Colonisation and the burden of guilt

A friend recently lent me a New Zealand book published in 2021 and called The Forgotten Coast, by Richard Shaw. The title is odd because it tells you nothing about the book’s contents. The same is true of the cover photo, which shows the author as a boy (at least we must assume it’s the author) holding up a wriggling eel that he appears to have just caught. Its relevance isn’t clear.

The book is unusual in other ways too. On one hand it’s the painstakingly researched biography of a brilliant young Catholic priest, a great-uncle of the author, who died tragically young from TB; on the other, it’s a breast-beating mea culpa over the injustices suffered by Taranaki Maori in the 19th century. Unable to make up its mind, it weaves uneasily between the two narratives.

Nonetheless I found The Forgotten Coast interesting because I have a few things in common with the author. Shaw, a professor of politics at Massey University, has deep family roots in Taranaki. His forebears were Irish Catholics and his great grandfather was part of the Armed Constabulary that took part in what is now called the invasion of Parihaka.

Shaw’s family settled on land confiscated from Maori and became prosperous farmers. These things trouble him, and his book involves a lot of anguished self-flagellation. He takes what some Australian scholars would call a “black armband” view of our history, meaning he sees aspects of it as deeply, ineradicably shameful. This obviously weighs on him personally.

Unlike Shaw I’ve never lived in Taranaki, but my maternal family roots are there and I could relate to his family history. My mother’s family were devout Irish Catholics too. Mum grew up in Hawera – my grandfather wrote a history of the town in 1904 – and my family tree on her side is Taranaki to the core. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried in the Hawera cemetery (and a lovely cemetery it is, to be sure). I visited their graves only a few weeks ago.

I have other points of identification with the author. He recalls that as a pupil at Francis Douglas Memorial College in New Plymouth, he took part in a long-established Catholic secondary schools’ speech and debating contest called the O’Shea Shield. So did I, although a decade earlier, in 1967. (My school, St Patrick’s College, Silverstream, won the shield that year, but no thanks to me. My team lost its debate against an opposition lineup from Sacred Heart Whanganui that included my cousin Damian de Lacy and a confident verbal skirmisher named Ruth Richardson.)

More to the point, however, my great grandfather, like Shaw’s, was part of the colonial forces that he depicts as ruthless enforcers of Maori subjugation. John Flynn, my mother’s grandfather (pictured above in later life), wasn’t at Parihaka, but he was a combatant in the Battle of Te Ngutu o te Manu (the beak of the bird), north of Hawera, in 1868. That was the battle in which the celebrated Prussian adventurer Gustavus Von Tempsky was killed and his men were ignominiously routed by the brilliant guerrilla chief Titokowaru. Twenty soldiers lay dead or dying when the smoke cleared. John Flynn, who served with the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers, was lucky to escape alive; he was shot in the thigh and carried to safety by his comrades during an arduous seven-hour retreat through the dense bush.

My other maternal great-grandfather, Charles Quin, later commanded the Normanby Volunteer Rifles in the small Taranaki town of that name, although hostilities had subsided by then and he never fired a shot other than in target practice. So I’m waist-deep in connections with the colonial oppressors whom Shaw condemns. And it gets worse, because my forebears, again like Shaw’s, took up land made available by the government; land presumably taken from Maori, although I’m not sure whether, in Charles Quin’s case, it was acquired fairly or confiscated. I do know that he ended up with substantial holdings near Normanby and Eltham.

There’s little doubt that a great injustice was done in the way land was taken. As Shaw explains, the law was arranged to facilitate easy acquisition of Maori land by white settlers and to restrict what Maori themselves could do with it. Even worse, Maori were sometimes forced to sell land to repay debts imposed by the Crown.

Deplorable? Certainly, and Shaw doesn’t hold back. His assiduously researched, eloquently crafted and sometimes painfully introspective book generally supports the orthodox left-wing academic line that colonialism was a brutal assertion of white supremacy.

I can sympathise up to a point. Every time I drive anywhere in New Zealand I’m aware that this wondrously rich, beautiful and bountiful country was once all Maori. It’s not hard to understand their resentment that they now control only a small portion of it (albeit a steadily expanding one).

I can also share Shaw’s distaste at the way a colonial template has been super-imposed on our history as if Maori didn’t exist. This is evident in all sorts of small ways. Driving through Patea, for example, I can’t help but notice that all the streets have staunchly English names – Norfolk, Cambridge, Dorset, Victoria, Manchester – despite roughly half the population identifying as Maori. 

