So I went to a party at the weekend. Quite a swanky one. Negronis and burgers and all sorts of people. Judges and doctors and advertising people and even musicians. 

An old mate was there, a card-carrying lefty. 

We're chatting and he says he's part of an urbanism group. Studying and advocating for urban development, and he says, "you right-wing ZB types would hate it." 

So I said, "I beg your pardon?" 

What part of having a well-designed and functional city is either left-wing or right-wing? It's not about politics it's about practicality. Who doesn't want a functioning public transport system? Who doesn't want accommodation solutions for the poor and the young so they don't have to leave the cities for a house? By the way right-wingers love trains. Mussolini made them run on time. 

The politicisation of city designs is why nothing ever happens anymore and our cities just get worse and worse. 

So it was good to open the paper on Sunday and see the Auckland mayor talking about that city's abortive light rail plans. 

He said it was good that the Government killed Labour's plan off because it was disastrously handled. 

The main problem with it was the cost which had been calculated at 400 million dollars a kilometre. Mayor Brown said he was recently in a town in France, the size of Christchurch, who have built a very successful light rail, at a cost of 50 million a kilometre. Nearly 90 per cent cheaper? 

Then he went into all the reasons big projects cost so much in New Zealand. The gold plating of design, the contracts granted to constructors who are also suppliers who have no reason to contain costs, and then there's the politics. What idiot wanted to put a light rail into a tunnel? Michael Wood, that's who. 

But the problem with all of this is that a good idea is thrown away because of bad management. 

When Labour came in in 2017, AT had a 6 billion dollar light rail plan, ready to go. But Labour and then the New Zealand Superannuation Fund thought they could do it better and suddenly it was 15 billion because of the tunnelling and it stalled and then National killed it. 

Much was made of the 228 million spent with no track laid which shows us how little people know of projects. That money was spent on geo-tech reports and surveys and buying land and planning. It's still all valid now and to throw it out is a blatant waste of taxpayers' money. 

Light rail is not left wing. Light rail is not a bad idea. Labour was just a bad government that cocked it up. 

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A report from Auckland Council's boarding house inspectors shows out of 44 properties suspected to be breaking the law, 40 were “operating unauthorised transient accommodation or boarding houses.” 

Many had issues with fire safety breaches, growing numbers of gang-affiliated guests, and owners questioning council authority. 

Andrew Dickens had two callers today who discussed their situations. 

The first, Jamie, lives in a boarding house with his son.  

Jamie told Andrew Dickens “There’s one room here that’s $500 – the guy’s killing it,” 

Jamie said “You’re living with alcoholics and drug users. I’ve had to send my kid to his mum’s because it’s no place for a kid.” 

The second, John, owns two boarding houses and lives there himself. 

John told Andrew Dickens “When they come here, they are lost. When I give them a room, they sleep for a week - they are that exhausted.” 

John said “It’s an ideal situation to get these people off the street and give them independence.” 

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I presume the lead story in the Herald on Sunday was welcomed by police and those behind our stronger gun laws.  

An Auckland pensioner and his daughter have been caught for legally buying 13 guns for the Comancheros motorcycle gang.  

It's the latest of dozens of discoveries by police of licensed gun owners buying for gangs who cannot legally purchase guns.  

It was validation of good old-fashioned police work. Over the past 4 years the police have analysed more than 350,000 sales records looking for suspicious patterns of spending.   

They then correlate the purchases with the records of gun owners, and they discover the gang's straw buyers.  

But to me, it also validates the strengthening of the laws back in 2019 after the Christchurch mosque massacre.  

That saw the banning of military-style semi-automatics, stricter rules on the “fit and proper” test to hold a license, the establishment of a gun registry, and a set of rules designed to ensure gun clubs and ranges are safe places.  

At the time, gun owners made out that the laws criminalised legal gun owners which was a massive over-exaggeration.  It criminalised a type of gun only. A type of gun that non MSSA owners find intimidating and unnecessary. A gun that turns any idiot into a killing machine as long as they can handle the recoil.  

And the new rules also told the citizens of New Zealand that ownership of a gun is not a right but a privilege that must be earned.    

But they also say that once it's earnt there's no problem at all as long as it's not a military-style automatic.  

And slowly it's beginning to make sense to even the law's hardest detractors.  

Act campaigned on a full repeal of the legislation and the minister in charge is Act's Nicole Mckee  

She is also the former spokesperson for the council of licensed firearms owners.  

