A postponed signing need not become a stalled deal, but the Minister must say when it will be signed
A ceremony in Queenstown has been called off. The Government's plan to sign a regional growth deal for the district was set aside after the National Party caucus was summoned to Wellington. The record does not say why the caucus meeting could not wait, nor when a new date for signing might be found. Both omissions matter more than the postponement itself.
What is at stake is not a photograph outside a council building. Regional Deals are meant to give councils, iwi and contractors a pipeline of work they can plan against, and to give private capital the confidence to commit money to New Zealand's growth in advance of any single project going to tender. That confidence is built slowly and lost quickly. A deal that slips its date once, for reasons unexplained, is a deal that markets will discount the second and third time a date is set.
This newspaper concedes readily that a caucus called to the capital is not a trivial matter, and a governing party is entitled to order its own business without answering to a select committee of newspaper editors. No one should expect a Minister to sign a document merely to keep an appointment. But there is a difference between the caucus meeting explaining the delay and the caucus meeting excusing the silence that has followed it. Queenstown Lakes District Council, its ratepayers and the firms weighing whether to tender for work under the deal are owed more than the fact of a postponement; they are owed a date, or an honest admission that no date yet exists.
The Minister for Infrastructure, Chris Bishop, has made pipeline visibility the test by which his portfolio ought to be judged. That test applies as much to the signing of a deal as to its contents. A deal delayed for good reason, and rescheduled without delay, does the pipeline no harm. A deal delayed and then left to drift does it real harm, and the harm accrues before a single dollar changes hands.