Thomas Coghlan

And the government has been talking about publishing what it calls a major transport projects pipeline, which is a list of what's coming and when it will be built.

And that pipeline is late.

It hasn't materialised yet.

And I think the people who are reading the kind of political tea leaves are assuming that it's sort of being redrawn in light of the fact that the fuel crisis has made the roads even more expensive.

And the fuel crisis has also made the appetite for raising taxes to pay for them, it's diminished the appetite to raise taxes to pay to build those roads.

So the government is pretty clearly having a look at those roading projects.

And I think it's probably fair to say that many of them will be

perhaps not cancelled, but you might have a road project that was meant to begin in five years and they're now going to say, well, look, we'll begin this in 15, 20 years when the investment case is stronger.

And to be honest, if you're talking about that timeframe, you've effectively cancelled the road because anything could happen in 15 years.

And so I think that's probably what's going to happen.

That's a really interesting question and I'm looking forward to seeing whether it shifts the polls because obviously for 130,000 people they're going to do really, really well out of it.

But I wonder whether those 130,000 people who already catch public transport are probably maybe inclined to vote left of centre anyway when you look at where they live.

Particularly the Wellington electorates have gone pretty left wing recently and some of those sort of southern and west Auckland electorates have been pretty labour-y for some time now.

So certainly where people who use public transport live at the moment suggests those voters are probably already heading towards Labour.

The question is whether, you know, if you're in part of the country, probably still in Wellington, Auckland or Christchurch, which has sort of good public transport connections, you're looking at your car thinking, gosh, at the moment, that is costing me an awful lot of money to fill up and get to work five days a week.

And you see this policy and you think...

Gosh, you know, $20 a week would be all I'd pay to commute to work.

And if that in your mind makes you think, I'm going to give this a go and tick the labour box, you can see how that would potentially work for people.

But I think for the people we're talking about will be people who are still in relatively well-connected parts of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

So you're sort of thinking...