Kerre Woodham: City egos drove V8s away

Nobody involved in the debacle over the Auckland V8 street race comes out of this affair covered in glory. It's been a balls-up from start to finish. John Banks' pugnacious support of the race alienated his brother mayors. Bruce Hucker's implacable opposition to the race blinded him to the benefits of such an event, and IMG's testosterone-engorged line in the sand over the Victoria Park route meant this event was doomed from Day One.

Not that I would have been lining up to get a prime trackside position. I don't really get motor racing. I love horse racing, so you'd think I'd appreciate another event where fast things, indistinguishable from one another to the untrained eye, go round a track, but I don't. Maybe it's because with the horses, it's all over in two minutes, whereas motorsport takes two days to find a winner. But for all that, I know there are thousands of New Zealanders for whom the throb of a big bore resonates in their marrow. The smell of high-performance fuel is a pheremone like no other. No wonder so many Dwaynes and Kylies are born nine months after major motor-racing events. And it would have been great to have had one of those major events in Auckland.

Notwithstanding all the problems, of course. There would have been traffic hold-ups and I do think the businesspeople who would have missed out on three days' trading should have been compensated for lost earnings. But if goodwill and a desire to succeed had prevailed, problems would have been overcome. That's the thing about this proposal. There's been a dearth of goodwill all the way along. People who were opposed to the event in principle were blind to reason, and the big kahunas from IMG were so desperate to show that they had the biggest cojones in the whole wide world that they refused to compromise. And as for the independent commissioners citing traffic problems and noise as the main reasons for their opposition! We're the largest city in New Zealand.

Of course there are going to be traffic problems and noise! That's what you get when you live in a city. Go to a seaside village if you want quiet and one-lane highways! It's such a shame. I used to live in Wellington when the Nissan Mobil 500 was raced around the waterfront, and despite the fact there were road closures, the city coped. Everyone got on with it. And for a week, the city rocked. When you get a huge bunch of big spenders, gathered together in one place and determined to have a good time, there's a fantastic energy generated. As well as impressive till receipts. I actually drove in one of the races one year, and to my chagrin, I was absolutely hopeless.

How can you be given pole position and come second to last? I indicated going round the first corner for heaven's sake! I did beat Bill Ralston but to be honest, there was no great sense of pride in that. He'd totalled his Nissan by driving into a wall during the practice day so it was a wonder his nerves had recovered in time to get him back in the driver's seat. Probably the Dutch courage he consumed beforehand helped him, but it sure as heck didn't help me. The Wellington street race was huge fun both as a driver, and as a city resident. And I wonder if Auckland will ever be able to put on a big ticket event. Oh sure, we do Christmas in the Park and Symphony under the Stars well. The America's Cup was great. But I have grave doubts about this city's ability to work together for a common cause. Any endeavour that's going to require co-operation and good will from disparate groups is going to be dead in the water. Auckland is not one big multi-cultural civic family.

We're a city of competing interests, a family of scrapping step-children. We're a collection of little villages, each with their own small-minded village mentality. I remember years ago when I first lived in Auckland, a bloke I'd met asked me where I wanted to go for dinner. I suggested SPQR, a brand new restaurant (see how long ago that was?) that had just opened in Ponsonby. The bloke, who was from Parnell, recoiled in horror. Ponsonby! he said incredulously. God no. I've never been to Ponsonby and I'm not going to start now. And although that was years ago, that attitude still seems to prevail. Other cities, smaller cities, have to get on with one another. They have no choice. But we're big and ugly enough to sit in our insular little suburbs and not have to concern ourselves with anyone else. And we're all the poorer for it.

Erebus a mountain of tears and grief for stricken families

Spare a thought for the families of those who were killed in the Erebus crash. It would have been bad enough to lose the person you loved in such ghastly and unexpected circumstances. It would have made it worse if your mum or dad, or sibling, had been one of those people on board who had been given their tickets on the Erebus flight as a present.

In the aftermath of the crash, along with the pain of grieving was the pain of guilt, as family members struggled to cope with the idea they had sent their parents or brother or sister to their death. Usually when someone dies in an accident, the death merits just a couple of lines in the newspaper unless there are extenuating circumstances. Those left behind are free to grieve in relative privacy.

But for the Erebus families, there has never been that luxury. Erebus was the world's fourth worst aviation disaster at the time, so the tragedy of the deaths of 257 people was in the international spotlight as well as entering New Zealand's history for all the wrong reasons.

The very public wrangling over who was to blame for the accident meant that the horror of Flight 901 remained very much in the public's mind for years. And every anniversary brings back the pain. It must be very hard for the thousands of people affected. As we commemorate the 25th anniversary of one of this country's worst disasters, we should be mindful that national disasters result in hundreds of private and intensely personal tragedies.