More problematical, however, is the author’s struggle to come to terms with his family’s role in the colonisation process. He writes at one point that he doesn’t bear personal responsibility for what happened in the past, which is obviously true, yet the entire book is shot through with guilt and shame.

Here he and I, for all that we may have in common (Taranaki, Irish Catholicism, ancestors who took up arms against Maori) part company.

I am neither proud nor ashamed of my forebears in the Taranaki Volunteers and the Normanby Rifles. They acted according to the prevailing attitudes and values of their time. To judge them according to 21st century standards is to engage in what is known as presentism: a tendency to interpret past actions and ideas according to our rather smug feelings of moral superiority. Shaw’s ancestors were creatures of their time, just as he is.

In any case, New Zealand history is complex and highly nuanced. The relationship between Maori and Pakeha was rarely straightforward. This was borne out by a recent Newsroom book review in which the historian Ron Crosby pointed out that more Maori fought on the side of the British Crown than against it – something you won’t read in histories that present the conflict as a straightforward one between Maori and the colonial invader, with no inconvenient caveats. In later life even Titokowaru became an advocate of peace between the races.

My own family history offers evidence of the ambivalence in Maori-Pakeha relations. Although John Flynn fought against Titokowaru’s Hauhau warriors, he spoke te reo and was on friendly terms with most Taranaki Maori – a fact attested to by his ability to travel unaccosted through the bush between New Plymouth and Hawera at a time when most Pakeha hesitated to venture beyond the safety of their towns.

Shaw himself refers to a tension between Pakeha who sincerely wanted to do the right thing by Maori and others (such as Native Affairs Minister John Bryce, who ordered the invasion of Parihaka) who had fewer scruples. He reminds us that New Zealand’s first Chief Justice, Sir William Martin, not only opposed confiscation of Maori land but pointed to Ireland as an example of how a “brooding sense of wrong” could leave a malign, long-lasting legacy. (That so many Irish, themselves victims of oppression and dispossession in their country of origin, should themselves become dispossessors of Maori is an irony not lost on the author.)

There are some things I can agree with Shaw on. One is that we need to know more about the totality of our history, not just the bits that shore up our comforting national mythology. He’s right when he says we pay more attention to Gallipoli and El Alamein than to the battles fought on our own soil.

That’s changing, as books such as the recently published Toitu Te Whenua, Lauren Keenan’s journey through the battlefields of the New Zealand Wars, demonstrate. But it’s a painfully slow process. The British, Americans and Australians celebrate their warts-and-all histories far less timorously than we do. How many people, for example, have spent their lives in Lower Hutt without knowing that eight British soldiers were killed in 1868 in a skirmish at Boulcott’s Farm, now the site of a local golf club?

It follows that we shouldn’t forget the past. We should face it squarely and try to remedy historical injustices wherever practicable (as governments have tried to do over the past several decades). But not forgetting is one thing; bearing a personal burden of guilt seems to me to be quite another.

Featherston Booktown: The book festival where books are optional

                           

My attention was captured yesterday by a Facebook post promoting next month's Featherston Booktown Festival. It advertised a panel discussion entitled “Fixing the Bear Pit: How to Make Parliament a More Humane and Positive Place”.

How this was relevant to a book festival wasn’t clear, especially since the advertised discussion doesn’t appear to be connected with any book. But what particularly struck me was the accompanying photo of brawling parliamentarians (above), which was clearly taken in a foreign country. I guessed somewhere like Serbia, though someone who knows how to trace these things subsequently identified it as being from Ukraine.

Alongside the photo, the description “Bear Pit” seemed apt. The problem with this is that in my lifetime there has never been a scene in the New Zealand parliament that remotely resembles the one depicted. The only punch I can recall being thrown was the one Trevor Mallard aimed at Tau Henare in 2009, and that was outside the debating chamber.

I suppose the use of a picture from an overseas image library misrepresenting an event in Ukraine as having occurred in New Zealand could be passed off, at a stretch, as a legitimate exercise of creative licence (Peter Biggs, the chair of Featherston Booktown, comes from an advertising background, so may well see it that way), or perhaps as a bit of harmless frivolity. But I think it comes perilously close to dishonesty in advertising, because it sets up the false premise that the New Zealand parliament is a place of mayhem when in fact it’s relatively civilised.

Off the top of my head I can think of only three recent instances when parliamentary order was seriously challenged, none of which involved violence. One was the Maori Party MPs’ haka that disrupted proceedings last November and is now the subject of a hearing by the privileges committee. (As an aside, party co-leader Rawiri Waititi contemptuously dismissed parliament’s “silly little privileges committee” and “silly little rules”. But I wonder what his reaction would be if a group of National or ACT MPs wilfully breached protocols on a visit to a marae. I think we know the answer to that question – not that the situation is likely to arise, since Pakeha guests on a marae invariably treat their hosts’ customs and rules with great respect.)

