The Greens have released their public transport policy for the 2026 election, Connecting Aotearoa. There are numerous components in the policy, but notably for Christchurch, it rejects the party’s previous policy of supporting commuter trains, in favour of light rail. This essentially represents the triumph of local Green Party activists’ views over common sense in the development of “mass rapid transit” in the city. To understand why this policy has been developed we need to look into the tenure of left-aligned politics in the City of Christchurch over the city’s distant and recent history. Because of the geography of New Zealand, in which the bulk of the country’s land is composed into two separate islands (the North and South Island), the size of these islands, the sparse population distribution across NZ with four large cities a considerable distance apart, and the placement of the national capital in the North Island, there has always been a strong independent streak in the South Island. Over time, Christchurch in particular has tended to see itself, effectively, as “the capital of the South Island”.

In the public transport realm, there has been considerable dissent since the first establishment of public transport as we would know it today, in how the system is to be managed, or more particular, who is managing it. The original public transport system in the city was its tram network, which started in the late 19th century. At that time, the city was made up of a number of independent boroughs, including the central city (City Council). Historians record the City Council asserted it should be the operator of the public tram network, to the consternation of the other councils in whose territory the tram network traversed. This situation was eventually resolved by forming the independent territorial authority, with its own board elected at large, named the Christchurch Tramway Board. The situation however was not put to rest at that time and periodically, City politicians continued to assert their belief they should be in charge of the network. As the tram system wore out, bus services were inaugurated and became the sole means of implementing public transport in the City from the 1950s when all tram routes closed down. The CTB kept its acronym with a small change of name to the Christchurch Transport Board. This was also a time when local passenger train services were gradually closed down. The Lyttelton service using electric locomotives was a particularly significant part of this process when the electric overhead system shut down in 1970. All these services were replaced by buses, which were a mixture of CTB and other operators to begin with, but the independents such as Midland Motors gradually sold out to CTB. The last commuter train service that ran out of Christchurch, the peak-only workers services to Rangiora, were withdrawn in 1976. There were also changes during this time to the way local authorities operated and were organised across the city. By this stage a number of the independent boroughs had been amalgamated into the City Council but several territories remained independent, notably Waimairi, Riccarton, Heathcote and Paparua. As well, Banks Peninsula remained a seperate territory, including Lyttelton. The Canterbury United Council was established in the 1970s and was the forerunner of the current regional council, but was made up of elected representatives from the territorial councils rather than the elected membership model that regional councils have. Frequent parochial battles over the administration of public transport continued at this level.

In 1989, the Fourth Labour Government implemented a reorganisation of local government that created the present Christchurch City. At the same time, the Canterbury Regional Council was formed as the next higher level of local governance, with its own separately elected membership, and was given the governance of region-wide functions including public transport. The Christchurch City once again lobbied hard to be given control of this, and did succeed in picking up ownership of the former Christchurch Transport Board’s bus operations, firstly known as Christchurch Transport Services and latterly Redbus. This was point in time in which the idea of the reinstatement of commuter train services in the region began to be discussed seriously and it reached the attention of transport academics at local tertiary institutions. Most notably during the late 1990s/early 2000s, a Lincoln University study estimated a cost of around $200 million to establish high frequency services north and south of Christchurch, which appears to have included within it the duplication of the single-track Waimakariri River bridge on the Main North Line. At that time, however neither Selwyn nor Waimakariri Districts had the population that would have been able to support the development of such services. The integration of Banks Peninsula District into Christchurch in the early 2000s did not have a material impact since there is very little demand for public transport in this region due to its low population. Things changed however when the Christchurch earthquakes took place in 2010/2011. There was a noted exodus of the population of the city and consequentially a large amount of new housing development occurred in Waimakariri and Selwyn, most notably in Rangiora and Rolleston respectively. The continued growth in both of these townships and in those territories since that time has galvanised commuter train proponents to continue developing their ideas and concepts. In particular, Tane Apanui, firstly as an independent citizen and also during a single term of office as an elected member of the Canterbury Regional Council, has campaigned for multiple investigations into commuter train cases and continues with this to the present day.

