And to be fair, it's not just him, okay?
I suspect very strongly, because they've hinted as much, that the National Party and the coalition government will announce exactly the same thing on Monday. After all, raising fuel taxes by 12 cents a litre in January, at a time when petrol prices are already elevated because of the war involving Iran, is, as Chris Bishop once put it, a political death wish.
But you can't have everything, okay? You're going to have to give something up.
Maybe it's the maintenance on your local road that those taxes help pay for. Maybe it's the new road you were hoping for.
In my case, it's the upgrade to Mill Road, which was promised to us by Grant Robertson, then cancelled, then re-promised by Chris Bishop, and now appears to have been cancelled again. That's because letters have gone out to property owners informing them that the deal is off.
NZTA is passing this off as a delay of maybe a couple of years. BS.
This is not a small delay. Remember, they started buying properties for a second Mt Victoria Tunnel in the 1960s. It is now 60 years later and we still don't have that tunnel.
So if they're cancelling these property purchases, it's because the upgrade has effectively been shelved for the foreseeable future.
Now, I'm gutted about that because I've lived south of Auckland in Pukekohe and I know how difficult it is to get up the Southern Motorway during rush hour. I also know how important Mill Road is as an alternative route for those vehicles.
But it has been cancelled because there simply isn't enough money. We haven't increased fuel taxes for nearly seven years now.
So sure, politically it's a smart move for these political parties not to increase the fuel tax, but there will be consequences.
And Mill Road is one of them.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and radio broadcaster who hosts Newstalk ZB's weekday Drive-Time Show – where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
You've become terribly conditioned that the only solution is more taxes. You are wrong.
In Auckland for example, I do not want tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on anti motor vehicle speed humps, or traffic lit pedestrian crossings, bike lanes, bus lanes, digital bus stop departure boards - GPS connected, elevators at train stations rather than subways much less Sistine Chapel level decor at the 3 new CRL stations but Auckland Council do it all the same. They do not give a flying shit about public money.
One cent extra in tax is 2 cents more they all can waste.
Road maintenance is a basic non negotiable but not by the spending decision makers are generally fixated by anticar ideology. We should be using their inconvenient bus obsession not our own cars and as we saw with bicycle activist Julie Ann Genter and her responses as associate minister to "Waka Kotahi" was to run our highways into the ground. She hated cars!
And God help the public in the regions without an alternative.
No more tax is needed. It just needs to be spent wisely and properly. Do not give those idiots an further excuse to waste our money on their favourite causes.
anon 7.28: But we got many kms of the 'cheesecutter wires' (as motorcyclists call them) lane dividers.
Also creating access issues for farmers and emergency services.
Try and change direction around Karapiro/Cambridge.
It takes vision, strategy, accountability and resources to built the infrastructure for tomorrow today. Right now we can’t built the infrastructure that is badly needed today let alone think about tomorrow. How more money in the hands of organisations that have zero vision, don’t understand priorities and are smothered by bureaucracy and red tape will achieve something more than fancy road crossings and useless cycle lanes?
It has to be more taxes because they have urinated away billions of tax dollars on nothing but creating debt and can't sustain their massively excessive inefficient bankrupt system including failing what would in other hands profitable businesses. Then there's the welfare teat still feeding adults and the union gangs.
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