As a headline-grabbing exercise, former Justice Minister Mark Burton’s claim that the enquiry into Auckland’s future will be looking 100 years ahead is hard to beat.

But his ministerial job was gone by Wednesday lunchtime – and his place in Parliament might well be gone for a Burton by this time next year. Burton knows that his reckless promise will also soon be history. The guardians of ancient cities such as London, Berlin and Milan would not be so presumptuous to forecast more than 20 years ahead.

Mark Burton and his colleagues might instead like to look back, and ask themselves why Auckland has become such a logistical problem. It’s all very well to look a century ahead, when Jafas may (with any luck) be emigrating to the Moon, but what about the historical neglect that has made such a mess of Auckland?

Auckland is an aberration. It is one of the world’s largest suburbs, pretending to be a city. Nobody’s fooled. Auckland is huge, horrible, over-governed and unmanageable, and the resources it sucks from the rest of the country result in an unjustifiable imbalance of national wealth distribution.

The people who claim to run our country might ponder the fact that the transport infrastructure has fallen apart so badly that it’s hard for any overseas business to invest in the regions. Our major trunk highway has hardly changed in almost 40 years, and places like Gisborne, Wanganui, the Wairarapa and Hawke’s Bay are still seriously marginalised.

By now, we should have a four or six-lane highway from Auckland to Wellington, with dual carriageways reaching out East and West. Even the capital city is isolated, with third world road links and a railway network that the 19th Century’s railroad and bridge-builder Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be ashamed of.

Even the air links to potentially important satellite cities in the North Island are woefully underdeveloped. It’s hard to understand why runways cannot be extended to take medium-sized jets and why road improvements to make these places more accessible also go unaddressed.

Or perhaps it’s not so hard to understand. The recurring theme that echoes back for more than 30 years is that politicians love creating commissions of enquiry to investigate critical issues, and they always put the results on an inaccessible shelf secretly called Too Hard, for their successors to deal with.

They also do not understand the need for regional development, from the ground up. The economic disparity between Dunedin and Auckland, for example, is unforgivable – and what flows on from that is extraordinary differences in life opportunities for people who live outside the main centres of Auckland and Wellington.

While some public servant in Wellington is heaving the reports of all those commissions of inquiries onto those creaking shelves, the politicians will come out with some brand new, washes-whiter, 23rd Century solution to capture our imagination – hopefully in time for us to re-elect them.