Gog.org.nz

The price of just about everything (apart from houses and shares) is going through the roof, thanks to rocketing fuel costs. Many thousands are suffering genuine hardship that cannot be eased by Working for Families hand-outs, and we are in recession. So what does our Government do to protect the poor and vulnerable? It piles on even more misery by needlessly raising the cost of virtually everything, racking up the costs of transport through increased road charges.

This time, it’s the truckies’ turn to take a hit, thanks to speeding, swerving, dodging and weaving Transport Minister Annette King’s absurd move to raise road charges.

She claims that transport operators aren’t paying enough to maintain the roads, and told TV 3’s Campbell Live that she only seeks “fairness” . What a load of utter a-a-a-asphalt. Now that the price of diesel has virtually doubled in less than 18 months, Dr Michael Cullen’s tax take from the folk who cart our goods around has almost doubled. Not to mention the impact on the wallet that ordinary people suffer driving to, through and home from the supermarket checkout, including the higher GST content on all the basic stuff of life. You could build a Transmission Gully on a couple of weeks’ worth, if we didn’t have a government that can only dig holes for itself rather than build motorways for us.

These increased government transport charges will be passed on through even higher prices at the counter – further fuelling inflation and making a complete nonsense of Cullen’s tax cuts.

If, as expected, international interest rates rise and oil gets even more expensive, we can all look forward to much greater pain as the New Zealand dollar drops. Either way, Cullen will be rolling in cash (unless he breaks the habit of a lifetime and takes a truly caring, sharing approach by cutting the excise duty on fuel).

King, Clark, Cullen and Company appear to have a political death wish. Inexplicably, they seem to be hell-bent on a slash-and-burn policy, wrecking as much as possible before we send them off for a very long holiday on the back-benches (or preferably, a proper job - if they can find one).

Not content with hammering the motorist, they have unilaterally robbed taxpayers by buying back the Toll Train Set at a grossly inflated price and have committed the country to spending more than $1.5 billion on an unplanned one-track lemon.

So far, we have seen no railway strategy, apart from a mediocre paint job on an obsolete, hastily re-sprayed and tackily renamed “KiwiRail” locomotive. When John Key had the temerity to ask our Prime Minister just how much this would cost the taxpayer, Helen Clark accused him (under Parliamentary privilege) of personally profiting from the original sale. Clark, having yet another bad hair day, later grudgingly withdrew the accusation, but still failed to reply - because she does not know the answer. Deep down, Labour must have a twisted a sense of humour. How else can we explain the appointment of Jim Bolger as the Fat Controller? He presided over the rail privatisation and, along with National, will be blamed for its inevitable failure by grumpy socialists in a few years’ time…

Notwithstanding the economic damage and downright nuisance caused by truckies’ protests, they should be supported because the real damage is being done to New Zealand by a small cabal of powerful but incompetent politicians who are immune from the fallout, hermetically sealed from public opinion and utterly oblivious to the economic gridlock they have already caused.

Kamikaze King and her allies are driving this country to the wall. And the truckies’ protest shows what our politicians mean when they promise “jam tomorrow.”

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