Road rage is getting worse according to survey results out today, and I think it’s time we made road rage a specific criminal offence.

I’ll come back to that but, first, how about this for a story? A guy’s driving around Governor’s Bay when this boy racer starts tailgating him, then stops in front of him, pulls out a baseball bat and starts smashing the guy’s windscreen.

That was a week ago.

Then we had someone else sent to prison last week after stabbing someone in an apparent road rage incident in Riccarton. It happened back in September on the corner of Blenheim Road and Clarence Street when two guys got into an argument.

The guy who was sent to prison last week got out of his car with a pair of scissors and stabbed this other guy before taking off.

He turned himself into the police sometime after that, and he was sentenced last week.

So you consider cases like that and the incident in Governors Bay the weekend before last, and you think no wonder we’ve got new stats out today saying nearly 50% of Canterbury people think road rage has got worse here in the past year. It's 60% in Auckland.

So, surely, the time has come for us to make road rage an actual criminal offence?

At the moment, no one can be charged with road rage. It can lead to people being charged with things like assault, intent to injure, and reckless driving. But I think road rage needs to be made a specific offence.

I see it in the same light as the stalking laws the Government wants to introduce. Like road rage, stalking can lead to people being charged with other offences.

So why not do the same with road rage?

AA Insurance has found that, broadly, 1-in-10 Kiwis have been involved in a road rage incident of some sort in the past year.

They’ve experienced things like tailgating, being cut off by another driver, being tooted at excessively, and being yelled or screamed at by another driver.

Exactly the sort of thing this guy on Banks Peninsula went through. According to his post on Facebook last night, it was 12:10am and this boy racer was tailgating him when he, obviously, at some point overtook this guy, stopped in front of him, got out with a baseball bat and started smashing up the guy’s car.

And he’s now on Facebook asking people who live in the area if they’ve got any security footage that might help identify the vehicle involved.

He’s trying to track-down a Rego number so the police can, maybe, do something about it. Because, according to his post, the police didn’t do anything on the night.

Although the police have told our newsroom this morning that he was “unable to make a statement at the time” and was provided with information to help him report the incident online. The police did confirm that it was reported to them just after midnight on Sunday March 2.

The guy who was attacked has posted a photo online showing the windscreen smashed on the driver’s side. It must have been absolutely terrifying for him.

As Beau Paparoa, who is one of the bosses at AA Insurance, is saying today - things like tailgating not only increases the risk of rear-end collisions. It’s also distressing and dangerous for the people being tailgated.

But it goes next level when you’ve got some muppet not only tailgating you, then passing you, and stopping right in front of you, and getting out of their car and taking to yours with a baseball bat.

I don't think leaving things as they are and only charging people with other offences, and not charging them specifically with road rage, is going to do anything to fix the problem.

From my experience, I would say road rage has been a major problem for a long time now. Whether I can say that I think it’s got worse here in the past 12 months, I don’t know, but a lot of people think it has.

So surely the time has come to up the ante and make road rage a criminal offence.

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I don’t like this idea of dangling bigger carrots in front of people who own land that the government or your local council might want for big infrastructure projects.

But I'm more concerned about denying people who object access to the Environment Court. Instead of the court, if someone isn’t happy about compulsory sale of their land, they’ll have to complain to the Land Information Minister or their local council – depending on who it is that wants their land.

And we know who’s going to win that argument every time, don’t we?

“Dear Minister, I want to hold on to my land. Yours, so-and-so.”

“Dear so-and-so. Tough. You’ve got no choice.”

Or "Dear council, I want to hold on to my land. Yours, so-and-so.”

“Dear so-and-so. Tough. You’ve got no choice.”

The changes are being promoted as a cost-saving exercise and a way of getting big infrastructure projects happening sooner. The Government wants these changes so that big projects don’t get bogged down.

And the way it’s going to do that is by paying people more money to get their land if it’s needed for a big infrastructure project.

That’s if they agree up front. Because, if a landowner agrees upfront and doesn’t challenge it then there will, of course, be less expense involved.

