I'm in the USA but that budget...

I've noticed the NZ budget... see you didn't get any of your money back, except the contracting industry which is having an ol' fashioned pork barrel building boom on roads. The state sector continues to grow, and organisations like NaZis on Air get more money to propagate their.. well propaganda. Read this unadulterated vomit from the Acting CEO of NZ On Air:

"Acting Chief Executive Bernard Duncan said seeing and hearing our own stories on television and radio and in our music was especially important to New Zealanders because of our size and geographic location.

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What the hell are "our own stories"? Do your stories get put onto the radio or TV? Maybe you ring talkback and you can share your story? That doesn't get funding from the taxpayer. Apparently because NZ has a small population, or is it the land area of the UK, that means it is especially important to subsidise and prop up a bunch of self-obsessed wankers producing TV to make themselves feel better? Apparently construction workers, shopkeepers, farmers, restaurant workers all need to help pay those tossers to "share their fucking stories". It's not my fucking story Mr Duncan!

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Then he says “Local content that tells our stories helps us to connect as a society, and to know who we are as a nation. It allows us to celebrate our culture and consider the things that set us apart from other countries,”

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Connect as a society? You mean we all sit at home playing with ourselves and don't interact without having Mr Duncan take his cut of the loot Dr Cullen takes from our regular earnings to put some actors on TV? So New Zealand didn't connect as a society before TV came along in the 1960s??? Mr Duncan, New Zealanders meet each other socially in real life, they "connect" as you call it, without you propping up the careers and businesses of people doing something they "love". New Zealanders use bars, sport, clubs, churches, workplaces, families, the internet to connect - TV is the least connecting medium of all, it is passive and keeps people at home. The thing that sets New Zealand apart from other countries is not you funding TV programmes, New Zealanders overseas don't identify (or even remember) NZ made TV programmes most of the time - it is something else - and the state doesn't replicate or represent it.

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Now I've vented my spleen on NaZis on Air, the roads...

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Fortunately, most of the projects in the road spendup are quite good - though Labour's list of projects includes umpteen that are already underway and already funded, like the long delayed and much needed Mt Roskill Extension of SH20 in Auckland. Unfortunately, some are poor quality and the huge increase in spending in a short time has fueled massive inflation in the road building sector. At least you can no longer say your petrol tax isn't being spent on roads, now it is - although not guaranteed for more than 5 years.

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So now if you want even more roads, you'll have to pay tolls, more tax or not build the inefficient ones. Don't expect to hear Labour or National talk about roads that are being built that probably shouldn't be... you see flab in the roading sector is growing year on year. Maybe NZ could take a leaf out of the Bush Administration, which has a Democrat Transport Secretary Norman Mineta saying that some highways can be privatised:

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"we will encourage more states to find ways to open up their transportation infrastructure to private investment opportunities. State budgets are stretched thin, while gasoline taxes are becoming increasingly untenable as long-term sources of funding.At the same time, major financial institutions and their clients are expressing increasing willingness to invest billions of dollars in roads and airports."