From “Fish Discos” to Mt Messenger — and Now Home:

How Infrastructure Delay Becomes Normalised

When Sam Richards, chief executive of Britain Remade, spoke to the UK Parliament in 2025, his phrase “from bat tunnels to fish discos” struck a nerve.

https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-million-fish-disco-to-save-less-than-one-wild-salmon-per-year/

It wasn’t anti-environmental rhetoric. It was a critique of how modern infrastructure systems increasingly confuse process with outcomes — producing delay, cost escalation, and public frustration, often without delivering proportional environmental benefit.

The examples sounded absurd because they were meant to. But the underlying failure Richards described is neither humorous nor foreign.

It is structural — and it travels well.

The Framework: What Richards Was Really Saying

At its core, the “bat tunnels” critique highlights a system that:

·       Treats hypothetical risk as more important than real harm

·       Rewards delay and risk-avoidance

·       Measures success by compliance, not outcomes

·       Distributes the cost of delay to the public, while insulating decision-makers

Environmental protection, land rights, and legal safeguards all exist for good reason. The failure emerges when no mechanism exists to balance them, weigh proportionality, or resolve conflict in real time.

That is when delay stops being accidental — and becomes inevitable.

Mt Messenger: A National Case Study in a Familiar Pattern

The Mt Messenger Bypass was designed to fix a widely acknowledged problem: a dangerous, unreliable stretch of State Highway 3 that regularly disrupts freight, isolates communities, and poses ongoing safety risks.

Yet despite broad support and national significance, the project has been repeatedly delayed — most recently through Public Works Act land acquisition processes, prompting calls for reform.

Through the Richards lens, the pattern is clear:

·       Planning fallacy: land acquisition and legal friction treated as secondary risks

·       Precaution without proportionality: process risks outweighing safety urgency

·       Single-issue veto points: individual objections capable of stalling a national corridor

·       Incentive misalignment: delay costs taxpayers; delay benefits no one accountable

Mt Messenger was not delayed because it is complex.

It was delayed because the system cannot reconcile competing interests without stopping entirely.

Bringing It Home: NPDC’s Thermal Dryer and Coastal Walkway

The same structural issues are visible much closer to home — in projects fully within local government control.

The Thermal Dryer: When Risk Avoidance Becomes Cost Escalation

The NPDC thermal dryer project, intended to improve wastewater processing and resilience, has experienced significant cost overruns. While technically complex, the underlying drivers are familiar:

·       Escalating mitigation and compliance requirements

·       Conservative risk settings are locked in early and never revisited

·       Limited ability to adapt the scope as costs rose

Under the Richards framework, this is a classic case of sunk-cost escalation combined with process supremacy: once decisions are embedded, the system resists recalibration — even when circumstances change, e.g. when we learned soon after that NZ Inc is running out far sooner of Natural Gas than forecast, we didn't pivot or stop it, just heads in the sand and keep on with the project....

The result is not failure to comply, but failure to control outcomes.

The Coastal Walkway Extension: Mt Messenger at a Council Scale

The $39 + million Coastal Walkway extension between Bell Block and Waitara now faces what the council reports themselves describe as a potentially “catastrophic” risk: land not yet purchased.

Despite the project being:

·       Strategically significant

·       Half-funded by Waka Kotahi

·       Tightly scheduled through to 2027

Land acquisition remains unresolved.

Councillors have openly acknowledged the risk of:

·       Landowners refusing to sell

·       Route changes

·       Or an inability to complete the project as designed

The irony is striking.

Just like Mt Messenger:

·       Land risk was known from the outset

·       Public Works Act processes are available — but avoided due to. cost, time and friction

·       Delay itself is now the dominant threat

And once again, time is treated as free, even though inflation, contractor availability, and partner commitment are anything but.

The Pattern Is the Point

Seen together, these projects tell a consistent story:

Project	Scale	Core Failure
Mt Messenger	National	Land & legal delay overwhelm national interest
Thermal Dryer	Local	Risk avoidance locks in escalating costs
Coastal Walkway	Local	Known land risk deferred until it becomes existential

Different projects.

Different contexts.

Same system behaviour.

The Deeper Issue: Process Over Outcomes

From bat tunnels in Britain to highways through Mt Messenger, to walkways along our own coast, the problem is not that we care too much about the environment or property rights.

