Lessons from Louboutin
When I decided to have a damaged painting saved by costly restoration, I first bought a new pair of expensive shoes. Which you’ll agree makes perfect sense.
There has to be a balance in the force. Life is not all about scrimping and saving for your eventual coffin. As the old saying has it, you never regret your extravagances; you always regret your economies. But I don’t expect such insouciance from people using my rates to fund public projects.
Wellington City Council seems to have been dealing with financial reality on the same airy basis as myself, when it comes to shoes. But even I know the difference between about $30 million to build a new reservoir, and $58.2m. And it’s a safe bet that it’ll cost more.
The method used to calculate costs of the project was the ballpark one of building construction at so much a square metre, when this is a huge engineering job, needing to factor in problems like seismic strengthening, and negotiating narrow Mt Cook streets with endless trucks. Professor John Tookey, head of the Auckland University of Technology, accurately calls such guesstimates, ‘‘finger-in-the-air type of stuff’’.
Councillor Iona Pannett called news of the blowout ‘‘not great’’, but said lessons will be learned from it. Not great? That sounds like a woman slipping a pair of Louboutin shoes past her husband as stuff she found in a junk shop. But it’s worse because it’s writing off millions of other people’s money with an airy understatement.
Mayor Justin Lester refused to comment on the day, which was arguably worse. He has an obligation to account for what the council does, as its leader. What with shutting the central library indefinitely, the Island Bay cycleway a costly mess, and the cost of saving the old Town Hall multiplying yet again, this is no time to act coy.
Many more infrastructure projects will be far dearer than the council bargained for, the upshot of which will be another rates rise, inevitably, because I pay for their mistakes, which I resent. In fairness, the councillors and mayor should work for free until they’ve paid us back, because it seems none of them knew any more than I do about running a city – the difference being that I don’t pretend to. But I would at least ask questions.
We’re hard done by in this city at the hands of the regional council too. Responsibility for disastrous new bus timetables, and ongoing union action seeking fair pay for drivers, leave us with buses that may or may not arrive, and frequent cancellations: in short, chaos.
Nobody seems to be disturbed by this, apart from the public.
Yet more of my money, as in my taxes, is going to 15 female prisoners getting paid $25,000 each by the Corrections Department.
What happened to them was an outrageous abuse of power by whoever ordered it. They experienced, we’re told, intrusive ‘‘internal searches’’ when they were suspected of concealing contraband, a vivid word picture that appals me. The searches found nothing.
Corrections national commissioner Rachel Leota said she apologises unreservedly to the women. She also said, ‘‘I deeply regret that this practice was ever able to occur, and over such a long period of time.’’ I should think so. That it happened once was shocking. That it happened ‘‘over a long period of time’’ is unforgiveable.
We pay for prisons with our taxes. The least we should expect is that inmates, whatever they did, are not humiliated, but treated like fellow human beings. Which they are, even if they don’t know it themselves.