Mike's Minute: The annals of history wont be kind to the 2017-23 Government

A couple of fun facts that weren't covered in the Government's transport plan, given we all got exercised about registrations and fuel taxes.  The Road to Zero has been dumped as part of it. And the Te Huia train is under review.  You can add these two projects to the Labour Government's litany of shambles that, essentially, came to nothing.  The poverty figures that went backwards, the Fees Free programme that got no one they wanted into university and now Road to Zero, surely the stupidest of titles, finally put out of its misery.  In fact, is Road to Zero as stupid as Let's Get Wellington Moving? It's a close-run thing.  But like Road to Zero, Let's Get Wellington Moving didn’t work either. You’ve never seen such a lavish array of hot air and thought bubbles getting enacted at such a price.  Te Huia is a classic New Zealand story. At its heart, on a piece of paper, the concept of shuffling people between Hamilton and Auckland is not the end of the world.  But in typical fashion, at the start it didn’t stop in Auckland, it stopped out of Auckland. Then you had to change trains or get a bus. Then it ran red lights and got pulled.  Then no one used it, and when they used it a bit, it turned out they used it on weekends. So it turned into a touristy "let's visit Auckland on a Saturday" sort of thing.  All the while it was losing money hand over fist. Last time we talked about it they were expanding the number of services. Normally you expand the number of services because of demand, but not Te Huia. No, they just expanded it for the sake of it.  $90 per person per trip is what we all pay for this folly.  As for the Road to Zero, it isn't at zero and it's not close to zero. It will never be at zero and as the agency who oversees this stuff announced just this week, they are now looking at recidivist behaviour to see if it’s a hard core who are causing all the trouble on the roads.  Small hint - it is. It's like crime, it's a handful of troublemakers causing the issues, so all that advertising about seatbelts and speed and drinking never hit the mark, because the mark doesn't care.  The big question is the longer-term issue. By the time this Government undoes all the nutty stuff, will there be anything left at all of the Labour Government of 2017-23?  And if there isn't, how bad in the annals of history does that make them? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.