Hopefully one of the lessons we learn from the awful destruction caused by this cyclone is that we cannot do the rebuild from this on the cheap.

Too often we do things on the cheap. 

Take for example what’s just happened to the electricity; one of the biggest problems right now is a lack of power. At the worst, almost a quarter of a million people had no power, and currently it’s still in the tens of thousands. All over the North Island: Northland, Auckland, the Coromandel, Tairawhiti, Hawkes Bay, and it might be as long as two weeks before some of these people get electricity.

Part of that is because we built the electricity network on the cheap.

We chose to put our power lines above us on poles—the cheaper option—instead of underground where they would be less likely to be disrupted by weather like we’ve just had.

We are now paying for that decision.

The same is true of our roading network.

We've cut costs there too. Now let’s be fair, the roads were always going to take a hammering. This storm was unprecedented; it’s the biggest we’ve ever seen, but our roads were in trouble before this storm. The one that came through a couple of weeks earlier caused the massive slip on the main road into the eastern side of the Coromandel, and shut the Brynderwyns heading into Northland.

I really hope we don’t forget this lesson; it's going to cost us a lot to rebuild after this cyclone. Grant Robertson was reluctant to put a figure on it, but it’ll be many billions of dollars when you think that the Auckland flooding three weeks ago alone will cost 1 billion dollars, and that’s just to fix the roads. 

So we’re talking several tens of billions probably. 

Add to that the $210 billion we already knew we needed to spend on infrastructure just to catch up to before the cyclone struck. 

Let's be honest:

We can’t afford to fix every single thing that just got destroyed; we can’t even afford to maintain the roads we run right now. We are a country the size of Japan, and yet we only have 5 million people here to pay for the roads in comparison to their 125 million people. 

We are going to have to choose: either we fix everything for cheap, or we fix the very important stuff and do it properly. 

I hope we remember the lesson about what happens if you choose the cheap option: it runs fine when the weather is good, but it falls over easily.

And when it falls over we’ll wish we’d paid the money and done it properly.