Opinion: The Transport Minister’s had a bit of a mare.
The Herald yesterday morning broke the story about the Government’s new transport plan being finalised, including plans to take funding for fixing potholes and spend it on new bus and cycle lanes.
The transport plan which is rewritten every few years was to make climate change the number one priority for the first time.
And the Prime Minister additionally recognised how politically cataclysmic it would be to divert money to bus lanes we don’t even have bus drivers to drive down them right now when some of our state highways have become one giant pothole... kilometres wide.
The transport plan would need a rethink, which the Prime Minister has since confirmed, though it seems he failed to tell his transport minister in time for print.
Reading the Michael Wood interview in the Herald yesterday, not only did he fail to say the whole plan was for the scrap heap post-Gabrielle and that the new priorities were rebuilding and resilience...
He also failed to kibosh the cycle and bus lanes over potholes proposal.
The chef’s kiss, or political kiss of death, was Wood also talking up the prospect of not only lifting the subsidy on fuel taxes and road user charges but hiking fuel taxes and road user charges on top of it. Double whammy.
Did he not get the ‘bread and butter’ memo from the Prime Minister? We’re in a cost-of-living crisis - households are struggling to afford bread and butter and not only do you want to remove the discount that was helping people fill up the tank to get to work to pay their rent and feed their kids… but the government also wants to increase those taxes in election year too.
Wow. I admire your honest recognition of the need to top up the transport coffers but read the room bro…
The perversity here though is, of course, that the government is now dropping climate action back down the list of priorities to pay for the damage created by climate change.
We are the serpent eating its own tail. Forever caught in an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth.
