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Ryan Bridge: Wellington's endless spending on pen-pushers and reviews · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You can't escape bureaucrats in Wellington. It's just an occupational hazard,
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: isn't it of living there? Despite the bad press that
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: they get. They're not all useless, but it depends on
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: how you use them and how often you use them.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Take the Golden Mild disaster as just one example of this.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Council agrees to a project that can't afford expensive crazy
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: ratepayers revolt. By the way, a lot of the money
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: coming from US taxpayers generally cost blows out from one
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty million to two twenty that's sixty million
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: blowout or thirty disco toilets and Wellington dollars. New mayor
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: comes in. Review is ordered. Then enter the review. It's
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: a nine person panel, supposedly independent. Review is costing four
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: hundred k, which is at least one bike rack for
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: cyclists in Wellington dollars. Then yesterday there's a meeting. They
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: basically say this thing is still somehow affordable for Wellington,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: despite the fact the city can't afford a fifty cent
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: mix at the Derry. At present enter, the mayor Mayor
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: is asking some questions about Mission Creep. He's suggesting that
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: political judgments are being made by these reviewers. They want
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: their big project and they don't really care which poor
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: old Wellington ratepayer funds it. This is not entirely the
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: fault of the Boffins doing the reviewing, because as I
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: understand it, the review was set up not to actually
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: make major changes to the Golden Mile, just tweaks, which
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: begs the question why was a review ever needed at all?
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: And why did it cost four hundred k. You either
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: want to spend sixty million dollars, in which case do
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: or you don't, in which case don't. Why the endless
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: spending on pen pushes and the reviewers at all. For
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live to
• 1:41
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• 1:44
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