Rudman's city: Give it a bit of time and the Penny might drop

By BRIAN RUDMAN

At the risk of inciting idleness in the workplace, can I commend a website that, if you ask nicely, e-mails you an obscure word each day - an essential tool for my trade, of course.

How else would I know that "pleonasm" - pronounced: \PLEE-uh-naz-uhm\ - is a noun describing the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; as in "I saw it with my own eyes". Or that "fugacious" meant fleeting, or lasting but a short time.

Picking up my local newspaper yesterday, it crossed my mind that it was time we had a similar site for obscure members of Parliament.

There was a time when linking an MP to his or her party and electorate was as easy as the times table and spelling Mississippi backwards. But MMP, the much more rapid turnover of incumbents and brain-cell decay have all taken their toll.

These days I'm hard pressed to remember my local member's name - just joking, Judith - let alone those further afield. Who, for instance, was this Act list MP called Penny Webster, who was hogging the headlines demanding that Auckland's motorway system be completed by 2005.

Indeed she seems to have introduced a bill into Parliament "requiring" the Auckland Regional Council to finish the road-building by that date.

To help the bulldozers, Ms Webster's bill also scraps the Resource Management Act, which has, she says, stifled and hampered her road-building mates' plans.

I know it's all ludicrous and never going to happen, but as a fan of MMP I find such silliness rather depressing. During the great debate, the concept of Parliament under MMP being liberally studded with learned experts was appealing. Mixing constituency-elected brawlers with party-list greybeards, wise to the problems of the world, seemed to offer the best of both worlds. Such was the dream.

Instead, we've ended up with party hacks such as Penny Webster. To read her list of party spokeswomanships you could still be forgiven for thinking her the Renaissance savant of my MMP dreams. Here she is, listed as the Act expert on transport, tourism, immigration, internal affairs, customs, women, consumers, arts and broadcasting.

Well I don't know her expertise in other fields, but if her approach to Auckland transport is any indication, rest assured you won't be seeing this Albany-based former Auckland Federated Farmers chairman starring on TV One's The Weakest Link.

For starters, how can you pass a law requiring the regional council to complete the motorway network when that body has no power or control or money to do any such thing? As for the 2005 deadline, that's just irresponsible nonsense - even more fanciful than Auckland Mayor John Banks' deadline of 2007.

Even that most dedicated of road-builders, Transit New Zealand, is planning on the basis of a 10-year Auckland programme to complete the network. And that's if the money can be found, to say nothing of resource consents.

To finish the Auckland network in 10 years will blow the existing national roads budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. To think it can be done in three, as Ms Webster purports to believe, is cloud cuckoo territory.

Ms Webster is anti-rail. To her, the right to drive her own car has become as ideological as the American gun-nutters' battle to continue bearing arms.

"Each person in the anti-road movement has the same fear," she told delegates to last November's Act annual conference. "They are scared of cars because automobiles allow individuals to make their own decisions. Car drivers can turn left or right, they can travel for miles or stay in the city ... Planners and politicians can't control them."

Woop! Woop! Pull up! Pull up!

Like others in the road lobby, Ms Webster has a particular snitch on rail, but also doubts that people will - or should - get out of their cars and into public transport. The example of the central city Link bus illustrates how wrong she is.

When it was set up five years ago it had 12 buses and no passengers. Now, 18 buses are carrying more than 60,000 customers a week. Unfortunately the flat fare is about to rise from $1 to $1.20. However, the rise is unlikely to affect patronage. The service is too convenient and useful for that.

Perhaps Ms Webster should decant from her taxpayer-funded taxi or self-drive car and try it herself. She might find mixing with the hoi polloi not quite the gruesome, socialist experience she fears.

By the way, if you don't tell your boss who your supplier was, here's the obscure wordaday address: Word of the day.