Speaker by Various Artists

When you go mad and die several times a week at the age of sixteen, something has to give.

Possibly the last place on earth you would expect to find Giselle (the ballet, not the porn star) is Lightning Ridge, an opal mining town set deep in the Australian outback. So naturally, that is where we took our production of Giselle; “we” being the Sydney City Ballet (SCB) Company.

It was hot in Lightning Ridge. If you Google it you get a couple of dusty pictures of a couple of dusty places; the dust, it would seem, is the chief attraction. Not sure about the lightning, possibly a seasonal feature, or perhaps a PR strategy – Dust Ridge doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. But lightning or no lightning, we of the SCB were not at all enthusiastic about hauling our refined arses all the way out there. Well, that is, we with the exception of Hassan.

As sometimes happens in these types of situations, your ballet master is Egyptian. Given that, as the title suggests, a ballet master has the power of a tyrant over his subjects, this can mean that a dancer is not only expected to dance daily for her (low-fat) supper, but that she might also be called upon to dance daily for her modest meal in the desert.

In essence, we went to Lightning Ridge because Hassan was missing home.

Now, this is not to suggest I have anything against the desert, per se, or indeed our ballet master. Generally I was happy enough to comply with Hassan’s scheduling of the tour to take in various hot spots. I should have been at school, right? If there’s anything worse than a dance to the death in the desert heat, it’s algebra.

But the trouble with Giselle in the Australian desert is the sunburn. Giselle is dead for the entire second act, a ‘good' ghost fighting to protect her lover against the Wilis – the ‘bad’ ghosts of jilted women, who have sentenced him to death by dance for his betrayal of her. In ballet, the women tend to be much stroppier than in real life, though the theme of female vengeance is the same. I didn’t want to be a burnt ghost. It seemed to me that ghosts wouldn’t burn.

But over and above the vampire-like issues, Lightning Ridge presented an additional challenge that threatened to push this particular dancing ghost out into the full sunlight, and it wasn’t the heat itself.

We were scheduled to perform in Lightning Ridge on a Saturday. Saturday was Cake day.

Normally we played the bigger towns on the weekend, arriving on the Friday afternoon and performing that night and two shows on the Saturday. This arrangement suited my diet. Having all week resisted the cake-based feasts that were routinely served up by the townsfolk for an after-show meet, greet and eat with the locals, Saturday marked the end of a long week and provided an additional calorie-crunching show. It was the perfect day for cake. A get-out-of-(fat)jail-free day. The day the ballet gods turned a blind eye. The day dieting forgot. The day all the other days of beans in brine and undressed coleslaw anticipated, looked up to and served.

But Lightning Ridge interrupted this practically divine order of being whereby everything made sense for a day, and I got to eat cake. Driving the best part of Cake Day in a suspiciously small bus as far into the outback as you can go (and expect to return), my commitment to the cause was already strained.

What if there was no cake in Lightning Ridge?

As we drove deeper and deeper into the desert I couldn’t help thinking, if I were a cake, this would not be an environment I’d choose, if I had a choice. I comforted myself somewhat with the thought that cakes generally don’t have freedom of choice about where they end up. I knew how they felt.

I was sixteen in a company of adults, travelling many mad miles from home, half starved and challenged relentlessly by a climate distinctly unsuitable for ghosts. In a few hours I was expected to dance as if my life depended on it and then die a deranged death anyway, what else was I supposed to lust after? Cake made about as much sense as anything.

In fact, cake craving informed my on-stage interpretation of Giselle’s descent into madness. LET ME EAT CAKE, FOR CHRIST SAKE! was pretty much the sole crazed thought in my head as I made my way through ‘the mad scene’ at the end of the first act. I’d be flopped in the arms of my (on-stage) mother, her head shaking: ‘If only they’d let her eat cake.’

As far as the story goes, Giselle is supposed to die of an underlying heart condition further weakened by the madness brought about by the betrayal of Albrecht, the nobleman she loved. In my version Giselle is driven to suicide with the sword of her traitorous lover thrust deep into her hungry heart BECAUSE HE DENIED HER CAKE! ... much more credible. Like I said, I was sixteen.

