Yesterday David Farrar blogged about how Greens minister Julie Anne Genter said that she could do nothing about the road toll for many decades.
The article accused her of being impotent as a Minister but it mysteriously misquoted her by leaving out the word “substantial”.
The Herald article actually said this:
It will be “many decades” before New Zealand sees a substantial change in the road toll, says Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter.
Her comments come after New Zealand experienced its highest road toll since 2009, with almost 400 deaths last year.
There were nine deaths on the road over the Christmas holiday period; three fewer than over the same period last year.
Genter said the Government was in the process of implementing its road safety strategy – a strategy she said would save lives.
But this would take time, she said.
“The reality is these things take time and [there’s] a huge amount of road upgrades that need to be completed.”
In December last year, the Government committed $1.4 billion to making roads safer.
The policy, called the Safe Network Programme, aims to make 870km of high volume, high-risk State Highways safer by 2021 with improvements like median and side barriers, rumble strips, and shoulder widening.
That policy strategy will be in place in 2020, but Genter said it would be a process of “many decades to substantially bring down deaths and serious injuries on our roads”.
The headline as well as Farrar’s post was, what is that word, inaccurate. The Herald article clearly referred to substantial reductions and the text of the article repeated this. But Farrar did not use this word in his heading or in his comments.
And it will take decades to improve safety. After 9 years of wasting huge amounts of money on roads of National TM significance it will take many years for the planning, design and implementation of these safety projects.
Judith Collins chimed in:
Genter responded in that very gentle way which shows her politics:
And Sam Learmonth has suggested that blame for our appalling statistics should lie elsewhere:
The full text of the article written by Sam can be read here.
Surely it is too early for National and its cheerleaders to be blaming Labour and the Greens for a problem of National’s creation?
It appears not …
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