The other examples were Green MP Julie Anne Genter’s in-your-face monstering of National MP Matt Doocey and National MP Tim de Molen’s intimidating behaviour toward Labour’s Shanan Halbert. In both cases the offenders apologised and were censured.

Otherwise parliamentary scraps are merely verbal and generally settled by the errant MP apologising or being temporarily banished from the House. Yet here’s a book festival deceitfully using an image from another country to generate a sense of moral panic over supposed bad behaviour by our elected representatives – and curiously, involving a subject about which there is no book.

Now consider the makeup of the discussion panel. We’re expected to assume that the four participants, all being former MPs, will have a special insight into what goes on in parliament. But two of those former MPs are very former. Rick Barker’s bum hasn’t touched the green leather since 2011 and Marilyn Waring left Parliament in 1984, which makes her positively prehistoric. The other two, Kiri Allan and Ron Mark, have a stronger claim to relevance: Mark was an MP as recently as 2020 and Allan retired from politics in controversial circumstances in 2023.

Of course Waring and Barker are entitled to their opinions on the conduct of parliamentary affairs, but probably no more than the rest of us, given how many years have passed since they sat in the House. Couldn’t Featherston Booktown find anyone with more recent experience of the so-called Bear Pit, if indeed that’s what it is?

We’re also entitled to question whether the panel will present anything approaching an objective view. Allan and Waring both seem to have been wounded by their political careers and left embittered. That may make for (melo)dramatic war stories, but does it make them good judges of what happens in the House? I predict that both women will present themselves as victims.

Then there’s the question of political balance. Two of the four panellists were Labour MPs, and although Waring sat on the National side during her time in parliament (and won deserved admiration for her courageous defiance of her bullying leader, Robert Muldoon), she has since re-positioned herself firmly on the feminist, anti-establishment left.

Mark will try to bring some balance but it’s not hard to foresee which way the discussion will swing. Parliament will be portrayed as a male-dominated club that reinforces the power of the white patriarchy. Don’t expect the antics of Genter (a female bully) or the Maori Party to be mentioned.

I should stress here that I think Parliament is a flawed institution that in many ways invites ridicule for its childish antics and anachronistic rituals. I don’t see how anyone who watches it live on TV, as I sometimes do, could come to any other conclusion. But we’re not likely to have a fair and balanced discussion if it’s skewed by the experiences of people who bear grudges. I wonder, did the organisers approach anyone from National or ACT, or would that have risked steering the debate in an unwanted direction?

The Parliament-as-Bear-Pit event tells us something important about the nature of book festivals generally. They are essentially ideological exercises, intended to reinforce the prejudices of those attending.

Having been to a few such festivals myself, I would suggest the attendees are typically the ageing, genteel, affluent left – the type of people who drive hybrid or electric cars, have their radios permanently tuned to RNZ (to which they listen wholly uncritically), avidly read the Listener, attend film festivals, classical concerts and yoga classes, and vote Labour or Green. They enjoy the trappings of capitalism but fondly think of themselves as socialists. Many of them are prigs, intolerant of dissenting opinions and highly judgmental.

These people wouldn’t thank you for alarming them with ideas or authors they don’t agree with. Book festival organisers know this and programme their events accordingly, which isn’t hard for them because they’re of the same mind. The book world is an ideological monoculture.

The Featherston Booktown programme bears out my theory. Sure, there are non-political sessions. For instance, you can hear the noted axeman John Campbell in conversation with a Norwegian who wrote a book about firewood. It’s hard to see politics intruding there, although you never know with Campbell. There’s also a Q & A with my friend Simon Burt about his acclaimed, politics-free book Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown (a sitter for inclusion in the programme, given that its subject is more or less local).

Nonetheless there's an unmistakeable ideological thread running through the festival, as is often the case. There’s a session on how the justice system can make use of tikanga Maori (again, unrelated to any book), another called The Way of Waiata (ditto) and a discussion entitled Rogernomics: 40 Years On Through the Lens of a Wairarapa Community, in which Marilyn Waring and Rick Barker, neither of whom comes from the aforementioned region, feature again. (No book about that either, which makes you wonder whether the subject was chosen because it’s never a bad time to rake over the coals of Rogernomics yet again for the book festival crowd and declare how wicked it was, book or no book.) There’s also Invasion! The Waikato War, which at least has the merit of a book on the subject (by the leftist historian Vincent O’Malley). Oh, and I almost forgot Colonisation and De-Colonisation: Facing Them Head On (moderated by the multi-talented John Campbell, who can of course be relied on to take a rigorously impartial approach. In this case the flimsy pretext for the panel discussion is a slim book that came out, er, five years ago.)