It is our systems:

·       Cannot balance competing goods

·       Cannot price delay

·       Cannot adapt once decisions are locked in

·       And reward “not being wrong” over “getting it done”

Delay becomes the safest decision — even when it is the most damaging.

The Real Lesson

Infrastructure doesn’t fail because people are reckless.

It fails because systems designed to prevent harm have forgotten how to enable progress.

Until we reintroduce proportionality, time certainty, and outcome-based decision-making, these stories will keep repeating — just with different project names.

For those who are interested in a deeper dive, here are the top 10 fallacies that align with the above topic.

1. False Precision Fallacy

Mistaking procedural exactness for real-world effectiveness

Environmental mitigations are specified with extreme technical detail (species counts, lighting lux levels, tunnel dimensions), creating an illusion of scientific rigour — but without proportional evidence that these measures materially improve outcomes.

Result:

• High compliance cost

• Minimal ecological benefit

• Box-ticking replaces conservation impact

Precision ≠ effectiveness

2. The Precautionary Principle Run Amok

Treating hypothetical harm as certain harm

Projects are delayed or redesigned to address possible environmental impacts, even when probability and magnitude are unclear or negligible.

Result:

• Worst-case scenarios dominate decision-making

• No balancing against the economic, social, or climate costs of delay

• Paralysis by risk aversion

This is a precaution without proportionality.

3. Single-Issue Dominance Fallacy

Allowing one value to override all others

Environmental impact is treated as an absolute veto rather than one factor among many (housing shortages, transport emissions, energy security, public safety).

Result:

• Trade-offs are not acknowledged

• Projects that could reduce net environmental harm (e.g. rail vs cars) are blocked

• Broader system benefits are ignored

  
  

4. Regulatory Moral Licensing

“We followed the rules, therefore the outcome is good”

Agencies and project sponsors assume that compliance itself equals moral legitimacy, regardless of outcomes.

Result:

• No incentive to innovate cheaper or better solutions

• Escalating mitigation requirements with diminishing returns

• Responsibility shifts from results to process

  
  

5. The Planning Fallacy (Institutionalised)

Systematic underestimation of cost, time, and complexity

Environmental approval stages are routinely:

• Under-scoped

• Under-timed

• Under-costed

…but treated as “unexpected” every time.

Result:

• Chronic overruns

• Erosion of public trust

• Elected Officers/Politicians are blamed for what is structurally predictable

  
  

6. Legal Optionality Abuse

Using litigation as a de facto planning tool

Open-ended rights to judicial review incentivise delay, even when outcomes are unlikely to change.

Result:

• Small groups can stall nationally significant projects

• Delay becomes leverage

• Costs rise regardless of final approval

This is not accountability — it’s procedural capture.

7. Sunk Cost & Escalation of Commitment

Continuing absurd mitigations because they’re already specified

Once a mitigation (e.g. wildlife tunnel, bespoke habitat feature) is embedded in consent conditions, it becomes untouchable — even if evidence later shows it is ineffective.

Result:

• Money thrown after bad logic

• Inability to course-correct

• “Too late to change now” thinking

  
  

8. Symbolic Environmentalism

Confusing visibility with value

Highly visible, unusual mitigations (“fish discos”) are favoured over:

• Habitat restoration elsewhere

• Species-level interventions

• Outcomes-based offsets

Result:

• Public ridicule

• Environmentalism loses credibility

• Real conservation work is crowded out

  
  

9. Institutional Incentive Misalignment

No one pays for delay, but everyone pays for speed

• Regulators face little downside for saying “no” or “not yet”

• Project sponsors carry all financial risk

• Communities absorb housing and infrastructure shortages

Result:

A one-way ratchet toward delay.

10. Category Error: Local Harm vs Global Benefit

Ignoring net environmental outcomes

Blocking:

• Rail projects → more cars

• Grid upgrades → more fossil fuels

• Housing density → more sprawl

…can increase total environmental damage, even while “protecting” a local feature.

The Core Meta-Fallacy

Process Supremacy Over Outcomes

The overarching failure is mistaking procedural purity for public good.

If the system rewards delay, symbolism, and legal defensiveness, it will reliably produce expensive, slow, and absurd results.

Why this resonates (and why Sam Richard's video went viral)

Because people intuitively understand that:

• Protecting nature matters

• But performative protection at the expense of everything else is irrational!