The recent parliamentary failure to adjust the Resource Management Act and its Maori focus to the productive sector’s role in providing employment is emphasised by the loss of heavy engineering jobs in the South Island.The last minute RMA embargo on the 40 kilometre Lakes district monorail had the unpublicised effect of quashing jobs. Many of them in the castings sector that has been so recently hit by layoffs, especially in Dunedin.The 11th hour no-go signal for the monorail was ironic in that the monorail itself was planned as a green symbol in that it took passengers through heritage and wilderness areas without the earthmoving required by a road and the collateral damage of the motor vehicles using it.Now though the problem is not one of green or heritage sensitivity, but one of the loss of jobs in the heavy engineering sector which now requires infrastructure work of the very category represented by the officially-quashed monorail.The monorail was put forward as a major New Zealand tourist destination designed to pull international visitors deeper into the South Island on what was conceived as a one-day wilderness adventure.The lake-to-lake scheme, Lake Wakatipu to Lake Te Anau, would also have provided a motor transport free take off for the Milford track at the Te Anau Downs end.In the event and after having been granted a string of planning approvals, the scheme known as The Fiordland Link Experience was scotched at the last moment.The burden of the ban on the monorail centred on the possibility of the organisation promoting it, a South Island-based consortium, running out of cash at some stage and leaving an unfinished structure that would remain an eyesore for generations to come.The government veto focused on demolition costings applying to an uncompleted monorail.  It is not known if prior to issuing the veto the government had requested the promoters to furnish guarantees and insurances in the event of their being unable to complete the project.No impact assessment at the time of the veto was conducted on the value to South Island heavy engineering sector in terms of job provision or the erection of an international selling reference site on the extent of New Zealand civil and production engineering capability.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk