‘It’s irritating driving past the pump’

Steve Meharry says he’s lucky to work in Auckland’s CBD, enabling him to take public transport to and from work.

However, for someone who jumps behind the steering wheel each day, the mounting petrol taxes are maddening.

“I’m a little bit frustrated that basically we were promised no taxes and basically we get this excise tax coming in which is actually a tax,” he told the Herald.

“On top of that we’ve obviously got petrol prices rising. I know they move up and down depending on the global economy but it doesn’t help, it’s only going to get worse.”

Meharry lives on the North Shore and takes the bus into the CBD each day for work.

At his old job, he would occasionally drive to work but now that he works in the city the good public transport links mean he doesn’t have to.

However his wife used to work at Middlemore Hospital and would have to drive to and from work because there wasn’t a public transport service between the two. “It took her an hour and a half and, with the petrol prices the way they are today, they’d kill her. That’d be another $200 a week?”

The current cost of electric vehicles had put him off buying one for now, he said.

And Meharry said his family was fortunate not to have to worry “too much” about the petrol tax diving into other household costs. “Like a lot of people, we’ll just absorb it [the tax]

. . . we don’t necessarily feel the pain that potentially others are feeling.

“[But] it’s irritating when you drive past a petrol pump.”