There is a glorious pocket of time in Auckland City when I love it here.
After Christmas and until February, Auckland City empties and you got to wander through the lonely streets Quiet Earth styles like Bruno Lawrence.
This glorious pocket of solitude makes living in Auckland reasonable and fun and interesting over Summer.
For a moment each year we see what a City not groaning at the seams of over population and under investment in infrastructure feels like living in.
And then comes March Madness and a broken public transport system left begging people not to travel as a solution…
…don’t travel, that’s their solution?
Wow.
Just wow.
I want to punch the next commentator in the face who comes forward and glibly claims, ‘We can’t afford light rail down Dominion Rd’!
We are so underinvested for the vast growth generated by the mass immigration policies of Labour and National with no clear plan who is going to fund the infrastructure all that immigration requires.
We need underground and overground light rail all the way down Dominion Rd, all the way down Mt Eden Rd, all the way to South Auckland, all the way to West Auckland and all the way to the North Shore!
We need a new motorway connecting to Wellsford now plus passenger rail!
We need a vast upgrade of all Northland Roads, Coromonadal, the East Coast, the South Island!
We need a new Harbour Tunnel and we need a tunnel beneath the North and South Island!
We need our own pharmuctical industry.
We need a vast upgrade of our Military!
We not only need new drs, nurses and teachers, but we need new hospitals and schools.
We need solar panels on every roof.
We need Marae, Schools, Libraries, RSA, Churches and Community Halls to be directly resourced and built as resilience points inside a community.
We need state subsidised emergency survival kits to every community.
We need a new plan for food security.
We need degrowth sponge cities that pay the Artist wage.
We need 4 days working weeks, 11 weeks holidays and accomodation for Nurses, Drs, Teachers, Army and Police.
We need free public transport.
Free dental.
We need new regulation around Forestry, Telecommunications, Trucking industry and drainage industry.
We need a Ministry of Green Works and we need to pay for all this increased State capacity by taxing the rich more!
Sugar Tax
Financial Transaction Tax
Capital Gains Tax
Inheritance Tax
Land Tax
New top tax rate over $300 000
Wealth Tax on those over $30m
We have the tools to fund an increased State WHILE borrowing more at the same time.
This could be a chance to reset a broken Capitalism by removing the yoke of taxation from workers and putting it squarely on the speculators, the wealthy and the polluters.
Make the rich pay for hungry children to be fed.
The anger at the never ending cycle of climate carnage coming our way coupled with geopolitical shocks will force our hand if we continue to be in denial for the urgency of radical adaptation.
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Come on Bomber “we can’t afford any of that”!
Here in Auckland we are so broke our esteemed leader is planning to gut the shit out of Local Board funding resulting in the end of many community services and environmental progrommes that already run on the smell of an oily rag.
Meanwhile a tiny minority of Boomers are subsidized to the tune of $160 million annually hitting little balls around $2.6b worth of perfectly manicured real estate.
It’s all about priorities Bomber! Priorities!!!
We need $500 billion for all that Martyn. That’s the question, how do we pay for that massive wishlist?
The only suckers paying these taxes will be salary & wages earners, who keep paying tax after tax. The rest have blind trusts, or without jobs, and carry on with life claiming all benefits.
With over 200 different consultants engaged in the light rail project so far, nothing actually done and a guesstimate of 24 billion dollars that is bound to double over time, it’s a non-starter. The CRL started at around 2 billion, it will finish up at around 7 billion and its almost bankrupted us.
Besides, who is it going to serve? I do hope they’re not expecting me to use it to get to the airport, with my 20kg of luggage plus carry-on. Quite simply, fuck that: I’m using an Uber!
Maybe it’s designed to carry commuters to the CBD, but exactly who works in the CBD these days? Council staff, a couple of big insurance companies and some lawyers’ offices, plus baristas and some ram-raided and boarded up gift shops people.
Maybe the people making the decisions still think that hordes of labourers still work on the docks loaded bales of wool or frozen mutton on to waiting steam ships. Meanwhile my daughter works for one of those big corporates mentioned above and does it all from home and her lawyer husband works for another and he goes into the office less than once a week. Word is, most council workers don’t turn up to the office regularly either. They’re “working from home” LOL.
Tax anything that exceeds a wealth threshold. Don’t wait until the personal fortune exceeds thirty million dollars. Start at five million dollars perhaps.
Boomer, I love you like a brother, mainly because you make me roll on the floor with laughter.
Please keep up these rants, they make my day and reinforce Damien Grant’s description of you as “an economically illiterate numpty”.
There is little to laugh about in these woke times so I implore you to keep it up.
Bomber is gen x, not a boomer, btw
Not sure holding Grant up as an icon for talking about others economic literacy is the right thing to do but you did give me one hell of a laugh all the same.
Trams are 19th century public transport. May make sense to extend existing tram networks, but starting a new one?
Then again Auckland/NZ outrageous costs. In Zürich a couple of months ago new light rail (17km) completed amonhs complaints of excessive cost.
It cost about 89000 NZD per m
Auckland LR current estimate is approx 1250000 NZD per m.
BTW Swiss construction labour cost is more than 3 times NZ
Forget trams, invest in electric autonomous shuttles. Suitable for our population density, inherentöy adaptable and scaleable. Would cover all Auckland, not just narrow corridor.
To keep warm, burn all the rich you want – winter will still be cold when they’re all gone.
Burn the rich… yet they will still be rich. You still don’t get it do you Henry?
Well light rail is great un amsterdam around a little small city but to the stuff you need to do in Auckland you will always need independent private transport, cars. How do you get your large Tongan family to church on Sunday on buses and rail. How does a soccer Mom get her kid to Whitford for the Sat game. How does the tradie get from South Auckland to a job on the Shore etc etc. Light rail is for apartment dwellers in the inner city to get to the airport. The quicker solotion is just to build a connecting rail line from the airport to Manukau but alas that wont create enough bureacratic fat to consult over.
It’s not that simple.
https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2018/10/19/how-easy-is-a-puhinui-airport-rail-spur/
Truth be known the impractical unpragmatic anticar greaterauckland lobby group would prefer locals and tourists to bike from the airport to the city.
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