One of The Great Rorts Of Our Time

Cycleways--A Thing of Deceptive Beauty

When public bodies waste taxpayers' money, blood begins to simmer on its way to boiling.  It now turns out that Auckland--New Zealand's largest city--has been the victim of a scam.  The deception, apparently, has been carefully engineered by a bunch of anti-car, cycle zealots whose view of the future is soooo righteous, it justifies dissembling and lying.

We live close to the Great South Road as it makes its way down towards the Hunua ranges.  That main arterial road was once a main highway south, with two lanes heading south, and two north.  Now it is one lane either side.  But one both sides of the road there is a vacant cycle way to encourage and facilitate bike use.  What used to be two lanes of traffic each way is now one traffic lane and a cycle way.  At all times during the day and night, even in commuter rush hours, the cycle lane is more empty and barren than the Sahara.  As a consequence, traffic is gridlocked.

Commentator Mike Hoskings has also had his fill of this deceit and chicanery.

Not a Pretty Picture

Wellington Meets the Hard-Left

Christchurch used to be New Zealand's most hard-Left city.  There were plenty of folk in that metropolis who were heirs of a liberal, works-based Christian tradition.  As the generations passed, "works-based" increasingly became a strident demand for government works, with local government being a big ruler, regulator, and funder via taxation, and central government being pressured to co-contribute.  

The Christchurch earthquake put paid to much of this.  Reality--hard, brute reality--has sunk in and all sort of tradeoffs are now being made in that city.  If they had not had to face real life and real human beings and real suffering Christchurch would likely have remained a hard-Left beacon.

Now, the hard-Left in that city has narrowed down to spending most of its time focused upon what do do with the wrecked Christchurch cathedral.  There are plenty of hard-Left socialists and fellow travellers who feel that "they" own the cathedral--despite the fact they have never set foot within it while it still existed--and who demand that they have the final say as to what will happen to that ruin.  The actual owners, the Anglican Church, have largely been sidelined by the "community"--which is code for those who believe society, aka government, aka taxpayers, need to be stripped of some more money to bring the "community's" plans for the cathedral into reality.  The reflexive Leftist assumption of ownership of the cathedral is a classic symptom of the mindset.  The demand that "others", in this case the Anglican Church and central government, pay for their demands is also an abiding characteristic.  

But now Wellington is probably the most hard-Left city in New Zealand, with Christchurch limping along behind.  That city is exhibiting one of the abiding characteristics of hard-Left governance: breakdown, gridlock, and havoc.

Collective Responsibility of the Politburo

Keep Them In the Dark

Sometimes the most anti-democratic folk around the bazaars are politicians.  We see this cropping up in lots of different ways.  One example is the abuse of Freedom of Information regimes, which most Western democracies have these days.  Under FOI regimes, ordinary citizens (voters) have a right to request information from governments, which in many cases must be released to the requester.

In daily practice this means media and researchers and interest groups peppering government bodies and administration with FOI requests, which are supposed to be complied with in a certain time frame.  Almost inevitably the process gets clogged, delayed, and obfuscated.  This, of course, is not helped by opposing political parties making innumerable FOI requests just to be a nuisance.  But basically politicians love democracy only when they have to appeal for public support at the polling booth.  Suddenly democracy is wonderful.  But for every other day of the year . . . not so much.

Here is another egregious example of a political body which has completely lost touch with what it means to serve the people.