She was also interviewed in the paper yesterday where she said gun owners hoping for a rollback will be disappointed.  

Act campaigned on greater access to MSSAs and scrapping the gun registry, but these didn’t make it into coalition agreements.  

Instead, the National-Act agreement committed to repealing the regulations around gun clubs and shooting ranges - which Mckee has now backed off from doing completely - a review of the registry and a rewrite of the arms act.  

But, at the moment, the laws are being seen to work.  And here's the rub.  If you support getting tough on crime then you must also support getting tough on gun ownership. 

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Welcome to Budget Week. Which I am looking forward to.

After all the warnings from economists and world agencies like the OECD, that this is the wrong part of an economic cycle to bring in tax cuts, it ill be interesting to see the way they're going to pull it off.

Personally, I can't see the budget being nearly as harsh, nearly as radical or nearly as transformational and beneficial as all the politicians say.

I've already decided to call it the bad day at the office budget. Which we'll all get through.

Meanwhile, we're getting little bones thrown at us to keep the headlines flowing. $50 million odd to hire teachers feels like a small change when you look at the entire education wage budget.

My grizzle today is about doctors. The Waikato times weekend paper featured a couple of young doctors at Waikato Hospital and their impossible workload.

Both are just 27 years old, 4 years out of school. 10 years into learning their trade.

One ended out working alone on a cardiology ward with 100 patients in it. There should have been 3 doctors on duty.

The other, a medical registrar, told a similar story about how patients in agony in E.D spent 12 hours waiting for care.

Things are not getting better anytime soon. The population is growing, people are living longer, patients are getting sicker and arrive more sick because they haven't seen a GP. Because there's not enough GPs either.

Meanwhile our underpaid, over worked 27 year olds have 6 figure student loans to pay off. So when choosing their specialty they often choose the better paying so good by psychiatry, hello dermatology.

This perfect storm of dysfunction is the result of decisions made a long time ago. Not just the last regime.

Student debt dissuades many except the determined or the already wealthy. Limiting our doctors' numbers.

Immigration has been allowed to blow out for decades without any increase in doctors in training. So fewer doctors per person

Entry numbers to med school are still embarrassingly low. So once again fewer doctors

What have we been thinking for the past 40 years?

We have a malaise.

Not enough doctors, teachers, police, houses, roads, public transport, energy generation. The list goes on.

We're like a 2 bedroom shack trying to house 10 people in it.

But every 3 years someone comes in and wallpapers one room.

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Now, I'm not part of the tribe who automatically thinks that Auckland Transport is a bunch of ideological toss-pots who want to force us out of our cars.

I'm the sort of urbanist that gets there's a limit to the number of cars that can use our roads, and when that limit is hit then you have offer choices so we can all get somewhere.

I don't reflexively hate cycleways or bus lanes. I comprehend congestion charges and I'm excited for the Central Rail Link and even Light Rail. Mostly because I've seen the good a co-ordinated public transport system has done elsewhere in the world.

But AT's 24/7 parking charges change is beyond the pale.

Having developed the city centre with apartments, it will inconvenience residents who have been trying to take their cars off the roads by living in town. It's going to cost ratepayers. Either directly, such as the residents who reckon it will cost them $11,000 a year to park their car now. Or by funding a bureaucracy to run resident parking schemes.

It's said it will affect hospo workers. It won't stop punters who tend to cab or even use public transport into town because they're on the lash. The people it will really affect are the minimum waged workers who need to get in and out of the city outside public transport times - and who are least able to afford it.

But the most chilling part of the story is that the mayor and the Council are powerless to stop it, even though they've helped to cause the problem.

Councils fund council controlled organisations but they don't run them. In this case, the Council looked to reduce its funding so AT unilaterally increased its external fundraising by hiking the parking charges.

But that is AT’s constitutional right. The main Council body, including the elected representatives, have no operational control.

Rodney Hide designed them that way so politicians couldn't get the filthy, compromised hands on big assets.

Which is why I've always laughed about National's plan for council controlled operations to run all our water.

Councils may own and fund CCOs, but they certainly don't control them.

Just look at Auckland Transport.

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I was surprised that the news that Auckland had inked a deal with the Government over water wasn't the lead story on last night's TV news.

I would have thought that John Campbell would have had a deep dive on its repercussions for Auckland and the country.

