Yeah, I don't know what to make of Shane Jones's prediction last night that the days of building big roads are over. He was at this infrastructure debate in Wellington and he said, and I quote, I personally don't see ever another four-lane highway being built in New Zealand in my lifetime. The politicians are going to struggle to justify the cost. Now he can't be right. because Mill Road is supposed to be 4 lanes. Mill Road is incredibly necessary. This is the road that runs south of Auckland, basically runs parallel with the motorway. It's crucial to getting commuters in and out of the city if we want to help them get in and out of the city faster, especially given how much development is currently going on in the Franklin District and Pairata and Drury south of Auckland. That road is supposed to be being built right now. If he is right that no four-lane highways will be built in his lifetime, and he's about 66, I give him another 25 years or so, right? If he's right that no other four-lane highways are gonna be built in the next 25 years or so, it means we're gonna be disappointed, yet again, by Mill Road, like all the other roads of national significance, being downgraded into two lanes, which basically means one lane headed north, one lane heading south. Either that or it's not gonna be built at all. Four-lane highways, by the way, are not flash, They're not extravagant. We should be able to afford them. The fact that we have another politician who was supposed to be all about supporting infrastructure, giving up on roads again, says clearer than ever that we have a problem here. And the problem is not that four-lane highways are unaffordable, it's that we are spending too much money in the wrong places if we can't afford them. We spend way too much. I don't know if you realize this, we spend way too much on entitlements. Just giving money to beneficiaries, giving money to pensioners, giving childcare who are on 1/4 of $1,000,000 a year, giving money to rich pensioners who can heat up their houses and they just use it to run their spa pools over winter. We do not spend enough money on infrastructure. We don't need to give up on four lane highways like Shane Jones has. We just need to stop wasting the money that we should be spending on four lane highways. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