Not all the sessions will be drearily predictable and a few of the participants have even been intelligently chosen. The adverse effect of Rogernomics on the Wairarapa is something one of the panellists, former long-serving Masterton mayor Bob Francis, knows plenty about, and at least the organisers in this instance roped in former Labour cabinet minister and key Rogernomics proponent Richard Prebble. So there will be some informed, first-hand input rather than just the usual anguished breast-beating about how heartless and immoral the 1980s economic reforms were, conveniently ignoring that the country was teetering on the brink of financial collapse when the Lange government came to power. I predict Prebble will enjoy himself immensely – in fact, will be greatly energised by the sight of all those pursed lips and disapproving faces in the audience.

(As an aside, I smiled when I saw that the Rogernomics session is sponsored by Murray Cole, owner of the Martinborough Hotel. As one of the entrepreneurs who did extremely well out of economic deregulation in the 1980s and the breaking up of state monopolies, Cole should have been shoulder-tapped for the panel. That would bring a different perspective to bear.)

Overall, the Featherston Booktown programme gives the impression of having been carefully curated to avoid offending the sensibilities of the attendees or challenging sacred leftist shibboleths. A friend of mine, a genuine lover of books, accurately calls it a wokefest. None of this should come as any surprise, given that this same festival cravenly cancelled what was intended to be a light-hearted Harry Potter quiz in 2019 because a handful of trans activists insisted on banning anything to do with J K Rowling. (So much for free speech.)

I’m reminded of an annual Sydney event pompously called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which has deservedly been mocked because the supposedly risky ideas promulgated never threaten the cosy leftist consensus. Australia’s intellectual left, like our own, still labours under the fanciful delusion that its ideas are subversive, ignoring the fact that since the 1970s the real radical thinkers – the outsiders who challenged orthodoxy and whom the literary establishment wanted to shut down – have tended to be on the political right. Literary events such as Featherston Booktown serve much the same purpose as the Sydney gabfest and could fairly be called festivals of safe ideas.

Should it bother us that a book festival includes several sessions that appear to have nothing to do with books but rather provide a convenient platform for a roster of perennially disaffected activists? After all, if that’s how festival patrons want to spend a weekend, it’s surely their business.

Problem is, it’s not just their money that pays for it. It’s ours too, because Featherston Booktown is subsidised (heavily, I suspect) by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Creative NZ. We may have a nominally centre-right government, but the steady flow of public funds to the entitled leftist literary and arts mafia continues unabated. Some things never change.

Little stands to capture the 'Anyone but Whanau' vote

The least surprising news of the day is that Andrew Little has confirmed he will run for the Wellington mayoralty. I imagine the announcement will come as relief even to people not normally disposed to look favourably at a Labour Party stalwart. “Anyone but Whanau” is likely to be the catchcry, and I’m sure Nick Mills was right when he said on his NewstalkZB talkback show this morning that Little has to be the hot favourite – though there’s still a gap in the field for a late contender who combines political nous with the charisma that Little lacks.

The former Labour leader doesn’t strike me as a visionary, and nothing he said in an interview with Andrea Vance in The Post today has changed that view. No one should expect him to magically recapture the vibe that made Wellington New Zealand’s most exciting city in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Perhaps the best Wellington could hope for under a Little mayoralty is that he would be a far more competent and grounded manager than the incumbent. That wouldn’t be hard, I hear the cynics chorus; but it might be a modest first step on the city’s road to recovery.

 
Footnote: I haven't lived in Wellington for more than 20 years, so have no skin in this game. But I'm still a frequent visitor and grieve for the city that used to be.

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Andrew Little signals a tilt at the Wellington mayoralty

So former Labour leader Andrew Little is considering a crack at the Wellington mayoralty. He gives the impression he hasn’t yet made up his mind but my guess is that he deliberately put the word out that he’s a potential candidate just to gauge the public reaction – and my guess, again, is that the feedback will be overwhelmingly positive, because Little would stand out in an uninspiring field and certainly presents a very plausible alternative to the incumbent disaster, Tory Whanau.

I note that Wellington NewstalkZB host Nick Mills, who has himself declared an interest in running, gave Little a glowing endorsement on his talkback show this morning. Mills has a big audience and Little will doubtless be encouraged by his approval. 

