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Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Mike Hosking: Michael Wood was dragged kicking and screaming back to reality


There it was.

At 7 o'clock yesterday morning Michael Wood, the lover of trains and cycleways, was on this programme waxing lyrical about the new spending priorities for our transport system.

I asked him whether it was more important to get a cycleway up or give Coromandel Highway 25A back. He said they were doing both, which of course isn't remotely true.

We were told just this time yesterday that climate change was top of the pile in terms of priorities when it came to handing out money for transport.

I asked Michael whether he had read Bruce Cotterill's piece on cycling up and down the country and what he had discovered about our roads. He hadn't read it, of course.

We needed, waxed Michael, to reduce our footprint.

We needed, opined Michael, to give people choice.

He had choice, because he had a bus around the corner from his place. But some people didn’t, so they needed that bus.

I wondered if people at a time like this wouldn’t be needing transport links back.

I wondered if Michael had an electoral death wish.

I wondered if Michael had the tinniest of tin-ears.

I wondered if he really was prepared to live through an election wipeout, but at least go down a hero in his own echo chamber as being the crusader for the ideas most people not only don’t want, but are now so angry about it will affect many thousands of votes come October.

In all honesty, 24 hours ago I couldn’t work out how this lot could be so wildly out of touch.

On one hand, the new Prime Minister wants to jettison dumb ideas that are holding them back, while at the same time Michael “number 47 to Mt Roskill” Wood is still babbling on about theoretical mumbo jumbo.

But by the afternoon it was over, Michael's dream was dashed. Political reality had come knocking at his door and the pot hole money going for cycleways, the excise tax going up, the roads that weren't being built because we needed bus lanes - it had all gone pop.

Just eight hours after being on air blurting out the greenie dream, the climate utopia, it was dead and replaced by what Michael is now calling an 'emergency response to the weather'.

So they got there - dragged kicking and screaming back to reality.

But here's the question - how is it you are such a mess you say one thing in the morning and another by mid-afternoon? What sort of panic does that represent?

They believe in nothing, they plan nothing. They say whatever you want to hear and hope you're sucked in.

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any bets on when the Labour Party will implode? Looks like a shitshow from here.

ihcpcoro said...

Remember Ardern's 'let's do this' in 2017? All that has been delivered by this inept mob is 'gunna do this', apart from the totally unmandated, divisive, racist stuff.