However, Christchurch City Council politicians have not given up their longstanding quest to control the public transport system, and from the early 2010s they inaugurated a much more lengthy and in depth campaign to control the narrative in a way that is much harder to oppose successfully. In particular this followed the inauguration of a new mayor in the City in 2013 following local elections that year. This mayor, with a strong left-wing political background and former career as a Cabinet Minister in various Labour governments up to 2008, revived the old campaign of seeking control of public transport in the city with much greater vigour than most of her predecessors. She instigated almost immediately what became known as the “Winder Review” of public transport governance in the city, and unsurprisingly this found in favour of her campaign objectives. Lobbying at central government level produced a minor level of commitment to re-examine the local arrangements in legislative provision. The Greater Christchurch Public Transport Joint Committee has been one of the standout features of this campaign, being established in 2016 with the clear objective of forcing Canterbury Regional Council to give up some of its statutory autonomy over the development and management of the Greater Christchurch public transport system. Newspaper accounts of the early meetings of this committee played up accounts that the mayor had made strident political attacks against CRC’s tenure in running the PT system. The election of a Labour government in 2017 saw renewed lobbying for the City Council to be given management of the system. The net result was a small legislative amendment that made provision for the transfer of services between different territorial authorities, however CRC refused to hand over its authority. This meant that in practice while the Joint Committee gives Christchurch City a lot more power to lobby the regional council’s members than in the past, the final decision making authority remains with CRC’s councillors and staff. Behind the scenes, wheels were put in motion for a more subtle but ultimately much stronger process of attempting to assert control over public transport through district planning. Around this time, newspaper reporting started to talk up proposals that the mayor and her supporters had reimagined the city as being able to develop in time to a population equivalent to that of Auckland (NZ’s largest city located in the north of the North Island). This is clearly the latest iteration of the “capital of the South Island” mentality on a new supercharged scale. The Public Transport Joint Committee architecture has thus evolved in recent years into a much more substantial entity known as Greater Christchurch. Despite the names of these entities and the involvement of leadership of the adjacent territories of Selwyn and Waimakariri Districts, the underlying assumption in all of this process is to assert the dominance of Christchurch City even over its closest neighbours, let alone in Canterbury, the South Island or the rest of New Zealand.

The development of Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) concepts in Greater Christchurch in the last decade have followed the same city-centric pattern. It became quite obvious when proposals first surfaced in the late 2010s that the hitherto long expected concept of commuter trains did not find favour with elected officials in the central city. This is due to the continued assertion of dominance of the City over Selwyn and Waimakariri; since commuter trains would enable residents of those territories to travel into the City with considerable ease, the hegemony of the City’s political establishment would be threatened as people would find it more desirable to live outside territorial boundaries. Post-earthquakes, the National-led government recognised the changing population distribution by constructing new motorways north and south of Christchurch, but resisted calls for passenger train services. The motorway developments were stridently opposed by the mayor and her lackeys, and at various times since there have been calls for out-of-city residents to be charged for use of roads and other facilities, most notably in the new stadium Te Kaha. The latter objective however was thwarted considerably by the 2013-2019 mayor’s extreme assertion of the Christchurch-dominant model in that formally regionalised financing of the stadium along the lines of that in Wellington never appears to have been seriously considered. As light rail was being talked up to a large extent in Auckland, this became the focus of Christchurch proposals. Long before the name of it became commonly mentioned, the first concept maps showed that the proposed Greater Christchurch mass rapid transit system would only operate to the city limits of Hornby and Belfast, and that it would follow more or less the same route as the existing heavy rail lines, but that Selwyn and Waimakariri could only expect to have bus services in that. The initial business case development for the mass rapid transit proposals created three transport network models to be compared against each other: heavy rail, light rail and bus rapid transit. The model that was created for heavy rail trumped the long held expectation of re-installation of a north-west 90 degree curve at Addington, where the existing North and South rail lines join, with a proposed underground tunnel running from Riccarton some 2 km beneath Hagley Park to reach a subsurface central city terminus. Unsurprisingly, this inflated the cost of heavy rail development to such an extent that it reached a comparable level as the construction from scratch of a new light rail network. These contrivances enabled the Greater Christchurch decision makers (elected officials sitting on the entity’s appointed board) to decisively reject commuter trains as there was said to be no financial benefit at all, and numerous other disbenefits, notably a lack of integration with City planning. This is hardly surprising as this planning has been largely integrated in recent times around the existing major bus corridors through the city, mainly those followed by Route 1 (the former Blue Line) from Belfast to the CBD, and Route 5 (formerly Yellow Line) from Hornby to the CBD. Both routes (notably Main North Road and Papanui Road to the north and Riccarton Road/Main South Road to the south-west) also carry large volumes of vehicle traffic throughout the day. During the term of the 2018-2023 Labour government, public transport funding in the city was increased, which to a large extent was delivered through a redirection of funds originally proposed at central government level for commuter train services. City Council officials from the mayor down succeeded in lobbying the government for this money to be redirected into improved bus operations instead, mostly focused on the major corridors with increased high frequency operation. It became clear this was a strategy aimed at building up passenger numbers on these corridors in order to justify the business case for light rail, and unsurprisingly Selwyn and Waimakariri on the extensions of those major corridors missed out on the extended service operations initially.

