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train station before a 46-minute
train/tram ride to town. No wonder
Donald Trump’s hanging on.
Producer: “Oh, come ooon. That’s
just too stoopid, even for this show.
What city in the world runs a train
to somewhere near an airport? Are
you back on the sauce?”
Writer: “No, seriously. Then
LGWM wins the tender to run the
Puhinui-to-airport bus service, so the
Apec leaders will have to hail cabs!
“Oh, and then it turns out that
the new central Auckland rail link
they’re building for $4.4 billion,
nobody knows who owns it!”
Producer: “Okay, buddy. I’m put-
ting you on stress leave.”A RUSE THAT MIGHT FAIL
Also only somewhat near to reality
is the proposal for National’s Alfred
Ngaro to start a Christian party as a
vote-extender to help get the Nats
back into power. This is an old idea
that, as above, keeps getting off at
Puhinui. Past Christian-based parties
couldn’t crack the 5% threshold, but
breasted 4% and effectively wasted
it.
Ngaro or another Christian MP
getting a seat would solve that
problem, but which MP is going to
budge up and give away their safe
seat for this experiment? Party work-
ers in Botany have already mutinied.
If National is lucky, the pending
boundary review will carve out a
new seat in Auckland’s blue zone
(gruyère Census data willing). But
to give it away for a ruse that might
fail will divide the party. Will a new
lot of National voters take to theI
t can’t yet be proven, but no one
should be surprised if it turns out that
Phil Twyford is really the frontman
for an elaborate fly-on-the-wall TV
mockumentary made by the satirists
who devise such political sitcoms as Veep
and The Thick of It.
POLITICS
Phil Twyford’s policy pratfalls are the stuff of TV sitcoms.
Yes, Minister
JANE
CLIFTON
Housing and Transport Minister
Phil Twyford.make this very old technology run
efficiently, or even at all!”
We must be getting near the
penultimate episode, though,
because the Puhinui Interchange
announcement took the Twyford
spoof to new heights of ludicrous-
ness. “Rapid” transport to Auckland
Airport will be galvanised by – ta-dah!- the tarting-up of a train station
not actually at the airport, but 10
minutes away.
We don’t have enough money
for the last 10 minutes, apparently,
although we don’t actually know
what it would cost, so how we know
we can’t afford it is also unknown at
this time.
Passengers will have to get off the
train – or possibly a tram, actually,
we’ll have to see – and catch a
bus the rest of the way. That’s
when there is a train/tram.
Meanwhile, it’ll be a bus.
Or two buses. But bear with
Phil, because he promises
there will be a train/trammy
thing in time for the 2021
Apec summit.
Cue footage of the world’s
leaders, agog after their
10-minute bus ride, alighting
at the new PuhinuiGiven the sheer daring and ingenuity of his
policy pratfalls, who would seriously believe they
could have been dreamt up by anyone other than
mordantly mischievous TV comedy writers with
a frankly silly budget? A real-life Housing and
Transport Minister simply couldn’t come up with
this stuff.
Take KiwiBuild: the Government pays private
developers to build “affordable” homes that they
were already building, then buys the houses
itself because no one else wants or can afford
them. That Twyford can straight-facedly call this
“recalibration” shows what a fine comic actor he
secretly is.
Then there’s Let’s Get Wellington Moving
(LGWM). Twyford vows $6.4 billion for cycleways,
walkways, tunnels and “mass public transport”
over 20 years, to and from mostly as-yet-unspeci-
fied points, using technology that hasn’t yet been
invented, so that, too, can’t be specified, or costed
and – it goes without saying – without
any actual Wellingtonians having
been asked what they think they
need.
One can imagine the excite-
ment of the writer making this
pitch: “The plan also includes
new bus lanes, even though
[guffaw] there are hardly any
buses now because the geniuses
behind LGWM forgot how to“What city in the
world runs a train to
somewhere near an
airport? Are you backon the sauce?”