Amid the consternation and flurry that greeted the Government's scrapping of Auckland's regional petrol tax and six-cent hike in national petrol tax, there were the usual blandishments and obfuscations.
Prime Minister John Key went for the tried and true: the old "trickle-down effect" - as in trickle down the country. When challenged that the rest of New Zealand would be funding Auckland transport, he simply said if the state highway network was more efficient in Auckland, the whole country would benefit from a better New Zealand economy.
Oh, and he also nodded in the direction of compliance - at least I think that's what he was getting at.
"You've got a situation where you have a regional petrol tax, it is hideously complex to administer and people will start doing all sorts of behavioural changes to avoid paying what would be quite a large tax in the Auckland region," he said.
When asked about a $420 million reallocation of Crown investment from non-state highway areas - that is to say from funds earmarked for public transport, walkways and cycleways - Transport Minister Steven Joyce did even better: "Yes, we are putting some pressure on the non-state highways classes to get better results from those classes."
Er, pardon?
One wonders what "better results from those classes" could possibly mean - in plain English.
One can only take a stab. How about, in the case of walkways, "You are not walking fast enough so we are going to cut you off at the knees until you do"? Or cycleways: "Not enough cyclists are using the cycleways so from now on only bicycles with one wheel will be allowed on the paths"?
We demand better results from the non-state highway classes!Let's back up and rehearse a bit of context. Those with memories that stretch back longer than six months will recall that the transport system in Auckland has long been contentious and chronically underfunded.
In an attempt to get some cohesion, focus and co-ordination across the whole of the Auckland region - and to allay a proportion of the costs where they arose and where they led to the most immediate and measurable benefits - the Labour-led government introduced the concept of a regional petrol tax.
That is to say the populace of the greater Auckland area, which most used the roads, would contribute proportionately to the costs of upgrading the roading system by paying extra through the tax. The Auckland Regional Council had developed a strategy based on such a tax of up to about 14 cents a litre.
Admittedly quite a hike, but if as a result fewer people drove to work through the gridlocked streets, and sought an alternative such as walking or cycling or public transport, then so much the better.
Public transport - the buses and trains and ferries - would be better patronised and therefore more efficient as a result; and those citizens who chose to walk or cycle would, all the evidence suggests, in the long term avail themselves less of the country's finite health budget. Heaven forbid, greenhouse gases might even be reduced.
National has turned all that on its head. And, frankly, on the flimsiest of pretences.
Mr Joyce's best shot seems to be in the lemmings-over-the-cliff category.
Public transport had enjoyed increases in funding in recent years, he said, and it was time road-users had their share, citing that "84% of New Zealanders go to work by truck, car or motorcycle".
Large numbers do it so it is the most appropriate and sensible policy? Large numbers of kids eat lollies - let's legislate to give them more?
No, this is a transparent appeasement policy for voters north of the Bombay Hills, for the Government's many friends in the road-user lobby groups, and an ideological two-fingers up to all those "touchy-feely" lefties and greenies who have been harping on for years about climate change, carbon taxes, peak oil and all that other hippy environmental nonsense.
Never mind that most of the rest of the developed nations are now peddling in a different direction.
We, it seems, are determined to turn the clock back, and blunder into a brave new world where carbon emissions don't count, where oil is abundant and where the car rules.
And the best thing about it? We here in the South get to pay for it.
• Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
