KEY POINTS:
What unfortunate timing on Auckland City's part. The week assorted members of a dysfunctional family are found guilty of unspeakable crimes against their 3-year-old relative, councillors decide to impose the biggest budget cuts on the the poorest areas of the city.
It's not my habit to quote from the Bible, but surely the good Christian conservatives who call the shots at Auckland City are aware of frequent warnings in the Good Book about reaping what we sow.
I can't begin to explain what goes on in the mind of someone happy to drop-kick a toddler across a room, or stick her in an electric clothes drier and switch it on. But we do know that if communities allow underbellies of neglect to develop, what crawls out is often not very palatable.
Yet with more than half the planned $800 million of budget cuts for the next 10 years centred on the Tamaki ward, this message seems to have been lost.
Indeed, as if to underline who is now ruling the roost, the conservatives have, in the words of Richard Northey, the Labour-City Vision team leader, "manipulated the rates system to hold the rates for wealthy property owners and businesses by increasing rates for low and middle-valued properties by more than 20 per cent".
This will be achieved by increasing fixed annual charges on every property in the city to $593 before the additional value-based rate kicks in.
Self-interest alone should have made the Citizen and Ratepayer majority twitchy about the risks of perpetuating pockets of deprivation and idleness within driving distance of their own leafy suburbs, but it seems not.
Hobson councillor Aaron Bhatnagar, for example, is delighted to have scored $5 million to resand and otherwise spruce up millionaire row's Judges Bay. Contrast that with the miserly $7.5 million that has been budgeted over the next 10 years for new swimming pools citywide.
The old and controversial Eastern Highway project survives in the guise of "AMETI," into which $344.9 million is to be poured to to provide "better, easier and more efficient access to and within Auckland's eastern suburbs ... "
This comes at the expense of the less fortunate folk further west in the meaner streets of Otahuhu, who are being told to wave goodbye, for a decade at least, to the $22.1 million swimming pool and library complex which was supposed to begin next year and be completed by 2011.
It will come as no consolation to the people of Otahuhu to learn that the council plans to pee the equivalent of their library and pool money and then some - $28.8 million at last count - up against a wall in 2011 on Rugby World Cup partying. And let's not remind them of the extra $18 million being spent on upgrading roading and other infrastructure around the main cup venue, Eden Park.
Today I was going to jump up and down about blasphemous talk of an Auckland Zoo without elephants. Growing up in Auckland without the mind-blowing experience of your first live elephant, face to face, would not be the same.
I'm ancient enough to have ridden on the back of Jamuna - not so long after he killed a keeper, as I recall, which added to the excitement. Then there was his monstrous African predecessor Rajah who, stuffed, used to preside over the Auckland Museum. Even in his moth-eaten state, he was to my generation what the dinosaur displays are to kids today.
Deputy mayor and Citrat leader David Hay's announcement that the zoo had to choose between hippos and elephants and "learn to live within its means" highlights how haphazard and arbitrary the belt-tightening process is.
I agree rates have to be kept under control and that the previous council was rightly disciplined at the ballot box for believing it was exempt from this basic fact of life.
But in the toss-up between, say, completing the Otahuhu recreation centre complex, which councillors in 1997 resolved was of "high priority", and more roads, councillors have made the wrong call.
Pouring $344.9 million into AMETI will possibly make it easier for drivers to flee their lifeless suburbs. But building new libraries and swimming pools and other community facilities at a fraction of the cost will give them reasons to stay and enjoy their surrounds. It might even do away with the clamour for more escape roads altogether.