If Little goes ahead, and if he wins, he will join a long and growing list of former central government heavyweights who have made the transition to local politics. Auckland’s former mayors include ex-ministers Christine Fletcher (not a heavyweight, exactly, but she did hold ministerial portfolios), John Banks and Phil Goff. Former minister Fran Wilde served one term as Wellington mayor, later became chair of Greater Wellington Regional Council, and this year will contest the mayoralty of South Wairarapa, where she now lives. In Christchurch, Lianne Dalziel won the mayoralty after stepping down as a minister in 2004 and served three terms in the top job.

Nelson has had two mayors who were formerly MPs: Philip Woollaston and the incumbent, former National cabinet minister Nick Smith. Other former MPs turned mayors included John Carter (Far North), Harry Duynhoven (New Plymouth), Jill White (Palmerston North), Sandra Goudie (Thames-Coromandel) and more recently Ron Mark (Carterton). There may be others I’ve missed; this doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list.

There was occasional traffic in the other direction too. Hamilton mayor Mike Minogue became a National MP (and a constant irritant to party leader Robert Muldoon), as did Mark Blumsky in Wellington. Another former Hamilton mayor, Bruce Beetham, served for six years as the Social Credit MP for Rangitikei, while Georgina Beyer jumped from the mayoralty of Carterton to a seat in Parliament as the MP for Wairarapa. Later came Jono Naylor, ex-mayor of Palmerston North, and Lawrence Yule from Hastings, both of whom served one term as National MPs. Green MP Celia Wade-Brown is another who rode into the House of Representatives on the back of a mayoralty, albeit a wholly undistinguished one.

Cynics hearing the news about Little are likely to nod their heads knowingly and mutter about politicians being addicted to the dopamine hit of politics and being unable to stay away. A mayoralty might have special appeal for such people because it’s seen as conferring individual power and control in a way that a cabinet seat might not. But there’s something to be said for seasoned politicians turning their skills and savvy to local government, especially when a city is in such a stricken plight as Wellington.

This post has been amended with additional information since it was first published. Thanks to my research assistant Mark Unsworth.

Correction: Eamon Sloan, a regular follower of this blog, tells me the Andrew Little story was on the Post's front page. The statement in my original post that the Herald broke the news therefore appears to have been wrong. I apologise for the error and have deleted the reference. I partially absolve myself because I could find no mention of the story on the Post's website. 

My war with the NZTA: Part Deux

Here’s a piece of advice for anyone contemplating a road trip: carefully check the NZTA website beforehand for any road closures.

This never used to be an essential precaution. It is now. And again the question must be asked: what has changed that requires state highways to be so frequently closed, causing huge inconvenience and disruption, when it wasn’t necessary in the past?

The obvious answer is that it’s part of a wider bureaucratic obsession with “safety” – here I pointedly use inverted commas – that has steadily strengthened its grip on the country to the point where it’s a drag on the economy and an impediment to progress.

In the case of the NZTA, this obsession is exacerbated by an apparent culture of disregard for the needs and rights of the public. The long-standing principle that New Zealanders should be free to travel on public roads without let or hindrance, to use a delicious old legal phrase, has been systematically subverted to the point where we accept holdups as an inevitable fact of life.

No one can complain when roads are closed for essential and urgent repairs, as happened north of Napier after the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, but routine highway maintenance and improvement is surely another thing. Yet the Desert Road – part of the main artery between Auckland and Wellington – was closed for two months during summer, forcing traffic to take a 40-minute detour. Does the NZTA factor the cost and inconvenience of such disruption into its calculations, or does it just go ahead because it can?

My own experience, reinforced yet again by a recent road trip through Taranaki, the Waikato, the Central North Island and Hawke’s Bay, tends to confirm my long-held view that the NZTA views road users in much the same way as Basil Fawlty regarded his hotel guests – as nuisances to be managed with minimal inconvenience to the control freaks in charge.

Delays and disruptions were constant. Intriguingly, there seemed to be no consistency. I think it was on the outskirts of Te Kuiti that I saw at least 200 metres of road cones encroaching on the road where a single truck was working on a roadside power pole. Only an hour or so later, I passed several trucks and a big crew working on a much larger job but with a minimal number of cones and no disruption to traffic. Decisions seem to be left to the discretion of the specific site manager.

Inevitably I also saw sections of road cordoned off with cones where nothing was happening at all, and speed limits imposed for supposed road works that either hadn’t yet started or had been completed. This is routine. The inevitable result is public disregard for speed warning signs, which is the very reverse of safe.

At Tongaporutu, in northern Taranaki, SH3 was reduced to one lane, controlled by traffic lights, for a couple of kilometres when only a short section of roadside barrier was being replaced at one end. A clear case of overkill – but at least the road was still open, which was more than could be said for SH54, which links Feilding with SH1 north of Hunterville, when my wife and I tried to drive over it en route to Taupo in November.

