Govt’s road funding a disgrace

“The recent announcement by the Government that it has allocated $33.5 million for work on two roading black spots is a disgrace”, Whangarei’s Democrats for Social Credit candidate, Chris Leitch, told an election meeting yesterday.

The Loop Road north to Smeatons Hill safety improvements have been urgent for years, but we’ll have to wait at least three years before the project even gets to the drawing board.

National obviously thinks that Whangarei voters are gullible enough to be swayed by an election bribe where over 60 percent of the money will not spent for at least three years, if ever.

While Northland roads have been getting a pounding, particularly from logging trucks, spending on road improvements has not even kept up with the rate of inflation.

Northland in general, and Whangarei in particular, has been starved for road funding for decades, and the miserly amount announced last week is just a cynical attempt by National to try and shore up electoral support for it’s new candidate.

Many of the people I’ve met in the course of my door-knocking in the past week are singularly unimpressed, and are fed up with National ignoring the north because it thinks these are safe seats.

Northland’s councils should be pushing the government to adopt the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund report of August 2012 which proposed using greater sums of government (Reserve Bank) issued money for infrastructure rather than traditional borrowing.

Such action would result in more jobs, and a stronger retail sector, with more money in the hands of consumers.

To those who claim that giving the government the power to issue a larger stock of money would be highly inflationary, the report says the opposite is true.

ENDS

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