When we finally pulled the bus into the dusty square that would have been the town centre, if there had been a town, I despaired. The place was deserted with no obvious shops of any description. Cake was about as likely here as drowning. There was nothing here.

Okay there was a dusty shed that Hassan indicated was probably our venue. Apparently this dusty structure also doubled – tripled – as the pub, suggested by the rusty advert for XXXX beer hanging over the door. Have you ever noticed how pubs don’t sell cake? Possibly not.

We piled out of the bus and marvelled at the heat. We’d thought it had been hot inside the bus. We’d been wrong. The extreme heat at least explained why our arrival in a conspicuous bus garlanded with SCB promotional material was received with about as much fanfare as our non-arrival on any other day of the year would likely have received. Were there any people in Lightning Ridge?

If there’s one thing worse than travelling to the back of beyond to dress up in a tutu and dance to the death for two and a half hours, it’s travelling to the back of beyond to dress up and dance to the death for two and a half hours without an audience. Perhaps our audience was being airlifted in. Would they bring cake?

As the crew arrived and began to unload the sets and the rest of the dancers headed off to find their own relief, I took off apace on my mission to find cool air and cake (cool air optional). Hassan was expecting me in class (a.k.a. warm up – hah!) in less than an hour, there wasn’t much time.

There was nothing open. I contemplated knocking on doors: “Good afternoon. I am Giselle performing in the ballet show tonight. Can I have some cake?”

It didn’t sound quite right. Giselle might have had a weak heart (in some versions), but she was an honourable peasant girl. It would probably have killed her mother if she’d been caught begging for food. There was enough death in the show without adding to it.

Oh why, oh why, did we have to be in Lightning Ridge on a Saturday? I babbled away under my breath as I rushed about the place, a preview mad scene.

I never did find any cake in Lightning Ridge. But I did find a boy, or he found me. He was an aboriginal boy, a bit younger than I was as far as I could tell. He must have been standing in the shadows as I stormed blindly past on my cake-seeking mission. On my way back he jumped out of the shadows and offered me a sweet. Just like that, as if he’d read my mind. It wasn’t cake, but it was close.

Naturally I refused and he shrugged with a casual smile then unwrapped the sweet and ate it himself. He said he was coming to the show and seemed very excited about it. This surprised and moved me somewhat. He was a boy, an aboriginal boy, and he had only one leg.

Later, when I collapsed in my mother’s arms and died at the end of the first act and a single peal of laughter rang out in the packed hall (most of the audience having been bused in, just like us), I knew it was him. He got the joke. The connection was better than cake.

I’m writing this because Russell has asked me to expand on my comment that I made in the thread named The Policeman at the Dinner Table.

At last, I thought, when I saw Russell’s post here - about Peter Cresswell’s blog - something I know something about. A bit. Not noticing until quite late in the piece, that it was two years old. I don’t know how I missed it back then. But it raised my ire, today, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, Peter’s thoughts on how to solve the problem of social violence could have been written today. The old saws about who are committing violent crimes and the sensationalist reporting in the media that makes us all think we are going to be knifed by a bogey man from South Auckland haven’t changed in the two years between Russell’s post, and my just noticing it.

I think, also, that it caught my eye because this is about my people. I teach in Mangere, most of you know that. And I love my job. I love it with a passion. I love the people that come across my path every day. And they have embraced me. Literally.

They have made my job so much more than that in the four years that I have been there. And let me tell you, I have worked in nine kindergartens in fourteen years, so I know a bit about quite a few communities. And this is my community. And to be more specific, it’s not the only community I’ve worked in, in South Auckland. (I could make a joke here about getting around, but, you know, then I would be dismissed as a woman of loose morals, so, yeah.)