Basically, water and housing are the biggest issues for this country because every single person, business and animal needs water - and we all need a roof over our head.

But maybe the kids we call journalists these days have never got water and its reforms.

There is a lot about the deal that has not been said.

Compared to 3 Waters, it's essentially 2 waters.

Watercare deals with drinking water and human waste. Waste is sewage.

That's a billion-dollar-a-year operation.

But they don't deal with stormwater and drains. That's called sewerage and that's dealt with in Auckland by an entity called Healthy Waters. Now that's a $200 million dollar a year operation. It's not a council controlled operation. It will still be funded by council borrowings.

So when people talk about polluted waterways being fixed, that's not really covered by the Watercare deal. Which is partly why Auckland's water rates increases are still at 7.3 percent.

That 7.3 percent is, as we all know, higher than the rate of inflation and a major part of the cost-of-living crisis which the Government promised to tackle. But that's another kettle of wastewater.

This deal happened because Auckland is the only council with CCO or council controlled organisations. They are the product of Auckland's amalgamation into a Super City by Rodney Hide. CCOs were actually designed to prevent Councillors fooling about in core business they know nothing about. And because of that they've never been overly popular. Yet it is claimed that this keeps water under local control.

Ask Auckland's Mayors and Councillors about how much control they really exert over CCO's like Watercare, or Auckland Transport, or Auckland Unlimited.

So, Watercare will have the remit, which is to provide water and remove waste. Operationally, they're in full control of their processes. The Council's control is limited to a majority of places on the board. So just a reminder that CEOs run companies not boards. They purely appoint a CEO and then assess how well the CEO has done.

The Auckland deal was low hanging fruit for the Government, because the structure was already in place. The real test is how this works for everywhere else in New Zealand.

The first real test will come this week when Horowhenua, Kapiti, Wairarapa, the Hutt Valley, Porirua and Wellington City meet on Friday to work together on a plan for a greater Wellington region water deal.

They will have to set up an entity with bureaucracy and thrash out a deal about which region receives what in funding. Just like 3 Waters.

Meanwhile, the good people in the countryside not adjacent to cities will be wondering if there's any white knights riding to their rescue regarding water borrowing. Or if they're going to be left behind.

To me this deal is 3 Waters lite, with no ‘co-governance’. And that's it.

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New Zealand seems to be waking up to an issue I thought would have caused more concern.

As part of the bonfire of the public service, the Government seems to be eyeing cuts to our public research and development sector.

Principally that means the Callaghan Institute, the Crown agency that employs about 300 people and has been the target of attack, particularly from David Seymour.

He sees the agency's work as being a form of corporate welfare, a bugbear of ACT's.

Other ministries and departments conduct significant research funded by the taxpayer. The Department of Conservation has developed major techniques and processes that have been adopted around the world.

The Primary Industries ministry also funds valuable research, including work into climate change mitigation.

It's feared that all this work will be affected as the Government saves costs in the backroom.

Last week, Stats NZ revealed that private industry is starting to put their money where their mouth is.

The New Zealand business sector has shown a robust increase in research and development (R&D) spending, reaching a new high of $3.7 billion in 2023.

That's $540 million increase, or 17 percent, from the previous year, marking the largest annual growth since annual data collection began in 2018.

There's value in research spending. So it would be short-sighted to reduce Governmental spending on it

R&D funding cuts could mean we will lose our best and brightest scientists, like those at Callaghan, to overseas countries who are investing in science.

As we enter a regime determined to cut spending I think it's good to remember a famous quote by Oscar Wilde.

He said - " a fool is a person who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing".

The worry is that the Government goes too far and starts to cut things of value.

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It is fair to say the country is not in a good place right now.

Job cuts dominate the headlines. A double-dip recession came true. Inflation is robbing us of our purchasing power.

Last week an IPSOS poll found that 60 percent of us think that New Zealand is in decline and 65 percent believe that the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and the powerful.

And when people bemoan our situation and wonder how we got here a common response is to blame the Labour Government and the Reserve Bank.

A common refrain is Robertson blew all the money so we can't afford to do anything now, even something as important as paying our police more so they don't quit or leave the country. You also hear that Labour caused a debt so large our children and their children will be paying for it for decades to come.

So I pricked up my ears last week when Mike Hosking talked to ASB economist Nick Tuffley about inflation and the economy in general.

Mike asked him how bad was our economy and he said pretty bad but still nowhere near what happened after the GFC.

