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Mike's Minute: Ideas like Julie Anne Genter's are why we have no money
I pray that somewhere in the departments that waste so much of our money, someone, somewhere, has the spine to stand up and tell the rest of the plonkers that what they are doing doesn’t work.
Julie Anne Genter, back in another Government when they gave her a portfolio, came up with the 'Road to Zero'.
That alone was one of the stupidest ideas going, for the simple reason that it set you up for immediate failure.
As much as she might have liked to have argued it was aspirational, more realistically it was unobtainable and everyone knew it.
Because every year since, the road toll it of course hasn’t been zero and, more worryingly, nowhere close to it.
In fact, it's getting worse.
It's getting worse for a couple of, I would have thought, astonishingly obvious reasons.
1) We have more cars than ever,
2) Our roads are rubbish and the weather has surely exposed that. Look at where the carnage is. It's not on the Waikato Expressway or the multi-lane highways; it's on the goat tracks they insist on calling State Highway 1 outside of the main centres.
And then,
3) The idiots.
That combination is all you need to know as to why we are where we are. And as such, no amount of advertising and pleading changes anything, therefore you can quickly conclude the $60+ million spent so far is wasted.
And it's wasted at a time when we can least afford it.
Reminding people about speed and seatbelts and driving drunk is only applicable to the sort of idiot who isn't susceptible to being told what to do.
Those who are, are already doing it. I am sure deep within the ad agencies they genuinely believe their latest piece of creative genius is the one to crack the code.
And to be honest, if the Government were writing the sort of cheques they are, what fool turns that down?
Which is why we need leadership. Someone at the highest level needs to break the ideology that spending other people's money for the sake of it makes some sort of difference, when it can be shown it doesn’t.
Michael Wood clearly isn't that man. He defends this nonsense; he inherited a mad idea and ran with it.
If you rounded up the hundreds of millions, if not billions, that has been spent these past five years on nonsense, we wouldn’t be talking about a tax for the clean-up.
We are only short of money because we wasted it.
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