On that occasion roughly 40 km of SH54 was closed to northbound traffic for what turned out to be about two hundred metres of work towards the northern end (we saw this on the return journey). Traffic was diverted back through Fielding and onto SH1 through Bulls, adding – at a rough guess – an hour to the travel time.

What made it worse was that because of poorly conceived signage, we were probably 20km along the road before we realised there was no way through. An electronic sign advising that SH54 was closed was placed in such a way that traffic coming off a side road from Ashhurst, as we did, couldn’t easily see it.

In any case, for the sign to mean anything you had to know you were on SH54, and I’ve driven that route countless times without having a clue what its official designation is.

It takes a particular type of dull, pedantic bureaucratic mind to assume that all road users know the official nomenclature of the highway they’re on. In this case, a sign saying “Highway closed ahead” or “No access to SH1” would have done the job, but no; logic and common sense don’t apply.

That was one of two recent instances in which an entire road was closed in one direction for what we later discovered was a short section of work that didn’t appear to involve major reconstruction. Why there couldn’t have been a simple stop/go arrangement for that section, leaving the road open to traffic in both directions, albeit with short delays, is a question only NZTA could answer.

Incompetence is one obvious explanation, but there’s also the possibility that making things easier for road users just isn’t a priority for the NZTA. I suspect such road closures may be indicative of the NZTA’s corporate ethos and its general attitude toward the public. It points to a culture of, at best, indifference and at worst, arrogance toward road users.

In the more recent instance, traffic between Ashhurst and Bunnythorpe (a part of New Zealand that I’m coming to view as some sort of terrestrial Bermuda Triangle) was sent on a long diversion caused by the laying of pipes beside a section of road (beside, not on) that was probably no more than 200 metres long.

The detour was a relatively minor inconvenience for us – perhaps an extra 10 minutes at most. But if you’re catching a plane or hurrying to an appointment, a 10-minute delay could make the difference between a good day and a bad one.

I should add that this happened when the road was unusually busy with traffic heading to the popular Central Districts Field Days, a factor that the traffic management planners either didn’t take into account or didn’t consider worth worrying about. Incompetence, indifference or a combination of the two? Take your pick.

All this points to the possibility of a deeper cultural flaw within the NZTA: namely, an inability (or perhaps stubborn refusal) on the part of NZTA planners and bureaucrats to place themselves in the position of the typical road user – i.e. the people the agency supposedly serves.

This is also obvious in comically illogical destination signage which unfailingly omits the place names most likely to mean something to the traveller.

I’m digressing here, but I noticed, heading north at a roundabout on SH3 at New Plymouth, that the most prominent directional sign pointed to a place called Northgate. Not to Hamilton, not to Auckland, not even to Te Kuiti, but to Northgate – a location that no one from outside New Plymouth is likely to have heard of or be remotely interested in visiting, and which doesn’t rate a mention in my 2018 NZ Road Atlas.

Even Google isn’t sure where Northgate is, but the geniuses at NZTA who decide what names to put on road signs evidently think it’s the destination of most significance to travellers heading north out of New Plymouth and looking for confirmation that they’re on the right road.

This is a common characteristic of NZTA highway signage, which frequently points to no-account places (Tauriko, Pauatahanui and Ongaonga are other examples) to the exclusion of towns and cities whose names actually mean something.

None of the above should be surprising when you consider that the NZTA is a big, monolithic institution with no competitor to keep it on its toes and no politician with the guts or gumption to pull it into line.

The NZTA appears to be answerable to no one: a law unto itself. Labour MP Kieran McAnulty has admitted as much, revealing in 2023 that when he was a cabinet minister holding the associate transport portfolio he was powerless to influence the NZTA over its insistence on an irrational and deeply unpopular 80 kmh speed limit on SH2 (which is wide, flat and straight) through the Wairarapa. It wasn’t until more than a year after the election of the National-led coalition that sanity finally prevailed and the former 100 kmh limit was reinstated.

If it seems from all the foregoing that I have become mildly obsessed with the NZTA and the traffic management racket, I plead guilty. I should get out more often.

Oh, that’s right, I do get out often. It's just that every time I try to go anywhere, road cones dog me every step of the way.

 

My war with the NZTA: Part One

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: the government’s response to public fury and exasperation at the wasteful, disruptive and mostly useless traffic management racket is to set up a hotline where people can report excessive road cone use? God save us.

