Tani Newton
Trying to understand what is happening in Grey Street in Gisborne is like peeling the layers of an onion.
Essentially the street layout is being altered in a joint effort by the Gisborne District Council and a community organisation called the Tairawhiti Adventure Trust. This follows on from the trust’s successful completion of an impressive skate park and pump track, both bordering Grey Street, and which were last year being hailed as further progress in creating “hubs for positive and healthy activities”, according to RNZ.
But local business owners and street users are most dissatisfied with the change, to the point of expressing anger in public and mobilising to call for it to be stopped. Another pop-up protest took place on Wednesday, this time attracting around 200 participants and the same cacophony of support from passersby.
Superficially this might be characterised as a conflict between the hard-working and the pleasure-seeking; or between those who seek commercial profit and those who pursue the lasting and timeless; or between those who prefer continuity and those who prefer change, one of the basic differences between human personality types.
One instinctively feels, though, that there is something deeper at stake. The mayor and the majority of the council have shown their grim commitment to woke-ism in the affair of drag queens and rainbow pedestrian crossing. Funding is coming from Waka Kotahi and Trust Tairawhiti, both of which have a profound commitment to the climate-change ideology. On the face of it they are trying to achieve positive change by making streets “safer” for people using all kinds of “transport options”. This is supposedly going to help us transition to less polluting forms of transport. But all of this comes under the Road to Zero road safety strategy adopted by Ardern’s Government, which means exactly what it says: the goal is precisely zero fatalities and zero serious injuries on the roads. And it only takes a minute’s thought to realise that that means zero cars and zero trucks. For all the talk about trucks and cars peacefully cohabiting with pedestrians and cyclists, the end goal is clearly to banish them altogether. And realistic people know that the modern world can’t function without them.
This is by no means a superficial conflict. It is truly and directly about whether we are going to keep the achievements of Western civilisation, or deliberately destroy them for the sake of a self-destructive ideology that has nothing better to offer in their place.
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