person who argued that consenting of major infrastructure projects didn’t need an overhaul. Labour and National agree it is cumbersome, and Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, a world authority on major projects, would likely agree as well. He may also highlight that it’s the least of our problems.
In a quest for successful projects, it’s not just whether consenting needs an overhaul, but what else needs attention too. Without seriously adjusting its scope and approach, the Fast-track Approvals Bill may end up looking like a bulldozer shifting deckchairs on you-know-what.
The Bill’s Legislative Statement tells us it seeks a “fast-track one-stop-shop consenting regime” for selected major projects because “consenting major infrastructure and other projects in New Zealand takes too long, costs too much and places insufficient value on the economic and social benefits of development relative to other considerations”.
That echoes the well-known project management mantra of “time, cost, and quality” and, other things being equal, should draw ready agreement on the merits of saving time or money on consents. As expanding attention to economic and social outcomes would presumably add to consenting issues, that largely leaves the thrust of the Bill as streamlining consenting by downplaying environmental factors.
Professor Flyvbjerg, having assembled the world’s largest database on big projects (16,000 and climbing), makes astute observations about them and, especially, on how they start out. His book How Big Things Get Done offers plenty of pithy insights, like “In sum, keep it short!”, a key risk management strategy that encapsulates the huge advantage of short project timelines. On the face of it, that resonates with the Bill. 
But he says a great deal more, including sobering lessons for anyone influencing projects. “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong,” he notes, pointing to a lot more than consenting, and indicating that some of the Bill’s processes may offer a cure that’s worse than the complaint (even if the complaint is itself valid).
The seemingly paradoxical title of his first chapter speaks volumes: THINK SLOW, ACT FAST: The record of big projects is even worse than it seems. But there is a solution: speed up by slowing down.
The best overall outcome for a project comes from spending plenty of time in the beginning “thinking” phase to ensure it is well considered (“Think slow”), so that the bigger and more intractable implementation phase can proceed rapidly and efficiently (“Act fast”). In combination, these let us “keep it short” overall, optimising delivery and reducing risk (and also pleasing a cost- and time-focused Government). 
The premium value of early project time is captured in the image above. Check out the curves as well as the “Value Zone”, because they show how the challenge of making and paying for changes escalates as time progresses, a harsh penalty for a rushed start.
If we see the passage from a Bill into an Act as a project, the Bill itself perhaps illustrates one of the very risks it is creating: of not committing enough time at the start to really set the project on the right path. Even its programme seems in jeopardy because of the select committee’s normal processes, which came off second-best as the quest for speed truncated a list of worthy submitters. And Government’s apparent retreat from the name it gave the Bill may also be a consequence of undercooking the start of the “project”.
However, Government may draw some comfort from learning that they are treading an incredibly well-worn path by setting up flawed processes for apparently good reasons. Flyvbjerg found such shortcomings so systemic he formulated the sardonic “iron law of project management”: Over Budget, Over Time, Under Benefits, Over and Over Again. This chart from his book shows fewer than one in 10 projects meeting both time and budget goals, and a minuscule number also yielding the anticipated benefits. The fix to this goes way beyond one-stop consenting.
From the perspective of project success, though, the Bill may be redeemable. The embarrassment of following the pack in the wrong direction is trivial compared with failing to correct its errors while they are relatively easy to remedy. Such capability for early self-correction is a fundamental strength of good project management, and ex-Secretary for Justice Colin Keating has already made authoritative suggestions for improvement.
The Bill’s critics point to it concentrating decision-making powers with three ministers who may lack expertise in relevant fields. We don’t need Flyvbjerg to turn up spectacular examples that illustrate that risk. Take Berlin’s notorious Brandenburg airport, a massive and agonisingly long embarrassment to techno-proud Germany.
“The BER epic,” Deutsche Welle writes, “is a top-to-bottom, start-to-finish failure.” Its failures truly were epic. More than 500,000 faults were found, including 170,000km of dangerously wired cable.
But a recurring theme in reviews is that the source of the problem was “political pressure to get the job done” plus a supervisory board “full of politicians … who were in charge of key decisions”. This may have a familiar ring about it but, regardless of the politics of the Bill, I would far rather its fruits were success stories than epic failures.
Flyvbjerg offers a comparable case study from his home country, Denmark.
