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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Ah, Martyn, if only . . .
What we will do is tentatively tiptoe over the abyss of societal collapse caused by climate change!
A pity – humans had some damn good characteristics before they went extinct!
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!!!
Bomber
I salute your list of demands and agree with all of them. But clearly you have no idea what all this costs and you are totally delusional about tax paying for it. How much more tax could you give to pay your share? Your obsession with tax as a means to money is flawed. To achieve all you dream of, we need to ‘Norway’ this country by firstly kicking the Greens into touch and secondly starting state owned, big profitable businesses:
NZ Oil Explor and Refine
NZ Gas and Oxygen
NZ Coal and Minerals
NZ Timber Produce
NZ Meat and Dairy.
We need to stop being so fucking woke, stop the NIMBY crap and start making some serious money. Like 7 or 8 tourists from China can pay for all of our dreams?
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.
We also need a real education system, not the woke fest the Wellington Twitterati is turning it in to. Just check out what they think kids need to learn in maths:
“Being numerate in Aotearoa New Zealand today relies upon understanding diverse cultural perspectives and privileging te ao Māori and Pacific world-views”
No, it’s maths, which was invented by several different cultures over thousands of years, and is independent of any culture. And why should Maori and Pacifica views on maths be any more important than any other?
Now we have a Curriculum Refresh is that it is based primarily on race and identity and not the real things that determine success in the world – literacy, numeracy, science etc.
“Being numerate in Aotearoa New Zealand today relies upon understanding diverse cultural perspectives and privileging te ao Māori and Pacific world-views”
It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, isn’t it? Who would dare point out the obvious, paralysed as we are by fear of being branded a “racist”.
The big question is: if the Nats win in October, will they tackle this problem? I have no confidence in Luxon, or most of his front bench – with the exception of Shane Reti, they’re all woke, or at least woke-compliant. Seymour and/or Peters will need to be in a position to force Luxon’s hand if we are to see any positive change in the education system.
Have you read the History curriculum yet??? Factually inaccurate and demonstrably false no mention of Seddon or Hilary or Rutherford. A paragraph devoted to Kate Sheppard.
Ardern described it as the achievement she is most proud of!! Go figure.
No I haven’t seen the history curriculum yet Shona, but what you’re saying doesn’t surprise me.
The general plan from both the Red & Blue teams, is we just write off the useless people, the illiterate, the innumerate, the people whose tech skills are limited to being able to text or play a Tiktok video, and import the “skilled” people we need.
Apparently education & training is a costly expense our country and businesses can’t afford, it’s better to turn the useless into sausages to feed the poor, and import “better” people to exploit.
Gawd…really…this woke disease needs to be put out of its fucking misery. Harming our children like this is madness!
If that is “being numerate”, not sure that I want to know what is “being literate” ?
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.
trams work in melbourne relativly cheap frequent and an intigrated ticket system….it’s not rocket science
It took many years and many millions of dollars for them to iron out the problems of integrated ticket system but it does run smoothly now . I would point out they have a large population and itvis a wealthy state with old money that has always had good public transport. The new underground system they are building is going to be incredible.
I was there 12 yrs ago trev so hardly a news thing
Rather than taxing people into the ground, here’s another way to help fund better infrastructure:
Jettison those useless demographic ministries, as Seymour has proposed.
The problem with Auckland is that it’s boring, ugly, expensive and unnecessary. Other than that, it’s great. Go Auckland! City of michael fay’s little sails. The only useful thing about Auckland is when it opens up and lets out the excrement from the bankers and money sniffers.
stuff.
‘You can smell where the money is’: Graeme Hart and his innate sense of commerce
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/128825629/you-can-smell-where-the-money-is-graeme-hart-and-his-innate-sense-of-commerce?utm_source=pocket_saves
I’d have to agree with you CB. It has no soul. Plenty of arseholes but yeah.
Its lost its mojo and has become highly polarised and politicised and full of talkers, not many doers because the talkers have made it hard to do anything without them capturing the funding and slowing down everything that needs doing. Why, because they, the talkers are the amateurs.
if it costs money it won’t GET done in NZ….c’mon be fair we have to bail out all the property owners who thought flood plains were a good place to build
The country already had widespread tramways, trolleybuses and passenger railway lines 100 years ago.
The roads were always bad. The attempts to fix that in the 1960s were something of a failure (too slow, too few freeways and interprovincial highways planned).
The idiotic ruling elite are simply too stingy to develop anything properly. Instead they just brainwash the little villagers, who have never actually used proper infrastructure before (or are old enough to have forgotten about it)
indeed kristoff just before I left the uk manchester was starting to build light rail(trams lets call a spade a spade) and when you laid the proposed new route map over the old tram map pretty much identical
To keep warm, burn all the rich you want – winter will still be cold when they’re all gone.
Well put, King Henry.
Burn the rich… yet they will still be rich. You still don’t get it do you Henry?
Dominion road rail.
I just don’t get it. If it was Wayne Browns idea, I’m certain 99% of the lefties and woke would be against it.
I do get the need for clean effective and efficient public transport, which will shift the masses.
But from the airport to city via Dom road? Someone please make a rational convincing case. Please convince me, don’t just blindly parrot Jacinda or Michael Wood because you’re a Labour lover.
It may come as a surprise to you, but Auckland is not London, and our airport is not Heathrow. There will be fuck-all travellers who will jet into Auckland for the day, perhaps the night, for a business meeting. Tourists landing in Auckland for a month travelling around NZ in their camper, WILL NOT train into the city.
Is there large population growth forecast along this line in the future? No, even with infill housing. There’s no where to grow.
Where as decent train services West, all the way to Helensville, would provide decades, if not centuries of future growth potential.
Same North. Imagine an efficient quiet electric train running from the city north, all the way to Warkworth-Wellsford! Under the harbour and into Brittomart. Massive reduction on the harbour bridge traffic, and you open up the city to vast areas of land north and west.
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.
Get a bike. Walk. Carpool. No you don’t need a tram to dominion road atm. Like not at fucking all.
E bikes. Self drive ubers are an alternative to light rail lines (fixed routes and carry stuff).
and self drive ubers help the congestion problem how??
By reducing the number of “skilled” migrants required to drive them. Frees up low cost housing too.
if you go back to my post it refers SPECIFICALLY to congestion….it doesn’t matter who drives the cars just that there are too many of them…your point is a different racist issue but nice try
Maybe we could train (and pay properly) New Zealand citizens as bus drivers, make public transport cheaper & more reliable, and then ban single occupant, non-commercial cars/utes/vans from city centres during 8am to 10am & 4pm to 6pm. Would that reduce congestion? Unfortunately, no one, even the Greens is pushing that kind of reform.
As to the racist issue, is it right to import more foreigners to fill roles that Kiwi’s could fill if companies were willing to train workers & pay a proper living wage? Especially when those imported workers are often exploited, and place additional burdens on our limited housing stock, schooling & infrastructure. Not to mention that sometimes they don’t actually have the skills they have been employed for. Being an Uber driver is not a skilled profession, it is exploitation by a foreign corporation, with most profits heading straight offshore, with little or no benefit to New Zealand.
training and pay as you point out are the issues if NZ business wants to cheapskate these are the results
Also split shifts & general conditions ruin what could be an enjoyable job for Kiwis. Violence & aggression from some passengers kind of spoil bus driving too.