Auckland mayor Wayne Brown is lashing out at the National Government’s decision to scrap the Regional Fuel Tax saying it’s going to see important infrastructure projects axed.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced on Thursday the Government will be scrapping the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax from the end of June.
It comes after National campaigned on scrapping the tax within its first 100 days.
Speaking to AM on Friday Transport Minister Simeon Brown said the axing of the fuel tax will result in several projects not being funded.
“There are a bunch of projects which won’t get funded. Some cycleways, some bus lanes and, I am sure the mayor will be happy, less speed bumps,” the Transport Minister said.
Brown said the fuel tax is millions of dollars that have been taken off road users that were meant to build roads and instead have been used on speed bumps and red-light cameras.
“This is about priorities and ensuring that the money that is raised from Aucklanders goes to priority projects.”
When the Boomer King Wayne Brown is struck dumb by the Government destroying the hopes of public transport infrastructure in our groaning gridlocked city, you know shit just got real.
I kept asking questions to candidates about roading privatisation during the election debate series because the obviousness of where National’s roading platform led to seemed an important issue, but it never caught a wider focus.
Now we not only get the privatisation, but we get the pain of user pays inequality.
It’s all stick, no carrot.
What the petrol tax did was generate revenue from as wide a group as possible to fund infrastructure, National have dumped that in favour of privatisation of roads with tolling and congestion taxes that will burn the poor with no expansion in public transport infrastructure to provide alternatives.
Remember our subsidisation of public transport was supposed to be an emission reducing tactic as well, so by dumping them will not only make gridlock more likely, it will produce more emissions that are feeding the climate change extremes we are watching burn our country this Summer.
So we open the taps on immigration (250 000 in a year) and rather than build the infrastructure for that level of migration, we simply impose user pays as the solution???
Whatever decision is cooked up will be for the benefit of a Right wing donor somewhere.
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Yep Auckland can suck eggs and walk all night to get to work ,but winny and cigaretti can gie over 30 million to some island nation for health and at the same time scrap our own brown health system .What a bunch of loosers you have voted in because you wernt allowed to spread covid willy nilly and kill 30k people .Sad country NZ has become
New Zealand was a sad place for 6 years,about to improve for everyone.
Who would have thought it. Aucklanders interviewed by RNZ are generally pessimistic about the cut in the regional fuel tax, as it effects infrastructure funding. Everyone else in the country should be too. If the regional fuel tax is cut, it means if Auckland’s vital infrastructure projects are to be completed the funding will have to come from somewhere else.
If these projects are not completed New Zealand’s biggest city will descend into a miserable polluted gridlocked mess. With impacts on the economy and well being of the whole country.
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/national/aucklanders-have-their-say-on-the-scrapped-fuel-tax/ar-BB1i0RDG?
Aucklanders have their say on the scrapped fuel tax
Story by Felix Walton • 15h ago
Apart from the loss of infrastructure funding that the Aucklanders interviewed found worrying, what is not directly mentioned in the above report by Felix Walton, is that while driving a private car to work will become cheaper, public transport will become more expensive, making Auckland’s gridlock and pollution problems even worse.
https://at.govt.nz/bus-train-ferry/fares-discounts/public-transport-fare-changes-february-2024
I’m happy to think the Coalition Government is more than capable.
Wasn’t good ol’ Wayne meant to fix everything after he was elected? Some of us warned them. Mind you, warned them about Luxon as well, fat lot of good that did.
Just come back from Australia, till roads everywhere. At least one has choice, with the petrol tax one does not. Petrol about 2 dollars a litre, compared to 2.80 to 3 bucks here.
You morons who voted for The Three Stooges? This madness is on you. @ im right, @ bob the first, @ jack @ trevor, @ all you other right wing Machiavellian Confederates spinning the ‘greed is good’ mantra while here attacking good people, this is on you. Well done. Congratulations. You’re winners. You win the booby prize for being that rare one thing with many arse holes, The National Party. A loud, proud, bald headed demolition crew. The Traitors to their target prey being our farmers, the exploiters to our urban people and our abusers to the poor they created. Well done. What winners! No one’s more proud of you than yourselves as you bank our money while you suck foreign bankster cock.
The morons voted Labour that’s why they lost.