In the 1980s, the Danish government decided to connect their island-based capital, Copenhagen, to the rest of the world by building the world’s longest suspension bridge and, for trains, Europe’s second longest tunnel. The government also announced they would use Danish contractors, a surprising political call because the Danes had little relevant experience. “Bad idea,” Flyvbjerg recalls his father grumbling (he had tunnelling experience). “If I were digging a hole that big I would hire someone who had done it before.”
The project went from bad to worse, with what should have been the coup de grace occurring when the bridge-building team drilled a hole through the seabed and straight into the gradually progressing tunnel. The jaw-dropping consequences are easy to imagine.
But it wasn’t quite a coup de grace because politicians, hypersensitive to the huge potential embarrassment of abandoning the project, overrode expert opinion and directed it to continue down the formidably costly path of remediation.
Now before we think “that wouldn’t happen here”, an inverse version of sorts has. On a major highway project an eleventh-hour decision to opt for tunnels instead of a huge cutting created unexpected opportunities for technical, economic and environmental improvements.
If you’ve ever driven the motorway north of Auckland, you’ll know the Puhoi Tunnels. At Johnstones Hill, almost until construction started, the motorway was designed to run in a massive cutting, bisecting a ridgeline cloaked in native forest, wrecking a major wildlife corridor, and filling a good part of the Waiwera estuary with excavated material.
The project was initiated in the 1980s and, in 2002, citizens approached the then Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Morgan Williams, concerned about Transit NZ’s reluctance to consider a tunnel instead of the hugely destructive (and disfiguring) cut. The resultant far-reaching evaluation of risks, costs, and benefits eventually saw the cutting abandoned in favour of the tunnels.
The PCE’s 2004 Annual Report outlines the situation, and why the tunnels weren’t considered in more timely fashion (included a narrow “Project Evaluation Manual” and, bizarrely, concern that Kiwi drivers weren’t familiar with tunnels. Maybe, like the Danes, the initial project team wasn’t either).
But the tunnels offered much wider benefits than just the worthy protection of wetlands and wildlife.
In 2016, Noel Nancekivell, engineering manager for the project, presented an insightful paper at the Safer Roads Conference, and reported a raft of technical and operational improvements to the motorway, including easier climbs and descents, gentler curves, and 15 percent faster travel.
“The reduction in gradients,” he wrote, “has the added safety benefit of reducing speed differential between fast and slower traffic, and allowing for less fuel emissions which has a significant long term benefit.”
However, we mustn’t overlook even deeper lessons the Puhoi Tunnels offer that, if heeded, would help the Fast-track Approvals Bill get back on track.
Under the Bill as it stands, in what would have been a lose-lose outcome, those significant technical and economic benefits would never have seen the light of day.
They arose from the concerns of people who would be disenfranchised under the Bill, expressed through PCE investigations the three ministers could choose to ignore, on environmental matters the Bill seeks to marginalise. Yet the shortcoming was technical: blinkered strategic decision-making early in the project. A flawed approach the Bill risks baking into legislation.
Nancekivell also discussed the importance of benchmarking actions against the project’s overarching goals, and Flyvbjerg cites examples of projects going off track because of a failure to do so.
Nancekivell and Flyvbjerg are in good company: Albert Einstein reportedly said if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes ensuring he understood the problem, and five minutes solving it. “Think slow, act fast.”
“Projects are not goals themselves,” Flyvbjerg writes. “People don’t build skyscrapers, develop products, or write books for their own sakes … but to accomplish other things.” We should keep that in mind with a Bill that appears so preoccupied with consents.
“At the beginning of a project,” he continues, “we need to disrupt the psychology-driven dash to a premature conclusion.” This dash afflicts more projects than we might imagine, to the extent it has its own name – solutioneering (seeking solutions before understanding the essence of the problem).
The vital importance of the early stages of a project, and of avoiding solutioneering, underpins value engineering, a discipline that arose in part from projects that were designed, funded, and ready to go only for it to emerge they weren’t really needed at all.
And that has nothing to do with consenting. If the Government is serious about improving the economic and social value of big projects, it should get serious about the entire process of starting projects well, including not rushing.
Flyvbjerg springs many surprises in his book, with one in its closing pages that reads more like a commandment for inclusion in every project’s scope: “Build climate mitigation into your project.” 
If one of the world’s greatest authorities on projects closes with such a clear directive, we should take serious note. And so should the Fast-track Approvals Bill. But, as it stands, the Bill puts consideration of that crucial issue into a lottery with lousy odds.
The Fast-track Approvals Bill can, and must, do far better.