So when Peter talks about welfare beneficiaries, when he derides “the parents encouraged to stay at home by the gobs of welfare”, he’s not talking about faceless people who bludge the dole, and bludgeon their children, he is talking about the people that sustain me. The people who make my life and work a much better place to be. When he talks about “good parents”, what he doesn’t say, but what is very much implied, is that those parents who receive welfare from the State, are not good parents.

So I am, quite simply put, here to put the record straight from a very personal point of view.

Of the 90 children that I teach every day, around 20 of the families are on benefits of some kind. Some are solo mothers, one’s a solo father, one’s had leukemia and isn’t back to work yet – malingerer! – and a couple are on sickness benefits. It is none of my business why they are on benefits. Though I might just say that for many, it is because they have no family in Auckland to look after the kids, and so they often have no choice. Childcare is not an affordable option.

My only interest is that their children are okay. And they are.

Peter Cresswell and his cohorts would have you believe that people on benefits are not only being paid to stay at home, you see, but that they are bad parents. Nay, they destroy the very construction of the family unit, itself! I call a big old bullshit on that one. The children I teach every day are well fed, well dressed and loved. Very, very loved. They are no less or more loved than the children who come from families where both parents work. They are no less or more articulate, they are no less or more likely to hit out at another child. And their families are no more or less likely to be ones where violence is okay. Their families, in fact, are just that. Families. No better, no different, to the families who have parents working.

In fact, on a side note, of the three people I mentioned in my comment on Russell’s thread who had gone to prison, none of them were on benefits at the time. And the domestic violence incidents, the people who hit their kids and their spouses? None of them were on benefits when the abuse occurred. And believe me, if anyone hits one of my kids, or one of my parents, I get to know about it.

So excuse me if I don’t buy the usual whining crap about who commits the most crime, who are the worst parents, who needs to be sterilised. Because the people doing the whining really don’t know what they are talking about. They don’t have any experience, usually, of working with people on benefits. They take the tired old myths and just regurgitate them. And it shouldn’t be allowed. They are destroying civilised society. They are tearing down the people who least need tearing down. They are picking on people who have done nothing to deserve it. And I will treat them as I treat all bullies in my playground. I will call them out.

Jackie Clark

My parents were late developers. They were in their forties when they met, married and began reproducing in a hurry. Three kids: bang, bang, bang. You can guess which bang I was.

In those days, if you married and started a family at forty-plus, you were probably my parents. It just didn't happen -- to anyone else -- and for good reason. Remember that this was long before forty became the new twenty-nine. Long before celebrities made it fashionable and science/society (IVF/the pill) made it fathomable. And long before special support services were set up to deal with the inevitable fall-out of grey-powered parents and their off-spring burdened with the compounded late-developer gene.

In short, in this long-before time, it was a bloody miracle that we -- the off-spring of not one but two late developers -- arrived and survived. Most of all it was a miracle that I survived. We arrived in such quick succession that the doctor wondered if we were in fact triplets. Indeed, if late developers were to produce triplets they may well come out in a delayed relay over the course of several months. The territory was, at that stage, uncharted.

But what was charted -- even back then -- were the difficulties of being the middle child; the bang you barge past unnoticed as you hurry to and from the other bangs. My older-by-a-bit brother and younger-by-a-bit sister might well tell it differently, giving emphasis to the pressures to succeed on the first and the hand-me-downs suffered by the last. And no doubt there will be plenty of people who agree and sympathise with both of them -- there always was.

But, let me just say on behalf of all overlooked, tightly-squeezed, underfed middles out there: how else is one to explain the incident with the turkey?

Okay, so there might be reasons other than late-developer parental neglect and sandwiched-sibling syndrome to explain why the middle-child of an otherwise respectable (albeit Australian) family might find herself trucking across a lawn in broad daylight, unnoticed by her family of late developers playing cricket on that very same lawn, hauling an entire turkey carcass in her toddler-sized arms (or perhaps I carried the bird on my head, as the women of Africa do when carrying anything larger than half their own body mass).

But, there is surely no other explanation for why that child was able to sit down on that lawn in her best party frock and proceed to devour the remains of the bird and attendant twiggery gathered from when she'd had to drop the carcass before hastily arranging herself and the corpse for optimum eating (bird in lap), while the cricketers continued cricketing, obliviously.

