Andrew Dickens Afternoons

The conflict over State Highway 2 is heating up.
A protest this weekend was the latest move by fed up locals who are sick of the dangerous road going ignored.
It has been the site for multiple crashes over the years, and residents are now threatening to stage a protest against a planned development. 
Residents called up Andrew Dickens to share their experiences on the infamous stretch of road and the horrors they have seen and experienced during their time.
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LISTEN ABOVE AS CAMPAIGN SPOKESMAN MATTHEW FARRELL SPEAKS TO ANDREW DICKENS
No roads, no growth: that's the message both State Highway 2 campaigners and Western Bay councils are looking to send to the Government.
Following its protest blockade of the highway on Sunday, the Fix the Bloody Road campaign has launched a petition to stop more housing being built in communities such as Ōmokoroa until the road is upgraded.
The petition, addressed to SmartGrowth - a collaboration of Western Bay councils and other groups - already had more than 300 signatures.
Campaign spokesman Matthew Farrell said SmartGrowth predicted another 43,000 homes were needed to house a population increase of 250,000 in Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty in the next three decades.
State Highway 2 was already well over capacity, he said.
"Given we are getting these major congestion problems and safety issues, it would make sense to hold off until the infrastructure has caught up," he said.
"We will keep doing what we need to do until we get some common sense decisions."
Farrell said he was also speaking to local MPs from all parties.
Meanwhile, SmartGrowth was working on its own ways to drive a similar message home to central Government.
In a leadership group meeting on Wednesday, they will discuss adding a caveat to a planning document for growth in the Western Bay over the next 30 years: the strategy would be a wash if transport infrastructure did not keep up.
Leadership group member Stuart Crosby said that while the education and health sectors had generally kept pace with growth, transport had lagged far behind over the past five years.
"We are at breaking point."
"It is absolutely critical that our transport issues are resolved before we add fuel to the fire - and that's what would happen if we kept expanding," he said.
"The Government can't demand on one hand we need to build more houses and then, on the other, not provide the necessary infrastructure funding."
Crosby said the current Government's funding focus on public transport, walking and cycling was not a good fit for this area.
The transport network was under pressure from the booming economy as well as population growth.
"You can't put containers and logs on public buses."
The message, in his view, boiled down to: "no roads, no growth".
Leadership group member Larry Baldock said housing affordability was also at stake: if the region could not deliver roads, it could not deliver strategic growth, and house prices would rise.
Priority One chief executive Nigel Tutt said the region's transport network was a national issue given the economic importance of the Port of Tauranga.
The port's chief executive Mark Cairns said it handled more than 40 per cent of New Zealand's total exports.
The rail network had so far borne most of the increase in cargo, he said, but more capacity was needed.
"We must have a safe, high capacity road, rail and coastal shipping connection through the port."
The NZ Transport Agency was reevaluating four projects planned for State Highway 2 north of Tauranga, a process Transport Minister Phil Twyford has previously said he would not interfere with.

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The Prime Minister has come under fire after mistakenly telling Mike Hosking she was "pretty pleased" with gross domestic product growth having received a "hint" ahead of Thursday's official release of the second-quarter economic data.
Newstalk ZB political editor Barry Soper told Andrew Dickens a Prime Minister or politician should never comment in advance when it comes to GDP.
"In my view, the listeners this morning would have been in no doubt to what she was talking about. She should not of been confused about what she was being asked about, its difficult to accept her excuse."
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There is outrage from customers that Meridian Energy has cut their 'prompt payment' discounts. 
The company called the discounts, offered to customers who paid their bill on time, 'unjustifiable'.
The move came days after the Government's electricity review panel criticised the use of the discounts.
However, the move has angered customers, who told Andrew Dickens that the discount offer was an encouragement to pay on time.
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Andrew Dickens talks with Rowena Duncum from 'The Country' about learning the delicious looking strawberries he had bought in the weekend were a 'no-go'.
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Well, the beltway is in full flight now, dramatically interviewing their typewriters, seeing two plus two and coming up with five.
Last night Tova O’Brien was breathlessly reporting a power battle between Winston Peters and Jacinda Ardern. A slug em out battle of the Titans with the future of the coalition hanging in the balance.
This came after two of the country’s biggest unions, FIRST Union and the Council of Trade Unions (CTU), came out and said they fear the Government's employment law reforms could be hijacked by Winston Peters.
The unionists went on to say they are a bit worried about the dominance on a number of issues that is coming from New Zealand First. Yes said the pundits, look at how Winston scuppered the reform of the three strikes rule. We now have co-leaders of the coalition and Jacinda has lost control
Now you could say that but it’s a bit over-excitable, over-egged and overhyped. We won’t really know the influence of NZ First until the legislation is tabled. That’s why Winston says it’s a work in progress. Until then it’s only speculation and conjecture and beltway babbling.
It strikes me that despite it being our electoral system for 22 years, so many people, including commentators don’t seem to get MMP. They seem to believe that if a Prime Minister and his or her party can’t steam roller their policies into legislation then we have a power vacuum and stand on a precipice of disaster and chaos.
The truth is that since 1996 no ruling party of New Zealand has ever had total control of legislation because they’ve never had the numbers to get stuff through.  They’ve had to mitigate and compromise. It’s why National never reformed the RMA or got rid of Working For Families. It’s why they did bring in policies they weren’t fond of like the Maori party’s Whanau Ora.
Now, this gets under the haters of MMPs skin. Under First Past the Post this wasn’t a problem they say. But Government’s got a blank cheque to do what they wanted. Not really a good thing. It was a kind of totalitarian where extremists and ideologues could do what they want. Labour and Rogernomics and National with Ruth Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets. 
Now I have no problem with MMP. It’s because we have only one house of representatives. In the UK, Australia and America there are up to three houses or branches of government providing checks and balances and ironing out the worst excesses. Here though, get a straight majority, do what you want. I laugh when people say MMP is undemocratic because it’s far more indicative of people as a whole rather than a ruling elite.
So the unions should calm down. You’re not going to get everything you want and that’s good because not everyone wants everything you want.
What I will say about leadership is that Jacinda Ardern needs more of her colleagues to start pulling their weight. At their best National was a two headed beast with Key, English and Joyce. NZ First is very much the Winston and Shane show. But Jacinda seems to be facing all these challenges alone.

