This government has made it plain it believes Kiwis love their cars too much to ever use anything else.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if the tax you had to pay was 4 dollars a litre?
Do you reckon Kiwis would go on showing their love as ardently?
Or is it possible that with that much push a decent number of them might actually be ready to look more closely at bikes and buses and trains and anything else that might be decently viable?
There was a time when the number of cars in New Zealand was zero. It’s perfectly possible that at some future date it will be that number again.
But this is a government that forever believes in keeping things just the way they are. And if that means $50 a week for 150,000 working families with kids to they can keep right on driving (or, in the styling of Nicola of Marsden Point, carefully targeted relief for the squeezed middle) then that’s as much as we’ll be getting.
So empty, these people: no vision, no imagination, no capacity to imagine a tomorrow that isn’t just like today.
Unless, say, it has enough Robbie Williams in it to make it feel reassuringly like it’s twenty years ago.
