Paul Little: Tourism the way to bridge the gap

Rawene Harbour's Boatshed Cafe is one of Northlands's gems ripe for tourist development.

The Northland byelection has been an opportunity for all parties to prove that predictability is the real lifeblood of politics.

The Government threw capital at the electorate with its promise to finish widening 10 one-lane bridges, many supposed to have been widened years ago.

The cost, said Transport Minister Simon Bridges, will be $32-69 million. I don't know about you, but when I get a quote I like it to be more specific than " between this much and more than twice this much".

All National's strategising seems to have gone into the bridge plan. It certainly hasn't gone into candidate Mike Osborne's billboards, which bear a photo that looks as though his minders managed to get his tongue back in his mouth just long enough to take the picture.

Labour put up a can't-win candidate in the form of Willow-Jean Prime - presumably the lost sister of River, Rain and Joaquin Phoenix. Then, obviously thinking there was an outside chance she could sneak home, Andrew Little told voters to support Winston Peters to send a message to the Government.

He has forgotten voters did that only a few months ago. The message was: "Beat me, cheat on me, treat me mean, I'll still come back to you."

And Peters, well, this is the most thrilling late-career comeback since that of Islam. Apparently the former Tauranga member's northern roots run deep, his forebears having made the great migration from Northland to St Marys Bay many generations ago.

He lambasted the Government for its pork barrelling - that job belongs to the inventor of the Gold Card. He hasn't had to play his other card - race - because no one wants to migrate up north. So he has been free to do what he does best: sledging and advocating a brilliant policy he'll never have to make good on - to save Auckland and the north by moving port facilities to Whangarei.

If we build it, they will come, is the cargo cult thinking in the bridge plan. Roads are pretty much the Government's answer to everything except school lunches and the over-acting on The X Factor. But it is not clear who will come across those bridges and what for.

It has been my lot for more than a year to cross half the bridges - the ones on the west coast - every fortnight. I have seldom had to slow down for a vehicle coming in the opposite direction. The bridges are not the problem.

Poverty, unemployment and morale are the problems. And the solution is tourism.

The Hokianga is a collection of tourist gems waiting to be discovered: from the giant and endangered kauri of the Waipoua forest, to the townships of Rawene and Kohukohu, to the Koutu boulders.

Even long-dead Opo the dolphin is a drawcard. After all, people go to Loch Ness to see something that was never there in the first place. At least the Hokianga has photos to prove its dolphin existed.

Training programmes, small business start-up subsidies and a change to power charges so electricity does not cost twice as much in the north as it does in Auckland would all do a lot more than bridges to improve the lot of those who live there.

Tourist numbers can increase considerably before we face bottlenecks on single-lane bridges comparable to those at Warkworth every weekend. And after all, one advantage of one-lane bridges, which everyone seems to have forgotten, is it's impossible for tourists to drive on the wrong side of them.