When the city and the cycling advocates and the business community can come together and get a plan for urban cycling in this city, I will make it my personal mission that funding is not a barrier to getting that plan implemented.
Michael Woodhouse is a Dunedin-based list MP for the National Party. He is Minister for Immigration, Minister of Veterans’Affairs, Land Information Minister and Associate Minister of Transport.
Talking points
I would like to be thought of as someone who really beats the drum for Dunedin. Sometimes we suffer a loss or two, but it’s a long game, I’m in it for the long term.
(Are you the unofficial Minister for Dunedin?) Well I guess I’m the official Minister for Dunedin. Because I am the member in government and now around the Cabinet table, the expectation on me to fly the flag for the city have gone up, and rightly so, but we must also be very careful not to fall into the trap of pork-barrel politics because we would be overwhelmed by numbers around the table by people from other centres. There’s obvious positive parochialism about things I advocate for, but we need to be careful not to get into that space because we already punch above our weight.
Every region…has a case that they hang onto for extra funding.
How many kids are in poverty? It doesn’t actually matter. What we can all agree is that there is an unacceptably high number of children growing up in circumstances that we would not consider to be satisfactory.
We have a significant challenge in the social engagement that underpins our community
GDP growth is just measure…there is work to develop a more holistic measure…but for this government perspective, GDP growth, growth in incomes and controlling inflation will remain really important variables in the things that we do.
We can continue to get growth out of a finite planet – the question is virtually answering itself. The argument is about the speed of a transition away from a carbon economy and into a non carbon economy essentially. Politically we won’t always agree about whether we are moving far enough fast enough, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that science is taking us into a place where we’re going to be better off.
I don’t think we’ve maximised our potential for growth in our agricultural sector. The question then, is are we going to do that at an unacceptable cost to our environment. I think we can grow the sector, yes it’s finite, but I don’t think we’ve reached the limits of our potential for food production, for forestry production, for sustainable fishing…
We’ve got no shortage of water, it’s just not always in the right place at the right time when we need it.
We risk looking at the past through rose tinted glasses.
We’ve solved point source…now we have a much more thorny issue of non-point source, farming run off. I am open to the view that geologically there are parts of our country that are not well suited to intensive farming – particularly dairy. I worry about the Manuherikia and parts of North Otago – the soils are just too porous for that kind of farming.
I’m really encouraged but by how the farming sector has improved its practice. There was a photo in the paper the other day – its always a file photo – of a cow standing with dirty legs standing in a dirty creek dirtying the water. And thats simply unacceptable, but it’s also very rare relative to what it was
Selling our (National’s) environmental record is problem, but I don’t believe it’s necessarily our Achilles heel. We have a strong blue-green lobby and environmental management is not the preserve of the left.
We have to balance a number of sustainable issues, including economic sustainability. Primary industries remain the backbone of our export sector. A balance has to be made, there’s always a tension around where that balance falls. I think we do extremely well.
By exporting food we’re getting double hit by our environmental record. We don’t blame Saudi Arabia for our fuel consumption.
We are reliant on extractive industries….and always have been…this is business as usual. It’s unfair to portray the National government as different or extreme when it comes to exploiting our natural resources because that’s been going on for a very long time.
(Why are we investing in roads, when we’re faced with Peak Oil and Climate Change?) Oil is finite and is having an environmental impact…in one year new cars are running on a fifth of the fossil fuel, next year it could be a tenth, by 2020 …I think we are much closer to the technological tipping point than people think.
When you factor in technology, yes oil is finite and wee need to remove reliance on it, there’s a rapid uptake of new technologies, and human nature is such that we like our independence – especially kiwis – we will still need roads, that’s what buses go on by the way.
We sell them as new roads, but…with most of them we’re not creating capacity for the future, we’re playing catch-up after years of neglect and years of very rapid population growth.
The more freight we get on the rail the safer our roads will be.
The one that affected me the most has been Invermay, you expect some things in decision making to go against your city, but for me that has been the one that has bounced hardest…I have to defend a crown research institute to make the decision they think is right for the countries science even though it might not be good for Dunedin. I’m more convinced though not completely convinced that they’ve got that right.
Hillside was very problematic politically, the wonder for me was that the decision wasn’t made sooner.
I think everybody in parliament does so for good reason, and we all want the same thing – we all want New Zealand to be the best it can be, and the most sustainable it can be for that matter. We might disagree very vehemently on the path to that destination, but we’ve all got the destination in mind.
(Activist) Yes, but not a publicist. I found (protests while I was at university) rather curious, that doesn’t make me any less active or less passionate about making change. If I was around in the Vietnam era I’d probably by sitting quietly on the side watching not throwing eggs at the police…I was in favour of the Springboks tour…the protestors intrigued me.
You don’t need to be waving a banner to say you’re on the side of the oppressed, it’s all about method.
Advice: Enjoy life, happiness is journey not the destination.