Welcome news for Hillside

After last week’s Budget announcement of $85million for the Hillside Workshops, it was fitting to read Dunedin Mayor Aaron Hawkins give praise to former Dunedin South MP Clare Curran and unionist Jim Kelly for their campaigning perseverance.

Some might have dismissed their doggedness as misguided or a lost cause, but their work and that of other supporters, has eventually borne fruit.

This century has been a bumpy road for the workshops. They survived a major downturn in 2000, bounced back by 2005 to the extent their performance led to them winning Otago Daily Times Business of the Year, but by the end of 2012 the loss of contracts to China meant the workshops were all but closed. A sad demise for a business which opened in the mid-1870s and which in 1946 was considered the largest industrial complex in the southern half of the South Island, employing almost 1200 people.

The new funding adds to the $20million upgrading funding the workshops received two years ago from the Provincial Growth Fund.

The funding boost for new facilities is expected to lead to the workshops assembling about 1500 wagons.

Hillside and a new South Island Mechanical Maintenance Hub in Christchurch will create 445 jobs between them.

Transport Minister Michael Wood said the Covid-19 supply chain disruptions had reinforced the importance of having a resilient and reliable rail freight network.

Budget funding for new locomotives, wagons and critical track maintenance would allow more efficient movement of freight, reducing emissions and congestion.

"On average, every tonne of freight moved by rail produces at least 70% less carbon emissions compared with heavy road freight. This helps with New Zealand’s crucial transition to a low carbon economy."

This aspect seems to have escaped the National Party, Act, and the Taxpayers Union, all of which have made dramatic, tin-eared comments about the funding.

National leader Judith Collins suggested the Government could have invested in infrastructure — did she mean more roads? — to get the economy moving. Then she went on to say that, instead, Meccano lessons were going to be held in Dunedin.

The Taxpayers Union issued a statement including a headline "Return to 1980s ‘Polish Shipyard Economy"’ while Act leader David Seymour described it as a "1970s union fantasy that men will be working away with hot steel and sledgehammers banging together locomotives and wagons in a big warehouse in Dunedin".

In an RNZ interview, Railways and Maritime Union national secretary Wayne Butson was quick to point out to Mr Seymour that women were now a significant section of the workforce.

It was also clear that if what Hillside could do was compared with the purchase decisions in the rail industry in the past 10 years, "we’re going to end up with far superior products".

He reminded listeners of the debacle involving poor-quality Chinese-manufactured locomotives which were as "unreliable as hell".

At any time, he said, there were about 40 of them out of service being repaired — almost half the fleet.

We agree with him that moves to invest in local manufacturing should be supported because they will make the economy and transport systems more resilient.

That does not mean the workshops development should not be scrutinised and the quality of resulting work done there evaluated properly to ensure it does help our transition towards a low-carbon economy. But now is the time to welcome the boost to our local economy, not the time for belittling and silly reds-under-the-bed criticisms which are reminiscent of the Muldoon era rather than something we might expect in 2021.