Keep politicians away from roads

The nonsense of Auckland City Councillors arguing about whether a barely used bus lane should be allowed to have wider usage speaks volumes about why politicians are profoundly incompetent at running what is essentially a utility service.

It's very simple. The NZ Herald reports that the Auckland City transport committee has decided to allow the Tamaki Drive bus lane to be open to any vehicles with 2 or more occupants, largely because the lane lies empty every 7.5 minutes at peak times, whilst parallel lanes are congested. An intelligent decision, although it could be better (as there is no reason why all heavy vehicles couldn't use it, since they pay more than any other vehicles to use the roads anyway, and have no reasonable alternative.

However, the leftwing halfwits at City Vision disagree. They would rather a precious scarce resource (road space) remain empty, whilst cars, taxis and trucks sit held up, wasting more fuel (and emitting more pollution and CO2) than would otherwise be the case. They baulk at money for the conversion coming from the "public transport fund", which of course is a little precious.

It's a quasi-Soviet central planner attitude that people using cars are "bad" and should be punished (presumably also trucks, because freight should go on rail), but public transport is "good" and everyone else should be forced to subsidise it.

Auckland's local roads should be given over to a new council controlled organisation, at arms length from all politicians, with a board, and a mandate to operate the road network to encourage free flow of people and goods and make a profit doing so. It would get money from kerbside parking (which it would run to maximise profits), any tolling, rates (as a transitional measure) and bidding funds from the National Land Transport Fund (as councils do at present). It should also be allowed to hand over local streets to body corporates of adjoining property owners if they so wish, and build new roads (tolling them if it sees fit).

Then you might get roads for those who pay for them, with the highest priority going to those who pay the most - at the moment truck owners and private cars.

So do that along with amalgamating Auckland councils (and getting rid of the power of general competence), and you might help address Auckland transport far more than an electric train set.

ACT's first serious (partial) let down?

A law on what people wear in public in one district.

After all, couldn't pubs, clubs and restaurants just enforce private property rights and set their own rules?

Good on Heather Roy and Sir Roger Douglas for being principled opponents, shame on Rodney, David Garrett and John Boscawen. You cannot pretend to be for less government or the liberal party by supporting the criminalisation of what people wear in public in one district.

It is not just authoritarian, but ludicrous that there is now a separate criminal law (not bylaw) for a distinct local authority district.

It is one thing for ACT's policy to disappoint me as a libertarian, but to actively machinate to support a new - victimless - criminal law, is appalling. The issue of course is that it isn't party policy, but for individual MPs - of whom only Rodney Hide is directly voted (and without whom none of the others would be there).

So I'll leave it to Bernard Darnton, Lindsay Mitchell and Blair Mulholland to conclude. Garrett and Boscawen appear to believe it, but Rodney Hide? He always talked differently - now with this, and the mega city, he looks like the others, it's a pity. I always hoped I would be wrong about ACT in government. This appears to be its first active support for MORE government not less. Shame.

How to help families?

Homepaddock proposes an excellent first step:

"If the Families Commission was really serious about addressing the causes of neglect and abuse it would disestablish itself and request that the funding it gets is redirected to where it will make a positive difference."

Now I know it would mean bugger all when you spread it around all families, but it is the principle of the thing.

Besides, wouldn't it be fun to watch Peter Dunne have a hissy fit about his pet bureaucracy?

If he left the government nobody would care, and it would be far preferable for government supporters to vote for a National candidate in 2011 than Dunne. Winston's gone, Anderton must be nearly retirement, about time to remove the last party that is simply an offspring of Labour.

Hungary 1989 - the iron curtain was cut

Today is the 20th anniversary of the day the Iron Curtain was cut. It followed Hungary's own movement towards freedom that paralleled that of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Karoly Grosz had become General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in May 1988, and began a process of liberalisation.

Widespread protests in 1988 calling for democracy saw multi-party elections announced in February 1989. Along with that came freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and the right to form competitive trade unions. In April 1989, the USSR agreed to withdraw all Soviet troops from Hungary by 1991.

However it was the removal of barbed wire between Hungary and Austria, and the "shoot to kill" policy of border guards on 6 May 1989, that saw the Iron Curtain pulled to one corner, and the light of the West draw thousands.