One more little thing. Not as little as semen brown mind you, nor as little as gormless chris bishops think-bit.
That photograph is priceless.
Here’s the team. And lets not forget ACT and NZ First. And remember, they all have one thing in common.
We pay them all their $ix figure$ plu$ entitlement$ and expen$e$ and God only knows what the pick up in the lobby.
The National Team.
https://www.national.org.nz/team
The ACT team
https://www.act.org.nz/people
The NZ First team
https://www.nzfirst.nz/people
RNZ.
“Auckland’s central city is home to some of the region’s poorest people, living in tiny overcrowded apartments which are threatening to turn some areas into slums.”
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/253620/slum-warning-over-auckland-cbd
The Slums don’t need lite rail though do they.
This shit’s going down because our farmers, the ones the natzo’s have been exploiting for 88 years now, have run out of puff. What we’re seeing in our parliament right now is barely contained panic which is why they’re trying to sell us to whomever wants a cheap top-shelf country, if they’ve not already done so. The natzo’s will be terrified of what’s coming at us which is The truth. That’s what’s coming at us, or more specifically, at them.
Aye Boys? You might have to explain just how it was that you saved up those 14 multiples of billions, the 3118 multiples of millions and of how much you got from the four now foreign owned banks to allow them to have their way with us innocent workers. The same foreign owned banks who now steal $180.00 a second 24/7/365 in perpetuity.
This is what needs to happen, and you will laugh at this.
Farmers and @ Maori and all down-stream agrarian service industry people must strike until a full and public royal commission of inquiry is conducted.
In the meantime, people with mortgages could form a mortgage payers union then go on a righteous strike and stop paying the rapaciously greedy now foreign owned bankster bastards one more fucking cent.
If farmers can drive a tractor in an angry fashion then surely they can stay in bed and snooze in an angry fashion while the terminally in debt urban consumer element of the country flies off in a wild panic because there’s no foods in the super markets and no exports earned economy coming to be siphoned off by the aforementioned four now foreign owned banksters.
What is that? When someone like me who knows fuck all can come up with a plan to save our arses while politicians and sundry other geniuses keep falling over their own flat feet while running around in circles in blind panic. I think it’s because I don’t have lies to keep lids on. All I can be found out to be is of being mistaken. They, them, those fuckers above could be found out as being crooked traitors. Aye Boys?
Where is your plan?
Perhaps if you spent as much time working on your farm as you do writing on this blog you would soon have your mortgage paid and the foreign banks will go away and you could hibernate for the next 6 years of National Party rule
Well said Trevor.
You always make sense CB, always entertaining and erudite. You know history and you know when it all went wrong for ordinary NZders be they farmers or factory workers.
You can see through the total nonsense we are served up daily and discern the basic truth. They are all as crooked as each other.
I think they are quite bemused when they realize we actually expect them to do something about our problems. If it’s as bad as they say it was under Labour, we expect them to do better.
Already we see them doing nothing or actively causing damage.
TVNZ news tonight, the dairy owners are aghast that the govt. hasn’t done a thing to help combat ram raids and robberies. Did they really think this govt. would? National got very cozy with dairy owners before the election but looks like they’ve been dropped from the xmas card list already.
You and I know that what the new govt. HAS done will exacerbate the problems, create poverty and debt.
Of course, they try to tell us it only started 6 years ago. Yeah, right.
The Herald reports that Seymour is becoming more popular. Of the 1000 eligible voters surveyed, how many were members of the ACT party?
In my opinion many NZders, like the dairy owners, are gullible and easily duped. Their social conscience has gone and they rely on influencers for their ‘news’.
Joy you must be an excellent cryptic crossword solver.
coz tolls work sooooo well in oz….
show me one just one privatised service that’s cheaper more convenient and easier to contact than public services…c’mon nats give it the good old college go…tell you what to give you chance you can include overseas
All of them.
I don’t think there is anything positive to say about Simeon Brown.
Of course they totally lied at the announcement. The bulk of the funding has not gone to speed cameras, speed humps, and cycle ways at all, but that’s par for course with these muppets.
The Muppets lost in October we now have a more than competent Government,of which Simeon is playing a major part.
Simeon showing signs of being an effective Minister.