To remind you, the GFC ended early in 2009 and John Key's government was in charge. To remedy the situation we borrowed, we opened up immigration and we went through austerity to a far greater degree than we're doing now. And it worked.

Need I remind you that within 5 years we were described as having a rock-star economy.

This is not to diminish the situation that we're in right now but it is to put a perspective on things.

But Nick was also asked why inflation and bad economic tidings were still happening here when other economies like the States, the UK and Australia are bouncing back. Economies with far greater debt and spending.

Tuffley essentially blamed our static productivity. He says considering we imported nearly 3 percent more population over the past 2 years our GDP should have raised, but it didn't.

We seem incapable of making more money per person year on year. And it's a problem that we've had ever since Ruth Richardson's Mother of all Budgets early in the 90s. And it's a problem that exists no matter the colour of the government.

It's something we need to look to ourselves for not something we can blame on the government.

And it relates to the comments that Christopher Luxon made overseas that angered some when he boasted that New Zealand is now open for business.

We've always been open for business. The real question is how much business are we open for?

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Since we were last together, the collapse of television news and current affairs has continued.

And with it, we have been subjected to a lot of highfalutin thinking about the metaphysical and cultural reasons why linear TV is dying.

You know - go woke go broke. Or- this is because nobody trusts you, because you're all raving lefties.

Meanwhile, Melissa Lee has been asked what she is going to do about it, when it's obvious that there's very little she can do.

These are commercial entities that are suffering at the hands of market forces that have been long predicted to hit.

Commercial broadcasting and journalism is an easy business model. Inventory control and labour costs. In other words, you can't employ any more people than the money you make from the advertising.

Hearing that more than 300 were employed by Newshub was pretty revealing. That's a lot of salaries.

For some perspective, NZME employs just over 200 for it's papers and radio and digital content. And the lid has been sinking steadily for a years now.

That's because digital players are siphoning off $100 million a year in advertising content

Despite the 6 o'clock news having the highest spot rates, they were unable to make the budget balance

Faced with this environment I was confused after Warner took over 3 that they added to the news output with full-service late-night shows and more. They increased their costs at a time when revenue was going down.

It seemed to me that no matter how woke or unwoke or how biased or unbiased, Newshub was increasingly modelled to lose money without a huge recalibration.

Meanwhile, despite warning bells sounding about the theft of revenue by digital companies, our TV operators seemed timid to adapt.

Facebook and Google sell clicks. They gain news content and then clicks when punters repost links. Yet the links from so many news operators continue to be free.

There's a reason the Herald is now behind a paywall, so at least we can clip the ticket. When we did it the industry thought we were audacious. It's beginning to look very smart.

Furthermore, TVNZ in particular has made a foray into the digital world with TVNZ+. But it's free to air and the ad inventory is so low it's better to watch it online with time shifting, thereby missing out on the ads that pay for the whole shebang.

The model is broken not because of politics or bias but because of fear.

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I vividly remember the first time I saw Christchurch Cathedral.

I was 10 so it was 1973. I was on tour with the Auckland Boys Choir.

It was winter and it was twilight and we went into the Square, which was bustling with cars and buses and Victorian buildings and a marvellous magic shop. People wore overcoats and scarves and there was the cathedral.

It as like being transported to England.

We went in to listen to the cathedral's boys choir performing Evensong and my choirmaster said they were the best in the land. And they were.

I say this after the news that the restoration may be put on hold due to the escalating cost.

I can't comprehend stopping something halfway through. It's too late to go back. Forward is the only way to go.

To paraphrase the Prime Minister - we have passed through the decision gate and in passing that gate there can only be commitment to finishing the job, even if it seems to be escalating out of control.

It's called aspiration. It's called determination. Perhaps this is the lack of ambition that our Prime Minister accuses us of.

Opponents say tear it down, because in 100 years who will know the difference? But using that logic, why do anything outstanding?

I'm reminded of the Notre Dame in Paris which will open to the public in December - 5 years and 7 months after being gutted by fire.

They have harvested an entire oak forest for the timber and raised 2 billion dollars through donations.

French billionaires are scrambling over each other to fund the thing so that their name lives on through generations.

The cathedral is 160 years old this year. Notre Dame is 860 years old. But they're worth the same to their cities.

Marking stones to the start of great cities. And in 100 years, who'll care how much it cost?

Sometimes it seems that New Zealand knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

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