Country Living – Munching popcorn while road promises snap and crackle

In my early 20s, my husband and I were working in Ghana, West Africa. It was a wild and crazy place back then, not really conducive to the fainthearted. Tiki touring on country roads was often akin to playing Russian roulette. Big old post war trucks, freighting goods around the country would come towards you like derailed trains, with bent and contorted chassis from “Third World roads”. Passenger vehicles needed to be tough and reliable, so it was mutually beneficial that many countries in Africa became a dumping ground for those outdated, solid, old (tank-like) Mercedes Benz cars that Europe no longer desired, but African roads did!

Decades later, those distant memories are now woven into my life reality. A couple of years ago, after my husband, swearing he would never buy me a new car while living on these roads, had a rare moment of insanity and brought me a brand spankers Jaguar. Fast forward two years from the red ribbons and associated princess fanfare, and the crushing reality of driving on Third World roads in our First World city comes to call. This, of course, being the utter degradation of our rural roading system, sanctioned by many who purport to govern us with integrity and fairness.

My beautiful car is now just a clothes horse for mud, dust, punctured tyres and rattling accessories. Our desperately identified roading expenditure seems to lurk in the shadowy depths of council budgetary spreadsheets. I feel compelled to take desperate measures to help mitigate the personal cost of living on these roads, so I am revisiting my old life in deep Africa. I have purchased a late 70s tank-like Mercedes to restore. She is a beauty – four on the floor and five-cylinders of rock solid “bad ass queen” that once restored, should have me floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee all over these crap roads.

The ironic lunacy that will see me shedding my modern car to be driven on random fair weathered days, then using my vintage car as the daily, seems so extraordinarily daft that I feel only an Auckland Transport decision-maker would get it. One must wonder if they aspire for our communities to go backwards. The Jaguar jokes will be sorely missed though – parked next to a pig hunter at the supermarket one day, he told me how proud he was of me for having the “filthiest Jaguar he had ever seen”.

Local government elections are upon us again, the time when us rural folk start munching down the popcorn waiting for the obligatory roading promises to be trotted out, while watching yet another generation of us drown in car maintenance bills. Man alive, if we only had a dime for every political candidate who vowed to fix our roading squalor, then perhaps our roads just might be sealed. I am proud of the hard-fought battle our rural communities have put up against a greedy system that is stacked against us and the decades of faithful rates they have paid.

Honestly, I doubt if the rural communities would even have cared how rates were spent in the city if we hadn’t been treated so poorly. The biggest election issue in Rodney has always been our roads. Yet, oddly, with increased rates, fuel taxes and targeted rates, the insane degradation of our roads still fits the term “Third World roads”. Public consultation is farcical at best. It’s like strange virtue signalling to appease what was once the remnants of our democratic wishes. A system, so narrated by hidden political agenda, it will take an army of voters among us to overthrow – ask and thou shall not receive.

How much louder can we possibly scream until people like me wake-up wishing their naked middle-aged body in a pothole was not plastered across billboards on a State Highway 1? Or, wishing you could reinstate the precious life moments taken from you to write a gazillion submissions, depositions and letters to the highest in the land?

It’s like our rural residents have had the starring role in an Auckland Council rendition of Oliver Twist, with the stage being our shredded, tatty roads and clogged drains and the climax of the show being us ratepayers on our knees begging, “Please sir can I have just a little bit more blue metal?” Personally, I would rather drive on dog poo than spend one more second begging for what should be rightfully ours.

Nope, this election it’s time for all of us, town and country alike, to unite for a fairer Rodney. Let’s bring out the best in each other and force those who govern us to recognise dire need before greed, which seems to be a key ingredient to happy and cohesive communities. A strong and respectful vote sending a signal to the whole of Auckland and the government that the great ward of Rodney will no longer tolerate such disparity of community taxes, nor hidden personal or political agenda. In the meantime,

I’m conjuring up a naughty little dream. Driving my big old queen down to the Council offices and parking out the front. I bang her in first gear, smoke her up and drop the clutch. Burnouts and doughnuts ensue as AC/DC blasts from my stereo the tune “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”, just to prove how my life under their governance has come full circle, and then drive off into the distance .. hee-hee.