I predict this pathetically feeble non-solution, announced this week, will achieve one-fifth of SFA because hardly anyone will bother ringing an 0800 number to dob the traffic management racketeers in.

People will rightly be deeply sceptical about trying to engage by phone with an anonymous and remote bureaucracy, knowing they’re likely to be left hanging on the line for ages before anyone answers – and that their complaint will go nowhere anyway, disappearing into a yawning black hole. People are profoundly distrustful of hotlines, and with good reason.

And perhaps it’s just as well if no one bothers using the service. Given that it’s hard to drive more than 10 km on any state highway without seeing forests of road cones, interminable temporary speed limit signs and traffic management trucks holding up traffic, often for no discernible reason, the line would be clogged 24/7.

More to the point, however, the hotline is a contemptible copout that places the onus on us citizens to deal with the problem of sclerotic, cone-choked roads when the real responsibility lies with the politicians themselves.

They allowed the traffic management monster to run rampant and it’s their responsibility to cut it down to size, starting with a root-and-branch cleanout of the New Zealand Transport Agency from board level down – which would mean defenestrating the chair, former National Party leader Simon Bridges – and the imposition of a new corporate culture that emphasises consideration for road users ahead of do-nothing jobs and profits for the traffic management racketeers.

Prime minister Christopher Luxon and Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden (whose title gives you a rather large clue to where things started going wrong) both admit that excessive traffic management is a plague upon the land.

“You can drive around this country at different times of the day and you’ve got whole roads shut down, no one is doing any work and the cones are frankly just clogging up the joint,” Luxon said at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.

Setting aside the fact that no politician should ever feel the need to use that flatulent and empty word “frankly” in an attempt to sound tough, since we’re entitled to assume they’re always expressing their genuine opinion, we should probably at least be grateful that Luxon has finally cottoned on to an issue that’s been driving New Zealand road users mad with frustration for years.

For her part, Van Velden says the issue of a “sea of cones” was brought up at almost every public meeting she attended on a recent road trip. So why has it taken so long for the government to wake up, and why it has responded with such a timid, half-arsed response?

Instead of faffing around with useless hotlines, the government should be asserting its authority by getting tough on the NZTA. After all, the traffic management racket wouldn’t – couldn’t – exist without the NZTA’s endorsement and approval.

What we’ve got here is a cosy, symbiotic relationship between the NZTA, roading contractors and traffic management companies. Over the past 10 years or so the latter have proliferated like … well, like road cones. This unholy three-way alliance is holding the country hostage and playing us all for suckers.

And what’s the government’s solution? A bloody hotline. Good grief.

I don’t mind admitting this has become personal for me. I do a lot of driving. Over the past three years I’ve covered every region and every provincial city in the country with the exception of Invercargill (the closest I got was Gore). And every time I set out on a road trip I brace myself for the delays and disruptions that I know are inevitable. 

We go along with this costly and unnecessary pantomime because we’re passive, compliant people. That was shown during the Covid pandemic, when we meekly fell into line with authoritarian controls that, in retrospect, are now acknowledged as oppressively over the top (and yes, I admit I was one of the fall-into-liners).

Traffic management depends on that same deference to authority. The NZTA and its traffic management bullies wield the power and we have little choice but to do as they instruct. I mean, what are your options when you’re forced to make a wholly unnecessary one-hour detour (as I did not long ago) or crawl at 30kmh through road works that have been in progress for months and even years and where nothing is happening? You can only fume impotently.

Sure, you could abuse the traffic management people standing around in their hi-vis vests (standing or sitting around being quite literally what they do most of the time, usually staring at their smartphones). But what would that achieve? They’re certainly a big part of the problem, but they didn’t cause it. The fault lies with the NZTA bureaucrats, who are safely insulated from public wrath; and beyond them, with the politicians who allowed the grotesque traffic management racket to flourish in the first place and only now are waking up to the great bloated nuisance it has become.

Oh, but I forget; the politicians have taken bold and decisive action: they’ve set up a hot line to report excessive use of road cones. Problem solved, then.

Looking for some facts to substantiate my jaundiced view of the hi-vis highwaymen, I recently asked the NZTA to provide me with figures showing the proportion of the national roading budget devoted to traffic management. I had seen speculative estimates ranging as high as 40 percent, which struck even me as unlikely.

Extraordinarily, it turns out that the NZTA has not historically separated out traffic management costs from its overall expenditure. This in itself suggests slack budgetary management and a remarkable lack of concern about how public funds are spent.

I would have thought that the cost of traffic management was the type of significant information NZTA board members would expect to have at their fingertips. That they apparently didn’t think to routinely request it every year doesn’t inspire confidence in their competence.

