Here’s the scandal. Fairfax has got some information out of the Official Information Act on the famed Transmission Gully. Years and years and years in the making, endless scrapping over it. Anyone who’s ever lived in Wellington knows the story of Transmission Valley.

The main point here is they’ve been busted trying to manipulate the use of the road.

Point Number One, Transport Minister Phil Twyford has given the go-ahead to look at this particular plan they’ve to start charging motorists to use the road.

Fairfax got their hands on a briefing document from the Transport Agency to Phil Twyford, recommending that he greenlight an investigation of a Transmission Valley toll too, in their words, ‘shape demand’

So the Transport Agency built a piece of road, and when you build a piece of road, what do people want to do with it? Use it. They want to drive on it. Why do they want to drive on it? Because they like roads, we like roads, we like cars, we like flexibility, individuality, personality, and usefulness of cars. So if you build a road, we will use it.

The officials don’t like that. The officials don’t like any of that, they don’t like any of us on the roads, so they want to ‘shape demand’.

So what they can do by charging us and charging us more and more and more, is make the road ‘mode neutral’. And in making the road ‘mode neutral’, it means that everyone simply will not drive.

And when I say will not drive, I mean cannot drive, because the people who get hit the hardest on this are the people who can least afford to be hit the hardest. These are the people who can’t necessarily get a train or bus to get to their work because there isn’t a train or bus close by or the train or bus doesn’t go at the time they want to go or train or bus doesn’t go to where they want to go.

So they are forced into their car, but the people at the Ministry don’t want you in your car, they want you on a bus or train that doesn’t exist. So they don't want you to have any flexibility or individuality or the ability to move your children from point A to point B.

They don’t want any of that because they are driven by this ideology that public transport is the beginning and middle and end of everything. Their problem is that when you build a road, we all want to use it. So they are going to tax you out of it, to ‘shape demand’, to make the road more ‘mode neutral’.

In other words, they are going to get you on a bus or a train even though you don’t want it, even though we all know it doesn’t work, even though the public transport system they provide will never work because we are too late to the game. We are stuck with roads and car right or wrong, that’s the way it is, has been and will be.

They are going to tax you out of your car. God knows how you’ll get to work.

They want to shape demand and they want to make it more neutral so the people who can least afford it are the people who will be hit the hardest.