I Know What’s Wrong with New Zealand.

A story about a dog and a bus.

We’re in in the midst of a national identity crisis driven by political, cultural, climatic, ecological, ethnic, gender and educational dogma but significantly lacking in critical thinking.

Somehow, it appears that even the name of our country is being changed by stealth. Not that I’m opposed – but it would be nice to be asked!

In my blog last week I asked the question- “What’s wrong with the country?” and I concluded that, like boiled frogs, the Mojo of courage and hope, imbued in us from our ancestors, is slowly being stripped away. We now have the dubious distinction of having the second highest diaspora in the world after Ireland!

Many of our best and brightest are leaving.

This insight came out of a thesis I wrote a few years ago, researching why New Zealand is so good at creativity and invention but so poor at implementation.

Those who inherited the courageous genes that brought our forebears to our shores, are now leaving, travelling to countries that recognise, support and value the creative and innovative success that brought our ancestors here in the first place.

Those who’ve been left behind wring their hands with glee knowing their competition has pulled out. They’ve wallowed in academia, gaining social science degrees, becoming virtue signalling political parodies, swallowing up overpaid jobs with their snouts in the public trough!

Now they promote feckless social irrelevancies involving things like school curricula, pronouns, cultural studies, bus lanes, cycleways and extravagantly expensive little bins for food scraps.

All this adds significantly to the already skyrocketing cost of living. It’s getting out of control with a burgeoning and seemingly unaccountable bureaucracy taking over our lives.

Take Auckland Transport activity as an exemplar of why the cost of living is so high.

We citizens subsidise public transport. But relatively few of us use it. Most of us drive because of the scattered nature and geographical spread of Auckland’s features and facilities. Where we choose to live and work could be 50 km apart. There’s no real centre, but a spider web of disconnected hubs. We simply don’t have the population density to support a regular and efficient rail network. So we end up with a clunky and unreliable bus service. A planned light rail system should arrive just in time to be redundant, when working from home and autonomous electric vehicles become the norm.

It's not clear to me whether the bus lane idea was purely punitive, discouraging private car use for the good of the planet, or for customer convenience, enabling bus passengers to get to work quicker. But the unintended consequence is that hundreds of drivers get stuck at traffic lights, spewing exhaust fumes, taking twice as long to get to work, while an occasional bus trundles past. I’d like to see an independent cost benefit analysis on that issue!

With New Zealand producing only a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions, what are we really trying to achieve? Ironically, the largest 16 container ships plying the world’s oceans emit more sulphur dioxide than all the cars in the world combined. Perhaps we could do better by not buying bulk commodities or cheap plastic goods that arrive by sea from China. Maybe boycotting the 2 Dollar Shop would be more effective in curbing emissions than taking the bus?

On Sunday morning around 7 am I took our dog for a walk down Parnell Road, from the Cathedral to Stanley Street and back. Walking with Dixie is a ‘sniffathon’. It took around 45 minutes. In that time we were passed by 28 Inner Link and Outer Link buses heading either in and out of the Central City. There were a total of 3 passengers in all those buses.

What are the economics of that? What dogma drives such rigid adherence to wasteful spending? Wouldn’t off-peak mini busses, or Uber vouchers for those sad souls address the problem. Maybe electronic monitoring of the bus-stop network could assist in adjusting the timetable in real time?

There has to be a better way!

Where is the Critical Thinking?