The NZTA told me, however, that it had recently undertaken a project – as if the thought had only just occurred to it – that sampled its contracts, and from this it was able to calculate average TTM (temporary traffic management) costs. These indicated that TTM over the past three years accounted for between 9 and 9.5 percent of total spending on road maintenance, operations and capital contracts. 

At first glance, that may not sound outrageous. But when you look at it in dollar terms, a different impression takes shape. 

In the years 2021-24, NZTA spent $786 million on traffic management. $786 million! That was out of total state highway costs of $8.4 billion. In 2023-24, the cost of TTM was put at $317 million (assuming the NZTA got its calculations right).

It goes without saying that $786 million buys a helluva lot of road cones, high-vis vests and expensive trucks and utes and with their ostentatious flashing lights. This may explain why so many of the trucks and utes appear to be new. 

It’s also clear from the NZTA response to my inquiry that there’s no systematic collection of reliable information relating to the cost of traffic management. That’s how I interpret the NZTA’s statement that “We have collected TTM actual and physical works costs from suppliers for a sample of contracts where costs were recorded and accurate, and we have calculated TTM costs percentages accordingly.”

Here’s an obvious question: if the NZTA doesn’t have complete and accurate records showing what TTM is costing, as that statement suggests, how can it know whether it’s getting its money’s worth?

You might think that a switched-on board of directors would want to know whether the money was effectively spent. Has any work been done on costs versus benefits? Does the NZTA have any idea how many lives have been saved or serious injuries avoided by its road-cone control freakery?

If any research has been done, let’s see it. If it hasn’t been done, why not?

Has anyone bothered to weigh the supposed safety benefits of the traffic management racket against the incalculable delay, frustration and inconvenience caused to road users? And I don’t just mean hapless private motorists like me.

Infuriating though it is to have my travel constantly disrupted, the far more serious impact is on commercial traffic. God alone knows the cumulative economic cost of holdups in the supply chain caused by trucks and tankers sitting idle for long periods at temporary red lights, forced to make detours or made to drive at ridiculous speeds through long sections of road works where nothing is happening.

The counter argument, of course, is that roads are part of our essential infrastructure and must be kept in good condition. That requires maintenance work. People understand that and will accept a reasonable amount of inconvenience. But it bears repeating over and over again that the contagion of traffic management New Zealand-style is a new phenomenon.

For decades our highways were built and maintained, often in very challenging places, without the need for heavy-handed traffic management, forests of road cones and lots of bullying trucks with flashing lights. We did it then. What makes it impossible now?

Part Two to come ...

Part 

Why shouldn't ACT have a go? The Left's been at it for decades

David Seymour’s announcement that ACT may stand candidates in council elections triggered a discussion on Nick Mills’ talkback show on Newstalk ZB this morning about whether political parties should get involved in local government. But that mischievous genie escaped from the bottle a very long time ago.

The Labour Party has long regarded local politics as fertile ground, both at district and regional levels, and always fields a slate of Wellington City Council candidates with the party’s formidable organisational resources behind them.

Frank Kitts, Wellington’s longest-serving mayor (1956-74), was elected on the Labour ticket; so were Jim Belich and Fran Wilde. Four of the current councillors owe their loyalty to Labour, though only one (Teri O’Neill) acknowledges her allegiance in her profile on the council’s website.

Wellington Regional Council chair Daran Ponter is a Labour man too, as is Lower Hutt mayor Campbell Barry. So Labour is a powerful force in local government, though it largely flies under the radar in terms of public visibility.

Then there are the Greens. Wellington got its first Green councillor, Stephen Rainbow, way back in 1989. Rainbow has moved a long way politically since then, shifting to the libertarian right to the extent that the current government felt comfortable appointing him as chief human rights commissioner, but there has been a more-or-less constant Green Party presence at the Wellington council table in the past few decades – to say nothing of two disastrous Green mayors, Celia Wade-Brown and Tory Whanau (who is Green in all but official designation).

So what about the other side? For decades Wellington had the conservative Citizens’ and Ratepayers’ Association, which was widely viewed as a National Party proxy. Its main purpose was to keep Labour out of power, in which role it was often successful. Sir Michael Fowler was a popular Citizens’ mayor (1974-83) and the Citizens’ Association often commanded a majority around the council table. But Ian Lawrence (1983-86) was the last Citizens’ mayor and the Citizens’ Association now seems defunct, not having stood a candidate since 1997. National itself has never stood candidates in council elections.

So now ACT is thinking about having a go – and why not? We should brace ourselves for howls of outrage, but ACT would only be doing what the Left has done (and very effectively) for decades.