Of course, when you're traversing lawns with a turkey carcass in your arms (or on your head) at the age of four, it's anyone's guess what you'll be doing at the age of five. Well almost. One thing even the least insightful observer would probably rule out would be a career in classical ballet.

As I've already mentioned, one of the problems with late-developer parenting back then was the lack of support services available to provide even a tiny amount of common sense advice to those in need. And so it was -- in the absence of insight and support of the kind that Mrs Worthington had doubtless benefitted from in an earlier age -- that my time-challenged parents chose precisely that solution which even the least insightful, but otherwise unchallenged, Australian would have ruled out.

However, to their credit, and true to character (as late-developers), they didn't rush into anything. Before the desperate decision was made to get their middle -- neither fabulous-first nor lucky-last -- child some help, it was deemed necessary to allow her the opportunity to develop a series of life-threatening illnesses.

To access this opportunity, she was enrolled at French's Forest Primary School where a veritable horde of Australians of various human, animal, insect and hybrid form were already in wild residence.

To distinguish one species from the other, the humans were uniformed. With pride and pleasure -- and a sense of exotic adventure in all things Australian -- my English-born mother sewed the school's broccoli-shaped tree-of-the-forest emblem onto the tongue of my uniform. Yes. This was the lucky country. Our uniform had a tongue and a tree.

But it was all a ruse. Not a broccoli tree in sight. No one would ever mistake a gum tree for a vegetable. Great claw-like protrusions sporting vicious and varied insect life and the occasional unnaturally small bear. These were not proper trees! There'd clearly been some miscommunication somewhere along the line. Dehydrated, grey, peeling, stuck-up and stiff all over -- gums are, well, like Once Were Trees, frankly. I don't know what koalas see in them.

Forest? Forest, my arse. Forests are green. Forests are good. Forests have squirrels and badgers (that steal from the rich and give to the poor). Forests are fair. Forests are friendly. This was no friendly forest, mark my word. This was bush. A place where snakes and spiders replace squirrels and saints. Where grizzly hybrid caterpillars -- half hairy spider, half sleezy snake -- patrol the gums to dive-bomb onto the heads of the least suspecting children (namely, the children of late developers), purely for purposes of terrorising them! Hadn't we suffered enough? Apparently not.

By the end of my first year at this fake forest school, I had contracted not one but four serious illnesses, as well as experiencing several episodes of fainting -- partly from sheer disbelief, I think -- during the assemblies held outdoors in the 40 degree heat.

My mother stole a moment for herself to reflect on my annus horribilis in a letter to a friend back home the following year:

Poor kid. She had a rough time last year, with the hepatitis, chicken pox, and then the asthma. [And don't forget the impetigo that covered both knees and persisted for six long, itchy and infectious months before a doctor was called.]

Sally was close to having to go to hospital, her breathing was so laboured, but the suppositories eased it -- though they made her vomit!

Oh well, you can't win 'em all. But thanks, Mother, for sharing.

I suppose chicken pox is not all that serious -- and not the fault of a fake forest school or parental neglect (in fact, I personally blamed the neighbours, who kept chickens). At any rate, as a catch-all cure for my horrible annus, ballet was prescribed. Dance or die: that was about the sum of it.

Now, the one agreed-upon advantage of Australians is their laid-backness -- their 'She'll be right, no worries' attitude (of course only in matters not pertaining to rugby, apples, cricket, hobbits and I suppose anything else involving Kiwis).

But my dance teacher wasn't laid back. She was Russian. What's the opposite of laid-back? She was that. A proper KGB "Ve have vays to make you tvirl" Cold War, Bond-villain Russian. Ballet she pronounced "bullet". The 't' was silent, as a bullet. She took one look at me, saw straight through to the turkey within, and pronounced me: "Sorry, not built for ballet."