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News of a new stadium in Christchurch has people fired up - both for and against the development.
The Christchurch City Council has voted to spend $220 million on replacing the AMI Stadium.
There have long been calls to replace the stadium with a covered roof, earthquake safe alternative.
However, many callers to Andrew Dickens Afternoons were furious at the cost and rationale behind the build.
One caller suggested the entire council should be sacked as they are clearly incompetent.
However, there were those supporting the stadium, saying it is necessary to generate activity throughout the city.
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There are calls for harsher penalties for people who text and drive.
Eliot Jessep, who’s mother was killed in a car crash while texting, crossing the centre line, told Stuff that he believes punishments for crimes remain too light.
Acting Associate Transport Minister James Shaw told the website that transport officials are investigating how effective overseas penalties have been, includign safety cameras.
Jessep is calling for the New Zealand punishment to be “at a level where it does impact someone”.
Callers to Andrew Dickens Afternoons were largely in agreement, and had innovative ideas as to how the penalties could be enforced.
Caller Phillip says that, in the UK, they are looking at rising the fines to £400, and that there has been very little backlash from the Brits about this.
He says that in England, they now have motorcyclists who drive around with cameras, snapping drivers in the act so they can be prosecuted.
Caller Johnny called for traffic cops, and says people should face having their licenses revoked for extended periods of time.
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Whoever came up with the idea of goal setting really opened a Pandora’s box of wishful thinking.
For the modern interpretation of goal setting, you can blame a bloke called Edwin Locke. He was an American psychologist from the University of Maryland who has studied the power of goal setting in the 1960s. He first suggested that employees were motivated by goals and feedback in his 1968 article "Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives”. In it he says individuals who set specific, difficult goals performed better than those who set general, easy goals.
Since then athletes and business leaders have banged on about it and so eventually so did politicians and it seems to have spread like topsy amongst them. And to make them easy to understand our politicians have defined our goals by setting targets. So now we have a raft of targets to achieve. Smokefree 2025. Predator Free 2050. Possum free 2030. We target zero deaths on our roads. We have 3 goals on emissions reductions ending in 2020, 2030 and 2050. The Government has set a target of getting 50 percent representation of women on state sector boards by 2021. And on they go.
But my problem with many of these targets is that they’re as achievable as me saying I’d like to be 2 inches taller in 2 years time. And the other problem is that many politicians think that just verbalising the goal or target is enough. That the target is the end in itself. And of course all these general targets go right against Edwin Locke’s theory that the goals must be specific and not general.
So here we go again.
Nikki Kaye has a private members bill in front of the house that would require every primary and intermediate school to offer at least one second language from a list of at least 10 "national priority languages". Its goal is to get every student able to converse in at least 2 languages. It’s a lovely thought however the bill is low on details of how to do this. Chris Hipkins estimates that to put a language teacher in every school would cost an extra $120 million a year. And that’s not even offering a choice. So it’s expensive. It also doesn’t look at where all these language teachers are going to come from. It’s a sort of chicken and egg situation. We need more language teachers so we can teach more language so we can have more language teachers.
And now the Greens have predictably done it during Māori Language Week. The Green Party is pushing for te reo Māori to be a core curriculum topic in all schools by 2025. And when they say core they mean compulsory which raises all sorts of issues.
Now the arguments against Nikki Kayes waffly bill exist for this one as well. To have a te reo teacher in every school would cost the same $120 million a year. And by putting a date on this it becomes ever more airy-fairy. 2025 is just over 6 years away. Good luck in finding 3000 odd new te reo teachers in that time frame.
Let’s talk about realistic goals. In the last budget, an extra $20 million was given towards Māori language teacher education. Maybe we should be doubling the budget with the goal of doubling the teachers with another goal of doubling the literacy within 5 years. And when we get to a tipping point of capability then we can start talking about something more universal.
And on a flippant note, could we have a goal of having goals that don’t have a mythical target date on them. And we could meet that target tomorrow.

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Is Jacinda Ardern bullying her MPs?
That's the question talkback callers are asking after the Prime Minister told off Greg O'Connor over an interview he did on Newstalk ZB. 
The Labour MP was critical of the Prime Minister's handling of the Clare Curran saga yesterday, earning him a 'stern phone call'.
Andrew Dickens raised the subject with his listeners, and they were split over whether it was Ardern or O'Connor who was in the right.
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