Brian Rudman: Bulldoze and Nats blow byelection

Opinion

If the Government comes out with an el cheapo, neighbourhood-ruining, overland solution for the Waterview Connection in the next week or so, it will suggest National's market research shows they haven't a chance of winning the Mt Albert byelection.

And that being so, then a plague on this Labour-voting backwater, we'll give them the motorway from hell and divert the money to more National-friendly places.

Perhaps to build dams for more biddable Canterbury farmers, as demanded back in February by the Minister of Finance Bill English's kid brother Conor, in his guise as chief executive of Federated Farmers.

As for Greens co-leader Russel Norman, he faces an uphill battle with his "build-nothing" cop-out.

Announcing his "selection", he blogged that "the old parties are arguing over two bad ideas in Waterview. They want to either bulldoze a suburb or blow $3 billion plus on a tunnel still buggering the creek.

The Green Party offers a better solution. We would fix the public transport system first, relieve congestion and give Aucklanders a faster, cheaper way to get to work and the airport."

Putting aside the reality that the last official costing of the tunnel was $2 billion, not the alarmist figure of "in excess of $3 billion" which Transport Minister Stephen Joyce and now Mr Norman are tossing around, Mr Norman's proposal is not of this world.

Some of us have battled for better public transport in Auckland since long before he migrated from Canberra to live in Wellington, but what he suggests is not the choice now facing the people of Mt Albert.

The Government, as was its predecessor, is committed to finishing this last link in the long delayed southwestern State Highway 20 bypassing central Auckland. The only issue is whether, as he puts it, we "bulldoze a suburb" or build an environmentally sensitive tunnel to complete the job.

This will be underlined next week, just over a month before the June 13 byelection, when the just completed Mt Roskill extensions of SH20 begin spewing extra traffic - and attracting it - through the Mt Albert electorate.

Standing on the hustings and incanting "Next Year, Better Public Transport" while traffic congestion gets worse along already crowded Dominion and Sandringham Rds is hardly likely to win many votes.

I mention his Canberra origins only because Mr Norman, like the other byelection contenders, felt the need to pretend a local connection. Mr Norman refers to his five years on "neighbouring" Waiheke Island.

With both major party leaders living half the city away from their respective Auckland electorates, such grassroots connections don't seem to matter - in Auckland at least - any more.

That doesn't stop Labour's David "fresh off the plane from Iraq" Shearer emphasising the house in Kingsland he once renovated and still owns, though hasn't lived in for years, or National's Melissa Lee noting she lived in the electorate when she first emigrated.

Act's John Boscawen trumps them all, though, by claiming links to the seat "that goes back over a century" to when "my great-grandfather, Hugh Boscawen, was aide de camp to five Governors-General.

He was also an early surveyor in the Department of Lands and Boscawen St in Pt Chevalier - in the northern part of the electorate - is named after him." I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe he was parodying the whole desperate game.

The most interesting aspect of the byelection so far has been new Labour leader Phil Goff's hands-on involvement in selecting his party's candidate. It was as though he was emphasising to even newer party president and engineers union boss Andrew Little just who was the alpha male.

Party leaders traditionally leave candidate selection to the party organisation. Publicly at least. You want all the party faithful supporting you, not just the ones you engineered into seats. But this time, Mr Goff actively promoted his old school mate and one-time foreign affairs adviser, Mr Shearer, from the start.

He met candidates and attended the selection meeting. Perhaps he remembered Mr Shearer's failed attempt to gain nomination in Waitakere for the 2002 election. He took a break from his United Nations job on that occasion, too, and managed to gain the support of the local organisation.

However, he missed out on selection when a strong contingent of engineers union affiliate members arrived at the meeting to vote for one of their union organisers, Lynne Pillay.

Despite mutterings from some local Mt Albert party members about being heavied into supporting Mr Goff's candidate, the leader appears to have pulled off not just getting his man selected, but also asserting his position as top of Labour's heap. Now all he has to do is win the byelection.

Otherwise he'll be in deep schtuck, with no one to blame but himself.