KEY POINTS:
If the eminent person who said as much late one night is to be believed, only one member of the Labour Cabinet voted against Roger Douglas' 20 per cent flat tax proposal when it was presented in 1988.
And we should probably accept that is what happened, for the eminent person who says as much was a Cabinet minister then and is a Cabinet minister now.
Clearly, the E. P. (and others) have experienced some kind of Dr Jekyll and Rodney Hide transformation in the intervening years. Unless, of course, we assume that folk like Helen, Michael, Phil and Annette all contracted some mysterious ailment in 1984 and spent the next six years confined to their sick beds with damp cloths over their aching eyes.
In which case they would have had no idea what was going on until they emerged from their extended convalescence to confront the true horror of what had occurred in their absence.
Mind you, you'd think they'd have told us that by now, if only to establish an alibi. "Don't blame me. I had a cold. It was all Geoffrey Palmer's fault."
So, perhaps, the transformation theory wins - if only by default.
It certainly explains some of the more bizarre occurrences of late, like that mad kerfuffle over Auckland Airport.
Seriously, you'd think anyone who voted for 20 per cent flat taxes would be absolutely chuffed to have some amiable Canucks pony up umpteen squillion dollars to buy the place, especially since their reason for investing was to give Auckland the clout it needed to buy other airports on sale around the world, including those in Chicago and Prague.
Kiwi expertise and Canadian money taking on the world - gosh, it all sounds frighteningly like the Knowledge Wave. And we can't have that.
So we didn't. We just had a lot of maundering tosh about "sensitive" land.
Which explains why we shoved a b@#$*y great utility on it in the first place and also, presumably, why the Minister of Conservation will be officially opening a brand new Burger King on Mt Cook next week.
With a bit of luck, we could have a railway line running up there by then, plus a spiffing electrified passenger service (don't mention the power crisis) shunting happy peasants to the event.
Because, as you're well aware, the old 20 per centers are now happily buying anything they can lay their hands (and our money) upon. Especially if the anything is choo-choos. Which we now own. Whether we like it or not. And we shouldn't.
Paying the thick end of $700 mill for a grimy bunch of clapped-out trains is daft!! With a capital Duh!!!!!!
It's a bit like us rushing out to buy a traction engine so we can reduce our petrol bills.
Let's face it, trains are to passenger transport what The Southern Cross is to transtasman air travel.
As long as cheeky (private) operators like Pacific Blue undercut (publicly owned) price gougers like Air New Zealand with their very tempting $35 fares, trains are never going to do much more than they do now, which is to ferry vast battalions of policy analysts from their humble Hutt homes to those airless Wellington offices in which they pursue their meaningless craft.
And that has to be the best possible reason for scrapping the service immediately.
As for freight, well, most of it will still come from places where the track isn't so there won't be a massive revolution there either. Basically, buying Tolls' cast-offs is just another excuse for not spending the enormous sums of money needed to make our state highway network something more than a creaking anachronism; overburdened, underfunded and, all too often, fatally inadequate.
Yet, despite that, for some inexplicable reason, our politicians love trains. They can't get enough of the damn things.
Perhaps it's because they're a nostalgic echo of the 19th century much like the Treaty, with which our leaders are also needlessly besotted.
Perhaps it's because trains are the limit of their technological imagination. Perhaps they're not aware of the road transport revolution currently taking place; a revolution that will see alternative fuels, engines, and fully automated, driverless vehicles making much cleaner and more efficient use of our roads, probably within a decade.
These things are being developed now! The imperative to put them into production is inescapable. Yet, in the face of such enormous change, the best our Fat Controllers can do is buy a second-hand set of Stephenson's Rockets.
Perhaps it's the irresistible thought of all the new stations they can open and ribbons they can snip. Perhaps it's the photos, those bombastic snaps of local semi-eminences lined up like worthy victims of a firing squad.
Or, perhaps - is that Sir Roger chuckling? - the old guard hasn't really changed at all. Perhaps our duffers have bought their chuffers because they want to do what Transpower did with the national grid, namely, get a nice little tax break by flogging the whole lot off to some dodgy bunch in the Cayman Islands then leasing it back.
Yes, of course! That's it!! We sold our power lines so we could buy an oily assemblage of second-hand trains. Now, that really does make sense!!!!!!!!!!!
