Well, it’s started – it’s 1 February and the campaigning for the September election is well underway. Political parties have been to Ratana and head to Waitangi next week, and we had the first big announcement of the year from the Government this week. 

Last year they announced they’d allocate an additional $12 billion towards infrastructure over at least five years - this week we got more detail about what it’s going to be spent on.

There was a bit of a spat among politicians as to whether this was a $12 billion spending project announcement, or a $7 billion dollar spending announcement as technically the rest is yet to be allocated.

But what we do know is $6.8 billion has been allocated for new transport infrastructure. A lot of it is going into building roads. Roads and rail in Auckland and Wellington, roads in the Bay of Plenty and Waikato, Christchurch and Queenstown.

Roads, roads, roads is the catchcry.  Someone has done their polling, and building roads is what we want to hear, so building roads is what we’ll hear.

Green co-leader and climate change minister James Shaw has made the point that more kilometres worth of cycleway than roads will be funded in the package. Simon Wilson in the New Zealand Herald also pointed out how the new infrastructure plan in Auckland took into account public transport, freight and cycle ways.

Simon Bridges, by contrast, claimed Labour had restarted Nationals plan that was put on hold in 2018.

All this grandstanding might have gone down better if it had not been delivered - in front of Helen Clark's Waterview Tunnel. And that’s my point. If there was ever something that should be depoliticised, it should be infrastructure - we need more roads, more rail, more buses, more cycle ways, more of everything. And they all take a lot of time.

The politicians who successfully commissioned and consented a project are very unlikely to be around to cut the ribbon many years later, not to mention the other politicians who may have had responsibility during construction.  Having a policy isn’t the same as having a plan, and having a plan isn’t the same as funding and delivering one.

So addressing NZ’s infrastructure deficit is always going to a problem when taking credit is a motivation – and taking the credit wherever you can is what elections are all about.

So, as the electioneering started this week and as we prepare for more promises and policies I thought it may be helpful to go around the world to get some perspective on some that have come before.

Ferdinand Lop was a candidate for the French presidency in 1938 through until the 1940s. He campaigned on eliminating poverty, relocating Paris to the countryside so residents could enjoy fresher air, and creating a Ministry of Health and Tobacco, and a Ministry of Sex and Folklore.

British politician Screaming' Lord Sutch’s only win was being recognised by the Guinness Book of Records for running for a seat in the UK more times than anyone else. During his many efforts his promises included bringing back the village idiot, using the European Union's over-production of butter to create a giant ski slope, heated toilets for pensioners, and putting joggers to good use by forcing them to power treadmills to generate electricity.

And our own satirical political party, the McGillicuddy Serious Party had some ripper policies: restricting the vote to minors: i.e., ONLY those under 18 years of age could vote, this was announced when Parliament lowered the voting age to 18 years. The party ran its 1993 electoral advertisements during children's programming. They also called for the demolition of The Beehive, parliament buildings, and all other buildings on a last-up, first-down basis, and the other one that took my fancy was free dung.

And then of course there’s Donald Trump’s promise to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it.

It’s interesting that Trump’s wall sits quite comfortably with the ideas of Misters Lop and Sutch. Arguably, so does trying to build 100,000 affordable homes in 10 years. So as the election promises and policies are rolled out across the next eight months let’s all try and keep some perspective – it could probably be worse.