This column (written by me) appeared in the Dunedin D Scene newspaper today
A parliamentary inquiry into manufacturing heard this week in Dunedin there are no quality checks on the manufacturing standards of the rail wagons imported from China – a contract which sounded the death knell for the Hillside workshops.
Common themes emerged at the day-long hearing with Hillside, NZ Aluminium Smelters, Oamaru’s Summit Woolspinners and the unions representing workers at those plants questioning tenders awarded to offshore companies over local providers based purely on lowest cost, rather than the true value to the whole of the economy; the impact of the high dollar on exports and indifference of government to keeping and building a skilled workforce in our communities.
One of the most chilling revelations was that there are no quality checks being undertaken on the standard of manufacture of the Chinese imported wagons.
The inquiry, initiated by Opposition parties heard that welding on both wagons and locomotives was substandard and that no checks were undertaken to ensure they met New Zealand standards.
I have since been told that a directive has been issued to Kiwirail staff that no-one is to stand on, or ride in the controversial IAB wagons imported from China in 2011. That directive does not apply to New Zealand built wagons. These wagons also have a speed restriction placed on them due to the systemic flaws with their design and construction.
The Rail, Maritime Transport Union has recently sounded a sobering warning through its latest journal that Kiwirail culture has dangerously shifted towards services over safety.
Clocks have been installed in Kiwirail workplaces and performance is being measured on minimising time delays.
The pressure from within Kiwirail to meet Government policies for profit on its freight business and to reduce cost on other parts of the organisation is a time bomb waiting to go off.
The union likens it to the period in the late 1990s when a series of fatalities stimulated a Government inquiry in rail health and safety.
Kiwirail and its political masters should be warned that the country is watching closely the impact of lowest cost tendering, cuts to rail maintenance and the pressure to put time-keeping over health and safety issues. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.
And who bought this loss making dog back to further impoverish us all…..?
@jemma…. That statement is so bereft of relevance to reality on so many levels, I won’t even try to list them… The sheer number of facts that require ignoring is breathtaking…
That tory playbook is starting to look a bit old hat bro…
What Is sickening is the way that the raiding party(national party) seem, not only incapable of accepting that reliance on road transport has impoverished every city/state/country that have gone down what is acknowledged worldwide as an economic cul-de-sac…but that they are unable, or unwilling to accept that their methods of attack on behalf of their sponsors in the road transport lobby have created a level of collatoral damage that will impact negatively on large sections of society…
Not to worry though… It’s not THOSE sections of society that matter to the raiding party….Their term for the damage they are inflicting us is “necessary collatoral damage”….”Necessary” is code for “acceptable”
I wonder just how low our road toll would be if the muldoon government hadn’t effectively put the final nail in rails coffin with the “transport deregulation bill 1981″…
Within 6 months, the increased congestion on the roads was impossible not to notice…..How much worse has THAT got?
What that also did, was to increase(at a compounding rate)the costs of maintaining what were already the worst roads in the country(decades of tory neglect paying for farm subsidies, among other goodies for the “boys”)…. This, of course has made the cost of bringing aucklands motorway/highway system closer to a functioning network much, much higher than it should have been…
It was noticeable when I got back to New Zealand late 2004 that there was a massive amount of roadworks being undertaken right across the metropolitan area, and beyond..
Thank god for labour govts who actually DO the things required… Whilst copping unceasing criticism for every little real, or imagined, oversight in the process being sheeted back to the minister, or the prime minister(largely with no factual basis for doing so)…
One has to be sure of the rightness of ones actions to be able to put up with that stupidity, and self serving drivel aimed at them as much as every labour govt, save maybe the savage govt, has had to endure…
NZ will be run and owned by a small elite group who have been involved in this social engineering since the introduction of Rogernomics and now being carried on by Shonkey Economics, the wealth will continue to be passed to an elite few, it would not suprise me if Solid Energy was driven into the ground on purpose and will be sold to some merchant banker like Macquarie Bank or Merrill Lynch for a song.
@jack…That sounds like a typical strategy for a merchant banker, or a money trader who would sell his mother into servitude to get ahead in with the “right” crowd…
Selling out on people he doesn’t even know is easy…
I am surprised to read the hoary old short sighted ignorant rave again, about aspects of buying the rail back.
It should never have been sold and nor should it be a dysfunctional SOE.
Steel wheels on rails with limited gradient will always be much more efficient than road.
We need to organise our commerce around rail and design our communities to be served by rail. The efficiency of long life rolling stock using minimal fuel, designed built and serviced in NZ, is but the start of a string of advantages that rail makes real.
The undermining and sell out of Hillside is deliberate. No one responsible to the public could be so foolish.
Having rail as an SOE has allowed this govt to use that as an excuse for hands off irresponsibility.
NZ Govt owns Kiwi rail but feigns that they have no power over its “corporate” decisions.
All SOE are precariously in the hands of “business people” rather than the public who own them.
There is another Nact agenda.
I’m looking forward to seeing the huge profits that our roading sector makes… Oh thats right it doesn’t unless you can afford a fleet of trucks.
A big shame and the problems are starting to come home to roost. The Nat installed board is going to make sure Hillside is as dead as a dodo, massive auction of anything engineering going on now. It was amusing to read in the auction guide that some stuff was required till july, and I think I saw the reason why… Chinese wagon was in the rollover jig geting its welds redone.
The National party managed to achieve even something TranzRail couldn’t by closing Hillside.
To bad that locomotives are getting sidelined as it takes a lot longer to get the brake blocks out of Hillsides new owners…
Dead right Shane, much of the basic railway materials that Hillside made, is now supposed to be made by the private Australian Contractor who jacked up the prices from day one.
Lots of shonky politics are going on all around Hillside as we speak, sadly, all the gear that the taxpayer owned in Hillside is being put upfor auction …. it is not being offered to the rest of the railway first, a cheap 2nd hand welder from Hillside is a far better option than buying a brand new one.
I suppose the tooling sold off from Hillside will then be used to drive further work away from other KiwiRail centres such as Hutt.
I am wondering weather these chinese companies that won the tenders for both the locomotives and wagons have ISO9001 accreditation? If they don’t then they should never have been given these contracts, as this is accreditation for quality control ensuring there are processes in place for the above issues. To my knowledge Hillside has ISO9001 accreditation so this should have been taken into account during the tendering process.