You see passport holders in the Warsaw Pact countries had freedom of movement between those countries. East Germans notably could travel freely to (then) Czechoslovakia and onto Hungary, and now onto the West. 30,000 did so between May and September 1989, before the geriatric thugs in the dying German Democratic Republic (GDR) put up their own restrictions on travel to Hungary. East Germans kept fleeing to Czechoslovakia, which had its own border closed in October before protests by hundreds of thousands in the streets saw Erich Honecker himself deposed by his own party.

Then the Wall came down.

Today I am in Budapest, by pure coincidence. It is a thriving city of free people, as it always should have been, and a city that remembers what it went through from the terror of a brief period of fascist rule in 1940, to Soviet imperialism, the 1956 uprising and its crushing and the sheer terror of never knowing from one day to the next whether the state would turn on you next.

Budapest has a Museum of Terror, dedicated not to terrorism as we know it, but the terror of the period of Hungary under dictatorship - from its own fascism to Nazi occupation. to the Soviet occupation and its socialist stooges. It includes pointedly, a long list of those who were the foot soldiers in this police state, the prison guards, the "judges" who proclaimed death sentences and the secret police men and women who bullied their own people. It was designed to name and shame those who "were only following orders" and so did what most would think was unthinkable - murdering, imprisoning and torturing in the name of "the people" and "the party" and "the revolution".

Today is a day worthy of celebrating, for it is remarkable to think that this once Marxist Leninist dictatorship is today a free member of NATO and the European Union. It is also worthy remembering that most of the former Soviet Union itself, at best has only just started really having some of that freedom, at worst is under a similar level of tyranny, with a different name. The philosophical and political battle for freedom in the former Soviet bloc is far from over.

Mt Albert and that motorway

One issue that both Labour and the Greens are making a big deal for the by-election is the Waterview motorway extension to SH20, which will link the soon to be finished Mt Roskill extension to the North Western motorway, effectively completing the Western Ring Road.

The bottom line is this:

Labour wants to bore a tunnel for the route (it isn't through a hill). This would come to around $2.8 billion. Note all the other sections of the Western Ring Road are open cut trenched motorways, note the total cost for the other six sections that have been built since 2000 is less than half this. In other words, you might wonder why the motorway through the former PM's electorate was to be a goldplated (but narrow) tunnel, but the other sections were left to be open motorways?

National is reviewing the alternatives, including a cut and cover tunnel, or an open cut road, like the other sections, on the ground it could save between $0.5 and $0.8 billion. It doesn't have Helen Clark on the end of the phone demanding her precious ex.electorate be protected from the big bad road.

The Greens don't want the road built at all, they want a railway line to connect west to south Auckland, and presumably prefer the roads between the two motorways to be congested. I guess they hope think road transport will become hienously expensive, and so everyone will use trains shooting past empty road.

Of course the decision will be made by this government. So which candidate is likely to make a difference to this?

Not Russel Norman. The government will ignore a local MP who says no road. Besides the Greens should be happy, they are getting their big electric train set.

Not David Shearer. He can jump up and down as much as he likes, but he wont have access to the government. Besides, there isn't enough money in the National Land Transport Fund to pay for more greenplated tunnels that aren't going under hills (the Victoria Park Tunnel will take enough money as it is thank you).

Melissa Lee? Well yes she will have access to Bill English and Steven Joyce, who will decide on the availability of extra money to the New Zealand Transport Agency, which in effect will determine the option selected. She is best placed to influence it.

On my part, I think it should be built when the private sector thinks it will be worth it, or at least when it is a better spend than paying for all the other roads that can be funded from road taxes.

Of course, Mt Albert voters might want to make a different choice. A choice about whether they want to vote for more government or less government.

It might be better to just wait to see who all the candidates will be, before making a choice.

UPDATE: ACT candidate John Boscawen has sensibly argued that the Waterview extension should be a surface level motorway, he isn't wanting to pillage taxpayers to placate local interests. He says "no more Buy election" which is quite clever, and in fact making it a surface motorway (like all the other sections) will make it far more affordable. Good for him, by contrast Labour was rolling out the pork for Mt Albert on this issue before the general election, and is doing the same now. (and credit to Gooner for his comment as I was typing this!).