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In New Zealand, politicians promise jam today, and more jams tomorrow... Picture by Dreamstime.com

If you laid every politician elected in the last 40 years end-to-end, their combined salaries, pensions and expenses could have paid for Wellington’s Transmission Gully route twice over. Now that Transport Minister Steven Joyce has decisively not quite decided when to complete the “new” road, we can see that New Zealand is at last moving forward at about a snail’s pace, rather than not at all. Joyce will be enjoying his fabulous pension and perks long before some other bigwig cuts the tape on Transmission Gully.

State Highway 1 is a slow-way country lane that shows just what kind of state we are in. Its entire length is riddled with death traps for the unwary, and SH1 is a stark illustration of how this country lost its way – and its will to win. The returning visitor can see little improvement to most of it (particularly those sections close to Wellington) since the mid-70s.

The French learned a lot from Hitler about how to fast-track transport. It goes like this: decide where you are heading and then let nobody stand in your way. The theory worked for road and rail until the French reached the other side of the Channel and discovered the unique Anglo-Saxon way of creating jams. It has taken decades of wasted time and public fortunes to complete the Paris to London fast rail link. Hitler wisely halted his advance at Calais, correctly realising that only a madman would wish to conquer Britain.

It’s the same story in New Zealand, where bureaucratic fossils with feet of clay have conspired to keep the rest of us stuck in the mud for decades.

Transmission Gully, a route riddled with faults, most of them belonging to governments

Now that Joyce has said the Gully is a goer, all manner of opponents are inventing new excuses for stopping it. Green vegetables, who would like us all to live in caves and reinvent the wheel (but this time, it must be square), now moan on about global warming and impossible gradients. To the Greens, we say: It’s the internal combustion engine, stupid. Until you brilliant hindsighters invent something that runs on seawater and reduces tidal inundation, the rest of us are stuck with reality. Personal transport is here to stay; the only real challenge is how to fuel it and get it from A to B more efficiently.

Some wring their hands, and talk about widening the existing long and winding road over the sea. Others recall how the US Army landed in New Zealand in the 1940s and offered to build Transmission Gully as a hobby to occupy the troops before they torched Japan. Still others say that is a myth, but it’s probably true to say that the US Army had more road-building equipment then than we do today.

But anyone crawling out of Wellington over Christmas at 5kmh must have wondered why – after all these wasted years – New Zealanders hadn’t resorted to terrorism and eliminated those scared politicians and useless pen-pushers who stood in the way of progress for the best part of half a century.

We could have called them Al Queueda, and they would have done us all a favour.