Budgets beyond belief

"The budget for Te Huia patronage is nearly being met." Well, that is not hard when first it was set far too low to be meaningful and secondly the ticket price goes nowhere near covering the cost. As a Supergold card carrying individual I can apparently load my Supergold card onto a Bee card and travel on Te Huia for nothing, albeit off peak only. As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. So you can guess who would be fronting up for my trip. You have to wonder if that subsidy on top of a subsidy is included in their calculations. Paula Southgate made a trip to Belgium that cost the ratepayers $10,000. She disingenuously suggested that it was okayed and budgeted for by the council. Of course it was, because she is far too experienced to use a slush fund for such a trip. (I have no problem with the trip but the timing was horrible.) The same people who ticked the box are the same people who think Te Huia is brilliant, organised the expensive "traffic calming" speed bumps all over the place that infuriate motorists and first responders alike, and signed off $25 million on a new theatre only to find they have run out of money. There must have been more than a few holes in their budget. Like many public entities they seemed to think that ultra low interest rates would, or even could, go on forever. The writing has been on the wall now for several years. Inflation was coming and you cannot battle inflation by sitting on your hands. The only effective tool for fighting inflation left in Adrian Orr's box was interest rates which are going to have to remain higher for some time. I have no idea how anyone is going to budget for anything over the next decade.

Geoff Orchard, Ōhaupō