There was a change of mayor at the 2019 local government elections, with a centre-right candidate taking office and remaining in power since, now in his third term. Since this time, there has been more assertive pushback against the Greater Christchurch agenda at regional and local level, but the degree to which its MRT proposals have been integrated to date into City strategic planning has made it difficult to dislodge. Significant initiative for the revival of commuter train development has come in recent years via Pounamu Travel, a private conglomerate that began operating tourist trains in Marlborough in the late 2010s. The phase-out of rail ferry services to the South Island in 2025 saw a large amount of rolling stock owned by Pounamu and their heritage rail partner, Steam Incorporated of Wellington, transferred to the South Island, and this was quickly followed by the establishment of Mainland Rail Ltd to run passenger trains out of Christchurch in partnership with several established heritage railways in the area. An early MRL proposal has been the “Events Express” bringing people from Rolleston and Rangiora into the City to attend major events at Te Kaha Stadium, which has used a temporary platform arrangement close to the old central city railway station to embark/disembark passengers. The inaugural service operated in conjunction with the official opening of the stadium and carried local and national political figures attending the event. Mainland Rail since that time have campaigned at central and local government level for commuter train services to be developed along the traditional Rangiora-Rolleston corridor concepts, which has in turn provoked strident opposition from the established supporters of the Greater Christchurch proposals with their embedded light rail expectations.

This is the background to the current Green Party’s “Connecting Aotearoa” proposal. At the 2023 election and continuing into 2025 the Green Party continued supporting the development of commuter rail in Christchurch. However at a public meeting called in late 2025 to discuss policy, local activists strongly asserted that the light rail system should take precedence over commuter trains, using the majorly flawed assumptions and numbers that the Greater Christchurch transport network models produced. It is an appropriate time to look again at the substantial overarching vision of the Greater Christchurch entity and its supporters. As recently stated, the assumption is that Christchurch City within its existing boundaries will be massively intensified to reach a population of 1.5 million people, equivalent to Auckland in the North Island. Note in particular the existing boundaries, which is an important distinction that overwhelmingly favours left-wing political interests that are much more dominant in urban areas. When the National-led government called for local government reorganisation and consolidation in 2026, the idea of joining Christchurch with Selwyn and Waimakariri into a larger “Christchurch Council” unitary authority, along the lines of the development of Auckland Council in 2010, was strenuously opposed by the City’s predominant local left-aligned political grouping, Christchurch 2021/People’s Choice. This then influenced the official position taken by the City in response to the Government, which has sought a unitary Christchurch City within existing boundaries, purportedly taking over the public transport system outright, but also rejecting integration of more rural areas in Selwyn and Waimakariri into a larger City as the more conservative political leanings of these territories’ populations would threaten the established hegemony of People’s Choice in Christchurch. Thus, the Greens have been induced to sign up to and support the local political interests and hegemonies rather than the more pragmatic considerations of lower costs of establishing commuter train services and the significant political resistance that would be encountered to intensification plans. The assumptions entrenched in People’s Choice’s thinking, that somehow they can persuade the central government to support this concept of a highly integrated planned city, is not borne out by any level of recent development experience anywhere else in New Zealand. Whilst some degree of intensification has to be in the mix in allowing for lower cost housing development to ensure that accommodation remains affordable for current and future generations of residents, especially with population increases, greenfields development of more housing outside the city limits cannot be excluded, particularly as most of the available land within the City has already been developed, the most obvious places for this being in the adjoining territories.

Therefore while the Greater Christchurch Partnership proposals continue to dominate at local government level, there is considerable scepticism all the way up to central government of the concepts, especially considering the much higher cost of development of the light rail system and the general reluctance of government to fund South Island infrastructure to anything like a level comparable to Auckland and Wellington. The Green Party’s policy for light rail development in Christchurch instead of commuter trains therefore has to be seen as prioritising local political causes over common sense.