Brian Rudman: One home invasion? What about another 365 of them

Prime Minister John Key is right about National's Mt Albert candidate, Melissa Lee, being "stupid" to say the proposed combined surface and tunnel motorway through Waterview would stop South Auckland criminals flooding into Mt Albert.

It won't. All it will do is get scoundrels from the south - and for that matter the west as well - to the electorate's boundaries quicker. If she wants to keep the undesirables out, she'll have to go for broke and support the discarded twin tunnel option. It's a bit hard to break into someone's home from 30 to 40m underground.

Jesting aside, National Party apologists are spinning the line that her gaffe was made under the pressure of a public meeting. Which it was. But what does that say about Ms Lee? That her gut response under stress is to grab for a convenient bogeyman - the stereotypical bad boy from South Auckland.

At least she didn't go quite as far as former National Party leader Jenny Shipley, who in 2000 opined that Polynesians "climb in the windows of other New Zealanders at night ... it's not just Maori".

Ms Lee's obsession with crime is understandable. She still seems to be suffering post-traumatic stress from her home being invaded six months ago by two balaclava-wearing, armed hoods. What suburb they came from has not been reported. As a result, she said in her maiden speech in December, "I don't feel safe in my own home, let alone the streets".

Last week in a radio interview she said she couldn't sleep for six months afterwards, had to keep the light on all night and was getting up every two minutes. Then last weekend, as the election hoardings went up, she brought it up again, saying: "Law and order was a big issue for people in the area. As a victim of a home invasion myself I understand exactly how they feel."

She seems oblivious to the irony of focusing her campaign on her personal home invasion, while in the electorate, voters are checking to see if their homes are among the 365 to be obliterated by National's road building bulldozers.

Has it not dawned on her that the voters of Mt Albert might be more concerned about this mass home invasion, and the great permanent barriers about to be scratched across local open spaces by her Government, than they are about her attempts to drum up fears based on her misfortunes.

The Government and the Transport Agency face an impossible task trying to put the genie that is the tunnel option back in its bottle. A year ago, the agency's predecessor came out in favour of the underground option, declaring "a tunnel is both feasible and preferable" and has "significant social and environmental benefit".

This included reduced effect on parks and reserves and "at least 300 fewer properties affected".

The price then of the tunnel solution came mid-way between two overland routes, one costing $1.9 billion, the other, $1.7 billion.

The National Government, after adding an extra lane in each direction, the $240 million cost of raising the sinking causeway on adjacent State Highway 16 (which had to be fixed anyway) and throwing in $585 million for the cost of borrowing the full construction costs of the tunnels, now says the grand total is $3.16 billion and unaffordable.

Its alternative solution will cost $1.4 billion. But somehow this can be built without a cent of borrowed money - thus saving $585 million.

Such manipulation of facts and figures has not escaped the attention of the locals, who after being promised a fully-funded tunnel a year ago, are less than enthusiastic about second best.

Admittedly, the new proposal, in avoiding the main Oakley Creek valley past Unitec and the Phyllis St Reserve playing fields, is better than some of the earlier rejected schemes. But it still pushes through the northern edges of the Alan Wood Reserve further upstream, and cuts communities in two.

For decades, governments have short-changed Auckland on the share of road levies spent in this region. Only in the past three years has this injustice begun to be reversed. Even so, the deficit between 1990 and 2008 is $3.04 billion - and that's a conservative calculation. We now seem to be on a fast drift back to the bad old days when the rest of the country milked Auckland, and we let them.