I haven't seen fit to besmirch the blogosphere with my musings for a week or so. As I opined in the second week of November it has got a lot less easy to be a grumpy old sod since we gained a mainly sensible pragmatic government. Other things have been happening to keep me occupied over the last three weeks as well, but maybe more of that later.
But it is one and half billy's worth of pragmatism that has dragged me back to the keyboard this evening. If you drive from Auckland airport to go pretty much anywhere north of Mangere you speed along a jolly spiffy motorway for about ten minutes and are then spat out in to leafy Epsom. It's a joke and has been for ever. The 'motorway' (sic) just stops in the middle of nowhere. That particular nowhere is on the periphery of the Mount Albert constituency which, for those of short memories, was the recent fiefdom of she who used to have to be obeyed. The hideous witch had decreed that the only way the ersatz motorway was going to link up with anything remotely useful in the way of a road was through a deep tunnel. NIMBY to the max. No roads going through my back garden. Now I'm no civil engineer but deep road tunnels don't come free with a packet of Weetbix. Proper roads (how would we know; New Zealand has none, but no matter) are not cheap but sodding great tunnels are eye wateringly expensive.
Well in a previous time (i.e. last year) that mattered not at all. The party that spent money that wasn't their's like a drunken sailor couldn't have given rat's arse what a tunnel cost as long as it kept motor vehicles out of Helen's petunias. Mercifully along comes the pragmatic new Minister of Transport and says 'Sod a tunnel at $3 billion for a game of soldiers, you can have road for half that and like it.' About bloody time too. We can't afford a tunnel. And that's pretty much it. But not for those cretins time warped in the past. 'We will have to demolish 200 houses' Tough. 'And a school' Tough. 'And some valuable green space'. Bollocks - and tough. 'It is ripping the heart out of the community' Well, its not and tough. On the Six O'clock News they even had a year five kid (that would make him ten or so?) giving his reasons as to why an above ground road was a bad idea. I'm surprised he wasn't asked his opinion on the cause of cancer or the meaning of life; they would have been just as relevant. Oh by the way his Mum was a leader of the 'Tunnel or Nothing Campaign' What a surprise. Well she ain't going to get a tunnel so she had better sod off to where she can have nothing. People like her are a waste of food and certainly shouldn't be allowed to breed.
Mount Albert is a dump and a few kilometres of black top instead of some ancient and crappy housing stock is marked improvement for the area. I sincerely hope this refreshing wave of pragmatism continues and grows to tsunami proportions. We need more of this. Forget all this consultation bollocks. 'You live in some scungy housing in the way of a nice shiny new road. Well, here's market value for your hovel. Now bugger off and go and live somewhere else.' Love it. And what are the yesterday's men of the Labour Party saying on all this? They are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the Wicked Witch's damned burrow. They are prepared to spend one and a half billion of my money for nothing. They say that by ditching the tunnel National are kissing good by to the by election. And National quite rightly don't give a fat rat's backside. Labour are happy to buy a by election (or Buy Election as ACT so correctly puts it) and National are happy to save money and sacrifice a useless seat.
One of the bylines of this Blog is pragmatism and six months down the track I am happy that we are getting a nice dose of it. A couple of hundred civil servants got the 'Don't come Monday' letter today. My only beef with this is that it wasn't a couple of thousand. Chrisitine Rankin has been appointed to the Families Commission. I'm not sure that the Commission is needed at all (and nor is Mrs Rankin) but the appointment has royally pissed off Sue Bradford so it was a useful move just for that reason alone. SWMBO has been shipped off to the other side of the world. Short of the moon I can think of nowhere further away. History Boy has been given the flick in all sorts of creative ways. He can't be feeling all that comfy being employed by The Rich Prick. Good, the less comfy the better.
No, I'm happy enough that the country is in much safer hands than it has been for nearly a decade.
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