Andrew Dickens: There’s something dodgy about these congestion taxes

I had a lovely Saturday morning. Lying in bed, drinking a coffee, reading the weekend Herald and listening to Jack on ZB say that he’ll ditch his wallet by next year as everything he needs will be on his phone.

I was thinking - keep up, lad. I ditched the wallet during Covid. The phone has become ubiquitous and if not the phone, then a card in a pocket in the phone.

It’s debatable whether this is a good thing considering how compromised phones are and how reliant they are on cell towers, software and power supply, but hey.

Meanwhile, on the front page of the Herald was the legislation meaning that councils could charge congestion taxes in the future.

Now this is dodgy. The taxes will be on roads that we already paid taxes to build. And if not taxes then rates, which after all, are also taxes. Talk about double jeopardy - taxes on taxes

And then, you have to wonder if the National-led coalition really is the tax cut party. Surely introducing a new tax is still a new tax, which is something they say is what the socialists do.

But everyone is doing it - rates are up, water rates are up. And under this coalition, the reality is our taxes are going up. No matter what their semantics suggest.

But they have to do it to get some cars off some roads that are so congested that they’re costing our productivity.

The motivation for taxes has many faces - they’re used to punish the rich, they’re used to redistribute wealth, they're used to fund health and education systems and they’re used to punish or change behaviour.

So they’re trying to change our behaviour to make more of us drive off peak and less of us on peak.

Good luck with that. Good luck with your tax. No wonder Wayne Brown said they’re not going to use the new power any time soon, he knows a vote killer when he sees one.

But the fact that a young modern city of just over one and a half million people has got itself in a position where a centre-right Government thinks the answer is a congestion tax is a complete and utter failure of civic planning.

Sure, I can understand congestion taxes in London, which has had centuries of development. But Auckland? Or Tauranga? Or Wellington?

All we had to do was provide alternatives to the car that were affordable and efficient.

But everytime public transport options and alternate modes have been suggested, they’ve been shouted down by people who think they live in rural villages and not modern cities and they should drive from doorstep to doorstep.

Thanks for your lack of foresight - it means another tax is coming and our roads will still be chocka.

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