KEY POINTS:
As I read the story in the World section on Monday about how London's bright-red socialist mayor had been axed after eight years by a thoroughly brassed-off electorate, I couldn't help but see the parallels between that election and the one we will have later this year.
After eight years of tolerating Labour's Ken Livingstone, the suburbs revolted, the story said. And the revolt spread far wider than London.
Said the Observer newspaper: "From Bury to Reading, and Manchester, voters punished what they see as a stealth-taxing, meddling Labour Party oblivious to their straitened finances ... "
It said the abolition of the 10p tax rate, which slashed the wages of millions, had ensured meltdown for the Labour Party, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown's undertaking to tackle that issue later this year cut no ice.
It quoted one MP as saying: "These are people who take a calculator to the supermarket to check they can afford the food. They needed the money now."
What the British local body elections reveal is that the public have had a gutsful of New Labour socialism and for much the same reasons as we have had a gutsful of stealth-taxing, meddling Labour-led governments and the pitifully politically correct nanny state they have imposed on us.
And I doubt whether tax relief, which will be grudgingly given later this month by a finance minister ideologically opposed to such, will do much to change the electorate's mind. As in Britain, Labour here can look forward to a thorough trouncing.
The "we know best dogma" that characterises socialist governments everywhere, and which is at its epitome in our Labour-led Administration, has had its day.
History shows that you can push the populace only so far before their simmering resentment will boil over, and those who have imposed it get savagely scalded. Roll on November.
As for the Government's buy-back of the nation's rail and ferry business, hindsight tells us it should never have been sold in the first place.
The Government was right to save Air New Zealand by taking a major shareholding, and the proof of that is the satisfactory profitability and continued high reputation of our national flag carrier.
Buying a major shareholding in the rail operator was not an option, so the Government has done the next best thing and resumed total ownership. That was the right thing to do.
New Zealand, with its long, narrow geography and urban population centres fairly far apart and not all that big, is a difficult country in which to have a profitable rail network.
Several competent overseas owners have tried to make a go of it, taking over a business seriously damaged by its first local owner, but have not succeeded.
So we must ask ourselves: what do we do? The only answer is for the Government to own the rail network, because the only other option is for us to have no rail network at all - and that would be intolerable, for rail is and always will be the cheapest and most efficient means of moving large volumes of goods.
And our inter-island shipping link is so absolutely essential to our national economy and social well-being that it must be protected at all costs.
It seems to me that only the Government has the capital to invest in modern rolling stock and upgrade the rapidly deteriorating rail tracks. Private operators have more sense than to try.
I doubt that passenger services will ever be anywhere near what they used to be, and there is no reason they should be. I can go to Wellington from Auckland by air for as little as $89 plus petrol, parking and taxis, and the entire journey will take me less time, door to door, than it takes an "express" train to get to Hamilton.
Nevertheless, there will always be those who want to travel by rail, and in a modern, civilised country they should have that ability, provided they are prepared to pay for it.
For those who don't know whether the Government's purchase was a good idea or not, this newspaper's editorial on Tuesday was of no help at all; it argued diametrically against itself.
In the first paragraph it pointed out that two experienced rail operators, Wisconsin Central and Toll, had been only too happy to walk away from their New Zealand investment, yet in the last paragraph suggested that the railways "should be placed in the hands of another foreign rail company which, disciplined by the risk to its own money, would run a commercial enterprise".
" ... Better that approach than a buy-back which ignores the lessons of 15 years of privatisation," said the editorial.
What lessons? That essential infrastructure can be privatised, then asset-stripped and left to rot?