Naturally my mother was entranced by the dance teacher's exoticness and quite unfazed by such a verdict -- she was already well-accustomed to hearing bad news pronouncements pertaining to her middle-child. So an agreement was proposed whereby the Russian accepted there was "no harm" in "ze child" coming along to the class for fun (and hard currency): "She can stand at ze back."

And thus it was at the age of six, battling blocked bronchials, suffocating siblings, tempting turkeys, fake forests and one rude Russian, that I finally began to learn to dance with the dingoes -- so that I might breathe.

If breathing had only come easier to me I would never have played Giselle. I would never have gone mad and died at the end of the first act only to be resurrected as a vengeful ghost in the second (and all in a tutu). I would never have seen back-stage at the Wagga Wagga Town Hall. I almost certainly would not have gone to Greece on a bus we called Tragic, nor taken a trip across to Crete on a ferry called fate...

In a parallel universe there is a girl who could breathe without the aide of suppositories, who is living the life I would have lived had I only found it easier to breathe. I wonder if there are proper trees there?

Sally Jones

As we all know, husbands are the most understanding species on the planet -- second only to wives.

So when I first told my husband of my intention to write an essay on the subject of my inaugural blow job, I took his nonchalant wave as hearty approval. However, as the weekend continued, and no standard spousal prying ensued, I began to suspect that he might not have heard me. He had been multi-tasking with Jeff Beck and the vacuum cleaner at the time.

Of course, I can and do proceed in most matters without my husband's approval. After 547 years of marriage, I tend to take his approval as given -- not that I necessarily encourage him to do the same with me and my approval, but that's another matter entirely.

I felt, however, that there was something distinct about this situation to which the well-established precedents for an enduring marriage did not altogether apply. So I decided to broach the subject again, this time leaving Jeff Beck well out of it -- my first blow job was none of Jeff Beck's business, after all.

On this occasion, there was no question of my husband having heard, though his response was largely mimed. The expression that crossed his face as he braked suddenly -- when he might have continued steadily through an orange light -- was a mixture of horror and denial.

We sat in silence at the traffic lights, as I watched his expression move from genuine confusion, 'Are you serious?' to semi-genuine, marriage-worn 'Fine by me, just as long as my penis isn't involved' to perfectly disingenuous, wisdom of the years (and years and years and years of marriage to someone like me) world-weariness that said: 'Whatever you do, my darling, is okay with me. I trust your judgement and support you in all your (insane) endeavours, even if I can't quite put this unconditional trust and approval into any of the many words invented for such purposes.' Ah, men.

When the green traffic light finally put an end to his marital mime, he simply said: "Oh". This was really all I needed to proceed, and all I could reasonably expect considering he was negotiating Auckland traffic at the time. And the fact that -- all said and done -- there probably is a deficit of useful and proper (not slang) words in the English language available for a husband confronted with news of his wife's intention to publicise the circumstances of her first blow job.

Shakespeare, no doubt, did his best to come up with suitable vocabulary for such occasions. Indeed 'blow job' itself has a whiff of the bard about it, hard as it is to believe that oral sex existed in his time. Whether or not it did, the world will never know, as Shakespeare failed to include the words 'blow job' in any of his sonnets, or even to liven-up the duller patches in Hamlet with a fellatio scene. At least as far as I'm aware. To be honest, my Shakespeare is not what it could be. When I might have been reading and re-reading his life's work, I've been busy doing -- well, let's just say -- other things.

So I cannot claim to be an authority on Shakespeare any more than I can claim to know the general history of the blow job or his involvement (if any) in it. All I have to offer is a much more modest account of one particular blow job that I had some involvement in, and which occurred not that long ago -- considering the full sweep of history, and how quickly time seems to get away on one.

In fact, here it is already half-past-ten in the morning of the day after I extracted my husband's permission to embark on this project (and a good part of the night reassuring him that the first blow job is not necessarily the deepest), and I haven't even told you where or when or how or with whom -- apart from establishing, more or less incontrovertibly, that it wasn't with Shakespeare or my husband.

