Mike's Minute: Our infrastructure is an embarrassment to the country

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Here is the real problem with a ferry running aground.

It comes in the same week the plane didn’t work and the same week a transmission tower fell over.

It's pathetic. This country is on its knees and it's embarrassing.

As we said last week, the upside is it might just be so embarrassing we actually now get around to doing something about it.

KiwiRail need an investigation into how they have run the business.

Sadly, I note Helen Clark yet again weighed in via social media with another one of her petty barbs about cancelling the ferry contract.

What we need are adults. Read the papers that have been released publicly between KiwiRail and Grant Robertson.

Even he was aghast at the blowout in the ferry budget, despite KiwiRail over and over again reassuring him their latest estimate was the final figure, until it wasn’t.

When Grant Robertson is aghast at a blowout you know it's gargantuan.

So this is as much on KiwiRail as it is on any Government.

But you can only embarrass yourself so much and so often before that becomes part of the country's psyche.

A recession is one thing and its outworking has an effect on us all both psychically and psychologically.

But you want to, in some way, feel there is something about this place that is decent and proper and rewarding. You want to feel good about your country.

The Prime Minister can't travel the world promoting business and saying we are open when the planes don’t fly and the ferry runs into stuff and the power is out because towers fall over.

We must do better.

We have to wake up to the fact this country has, in too many respects, been run into the ground. It looks increasingly third world.

The fear is the battle between the size of those who care and those who don’t is not that obvious.

The fact we can be in this mess and all former Prime Ministers can do is snipe is an increasing worry.

We are reaping what we sowed.

If this doesn’t strike you as an emergency, we are in deeper trouble than I thought.

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