Not political? In your dreams

Last week's arrival of the 1917 Winterless North parliamentary tour re-enactment was too good an opportunity for MP Winston Peters to miss.

If the Far North District Council was expecting Northland MP Winston Peters to comply with its request that he refrain from using the arrival of the 1917 Winterless North parliamentary tour re-enactment in Kaitaia to make political statements, it was doomed to disappointment.

"Why on Earth not?" he asked when he welcomed the rally to Te Ahu.

"The treatment of Northland by the Beehive and the Wellington bureaucracy is one of neglect and patronisation.

"The funding for Northland's roads by the NZTA is a classic example where severe cuts in real terms appear in their press statements, where Northland is concerned, as praiseworthy increases. The infrastructural deficit throughout the North is testimony to that."

It was impossible to keep politics out because the original tour had been organised by Colonel Allen Bell, MP for the Bay of Islands from 1922 to 1928, with political intentions.

His concerns then were still the concerns of a majority of Northlanders.

"Colonel Bell believed the economic potential of the North was not being given due consideration by the politicians in Wellington. Now isn't that déjà vu in fast forward?

"Both Colonel Bell and the North Auckland Executive and Development Board wanted as many MPs as they could to come and see what challenges the North faced. Sound familiar?

"In the end 40 MPs made the epic trip, as well as 97 others from various walks of life - farmers, business people and reporters. And what a trip it was. The tour was called a "tour of the roadless" North, and it was a big problem finding accommodation.

"On one leg of the 16-day, 800-mile trip it took them six hours to slog through 26km of mud and slush. Some of the MPs had to get out and heave on ropes to pull the cars out of mud.

"Of the 33 cars that started, only 10 finished the journey from Auckland to Kaitaia, then through Ahipara, Herekino, Broadwood, the Hokianga, Kaikohe and Dargaville."

Did Colonel Bell and the development board achieve what they wanted? Did the Wellington politicians wake up? Before considering that, Mr Peters said, it was interesting to note some contemporary comment of the tour.

The Auckland Star (February 1, 1917) said it had introduced those who had been on it to 'the riches of the North, developed and undeveloped, and they were astonished.

'The dominating impression brought away from the tour is one of immense possibilities ... and most of them (the people on the tour) have become converted to the Auckland conviction that the North has been neglected by the Government ... But they have observed failings in the North, and have not hesitated to point them out. They think that the North should show more energy and self-reliance.'

"Without being too political, if we want the North to get proper attention we must be united up here in asking for it," Mr Peters added.

"It is not energy or self-reliance we lack up here, but a united voice.

"For all of you who have joined this tour, our grateful thanks, because you have focused on an infrastructural need, in this case roading, that Northland desperately needs a response to."