On that note, incidentally, I feel some responsibility towards my husband for involving him in the project from the outset: in that, were I never to get around to writing the essay, he would rightly have cause to feel even worse than he feels already. Sometimes living with a thing is easier than living without it; even if that thing causes you chronic grief and only very temporary bursts of relief. In a marriage, it is important, above all else, not to make things worse than they are already. That mightn't be Shakespeare, but Shakespeare (surely) wasn't married as long as we have been, and the longer one is married, the more salient -- and Shakespearian -- that particularly piece of advice becomes.

So here are the pertinent facts:

Where: concrete roof, youth hostel, Crete -- a long way to go for a blow job.

When: mid-August (summer) 1985, Sunday (before church), 5.46 am, the morning after I'd been rendered useless for a job in Islamic martyr heaven.

How: not in a manner easily summarised under a single sub-heading. How: upside-down under a dark grey, heat-absorbing blanket, my recently de-flowered feet on the pillow where my head had, mere moments before, been sleeping -- and my mouth breathing -- with the ease of the unsuspecting. How: with firm encouragement from my pumped-up companion in the form of a large instructional hand on the back of my head. How: with an audience of between 10 and 20 twosomes sharing the shame and shade-less perimeter of the flat square roof. How: with great difficulty, much choking, acute humiliation, and heat-stroke; by 6.00 am the summer sun on Crete beneath a blanket -- quite frankly -- sucks, or to use the most up-to-date vernacular: it blows. How: with a deadline I'm capable of anything. How: because I hadn't eaten for some time. (And I would like to take this opportunity to advise all beginner blowers out there against undertaking this sort of job on a full stomach. The risk of it all turning to custard -- and an even greater mess than absolutely necessary -- increases exponentially with every morsel of food swallowed within the twenty-four hours prior. Twenty-five years on the job has taught me that much, if nothing else. To be safe, if there's a job prospect looming, I would recommend forgoing meals for the entire day. If you're on the job daily, of course, you may need to take a supplement. Snacking on dry foods, such as seeds -- and some nuts, although you may find your appetite for nuts in general rather diminished -- may also be helpful.) How: as fast as was humanly possible in the less than ideal conditions, and without the aide of a vacuum cleaner. How: because there seemed little option short of

leaping off the roof and spoiling everyone's breakfast. How: because if there's anything worse than a giant penis for breakfast in the sweltering heat with a bunch of knowing onlookers, it's a shirker. How: without thinking, other than of the magnum opus in my mouth that was about as welcome (and almost as big) as a nuclear missile. How: without swallowing. As it turned out that day, I wasn't as hungry as I seemed. How: God only knows. Well, God and Shakespeare (perhaps).

Who: some guy who said he liked my tits. Or said he liked "these" as he gave them a synchronised squeeze. Two hands, two tits. It sure is all laid on for them, isn't it? Who: he told me that he was from Oxford (though his talents would have been wasted on rowing). Who: some guy who couldn't believe there were any nineteen-year-old Australian virgins. Perhaps Shakespeare's son, after all.

Sally Jones

How has this usually confident and cocksure commentator got himself into such a flap? (See: Tunnel vision threatens Super City, NZ Herald, July 31.) What ‘monster’ is keeping him awake at night? Is he fretting about global warming, about how we should be looking for opportunities in the coming lower carbon economy, or at least how much it is likely cost to fill his car?

No it’s none of these, quite the reverse really: it’s the fear that the Supercity may help Auckland secure some investment in public transport. Really? This is the thought that has turned our doughty writer into such a fretful sleeper?

‘..the fearful prospect remains’ and ‘..it scared me’ he writes of the idea that Auckland might finally complete the rail line from Britomart to Mt Eden [in an underground loop with new stations at midtown, K’rd, and Newton]. Why such emotive language?

Is it possible that he resorted to this approach to disguise that he offers not one fact to support his alarm? He merely states, again in somewhat unhinged terms, that the CBD Rail loop project is ‘uneconomic pork’.

Well perhaps it is time to properly consider the economic case for selecting infrastructure investments. While there are clearly finite resources for such projects it’s not as if our money isn’t being spent. The Minister of Transport Steven Joyce is so keen on road building that he wants us to spend over 10 billion dollars on motorways that he has himself decided are ‘Roads of National Significance’. Big think indeed.

Evaluating the likely economic benefits of large engineering projects is of course a complex and technical process, and the latest in a long line of studies is currently under way for the CBD Rail loop. It will be interesting to see if the authors of this report find themselves as much in a piggery as Roughan foresees. But in the meantime we can look at various factors that his frightened state must have blinded him to.

Auckland’s transport system is unusually dependent on the private car for a city of its size and density. This bias has consequences for the shape and look of the city, but also for the state of our wallets. According to American studies: ‘[Public] Transit based cities spend around 5 to 8% of their wealth on transportation but auto-dependent ones range from 12 to 19%’ [Resillient Cities, 2009]. How has Auckland become so auto-dependent? Simply because we have been building roads and nothing else since the 1950s. New Zealanders have been blithely investing in the most expensive way of getting people around our biggest city. Perhaps then, on this count alone it is time to push the balance towards other modes of travel?

Or perhaps what Roughan thinks is that we should just build more roads and keep making them ever wider as they fill up with more cars, and not divert a cent to other systems? Everyone will just have to have a car, and our architects can concentrate on designing the perfect parking building, why can’t we do that? Well not if you want those cars to be actually moving on those roads. Road building encourages ever more road journeys which leads to gridlock. Auto-dependency is not only extremely expensive for us all but is also self-defeating. This is why the rest of the western world is pulling down freeways and investing in transit.

Consider this: the NZTA itself calculates that every peak journey on a train in Auckland not only benefits the traveller to the tune of $13.18 but it also benefits road users by $17.27 by being off the road and out of their way [Economic Evaluation Manual-Volume 2 2008]. Impressive that they feel they can quantify this so exactly but regardless of the precision of these numbers the principle is clear: train users are the best fighters against traffic congestion.

So next time Roughan is stuck in traffic I hope he thanks all those selfless users of Auckland’s incomplete, infrequent, and underfunded rail service for without them imagine how much more stuck he would be. And perhaps he could also imagine how much better his driving experience would be if the Auckland rail system was as complete and interconnected, as modern and efficient as it could be, and therefore used by so many more current car drivers. Heaven knows he may then even be able to calm down enough to ride a train himself?

Roughan asserts that this project must pay for itself directly to be viable. All major transport infrastructure is paid for by taxpayers, no road pays for itself, not even tolled ones. A petrol tax is a tax, like excise on alcohol or income tax, we do not get to slice up our taxes and decide where the money goes but by lobbying the government. And all transport infrastructure is evaluated on an economic basis, not a financial one.

As it’s in Auckland Roughan wants this project paid for by Aucklanders alone [funny how apparently selfless the road lobbyists are]. Well state highways are also all stuck in one place. Perhaps the people of Wellsford should be required to fund the $2 billion plus for the proposed highway up there? By Roughan’s reasoning I should be able to insist that my tax doesn’t get spent on the proposed Transmission Gully project out of Wellington because I don’t live there. Or perhaps I want a refund for all of Chris Carter’s travel? Well I do actually, but it doesn’t work like that, does it?

Of course Roughan may be right, the Supercity just might mean that Auckland gets a chance to have a more balanced and rational infrastructure spend than has been the case over the last 60 years. I certainly hope so. As much as central government loves the idea that we can’t get our act together that is not the case at all. We have been prevented from making our own decisions by Wellington for decades, for example when the Muldoon government killed off Mayor Robbie’s attempt to build this network in the 1970s.

The Auckland motorway system is nearing a pretty thorough completion, in fact the lack of any real alternative means they are making us build much of it all over again. Clearly it is long overdue that we slowed down on endlessly expanding this road network and got on with complementing it with the desperately needed off road one. Both will then work better. Is that really something to be scared of?

Patrick Reynolds 2010
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