The Government wants these changes to get cracking on its roads of national significance and its other fast-track projects.

It's all to do with the Public Works Act. Which is the legislation that means if your house is sitting somewhere where the Government or your local council wants to build something like a new motorway, they can knock on your door and tell you that they’re buying your house.

It’s a compulsory acquisition of a property that isn't on the market but is needed for public works.

At the moment, if people don’t want to sell, they can go to the Environment Court. But the Government wants to do-away with that and I don’t agree with that at all.

I suspect that if you’re not affected, this sounds like a great idea. But if it’s your land that the Government or your local council wants to get its hands on, you might feel a bit differently.

I don't even need to be in the position of owning land the Government wants to take off me to know that taking away the right to go to the Environment Court is a bad idea.

Tell that to Land Information Minister Chris Penk, though. He says: "Public infrastructure projects up and down the country are often held up for years by overly complex, drawn-out processes for purchasing the land needed."

He goes on to say: “This has meant that projects which would provide massive benefits for communities end up stalled, with the only action happening in courtrooms.”

Pretty much every time you talk to someone who is anti-the environment court, they start going on about snails on the West Coast.

You’ll remember this one: about 20 years ago, Solid Energy wanted to build a mine where there were these giant snails and Forest & Bird went to the Environment Court trying to stop it.

What seems to have got lost over time is that the Environment Court agreed with Forest & Bird but didn’t have authority to intervene. It was then that Forest & Bird went to the High Court. Which led to Solid Energy paying for 6,000 of these snails to be relocated from the Stockton Plateau, so it could access $400 million worth of coal.

People who think the Environment Court is a handbrake on progress often refer to that case, and see it as good reason for getting the Environment Court out of the picture.

But I don’t see it that way. The Environment Court is a backstop. A backstop people should not be denied access to if they don't want to sell their land to the government or their local council.

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Winston Peters had no option when it came to sacking Phil Goff from his job as High Commissioner in London, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy with it.

I think he’s done the right thing. But he’s done the wrong thing, as well.

Because it just shows how scaredy-cat the world is of Donald Trump. But we better get used to it – this is how it’s going to be for the next four years.

That’s why I accept that it needed to be done, but it’s still pretty cruddy that we are running scared of him like this.

What Goff did was he let the political nerd in him come out when he was at an event at Chatham House, in London, earlier this week. And it looked like it was some sort of Q&A session involving Finland’s Foreign Affairs Minister.

The significance of Finland, of course, is that it shares a border with Russia.

So Phil Goff had the roving microphone, and he asked Elina Valtonen whether she thought Donald Trump understood the history of the second world war.

That’s because people are likening what Trump is doing with Ukraine to what happened in 1938, when Nazi Germany was allowed to get its hands on land in Czechoslovakia in a bid to avoid war.

It was a deal signed in 1938, but, as we know, a year later Germany still went to war.

Phil Goff isn’t the first person to say it. And on the face of it, it doesn’t seem that outrageous, but in diplomatic circles, it was probably enough to have them spilling their G&Ts.

And it was certainly enough for Foreign Minister Winston Peters to tell his people in London to give Phil Goff the flick.

Winston Peters says the reason he did it was because Goff’s comments “do not represent the views of the New Zealand government and make his position as High Commissioner to London untenable.”

And former High Commissioner Sir Lockwood Smith agrees. He’s in no doubt that Winston Peters has done the right thing to minimise any damage.

Phil Goff was due to finish his posting later this year, but that could have been extended, of course. But he’s over there right now and all the diplomatic crew will be chattering.

So it will be very embarrassing for Goff. Not the way he would’ve wanted to go out.

Especially, given that as far as I’m aware, it’s the first time New Zealand has sacked a High Commissioner.

Yes, he was being a bit of a smart-alec, something you’re not supposed to be when you move around in diplomatic circles. Which is a tension that Sir Lockwood talked about when he was on Newstalk ZB this morning.

He was saying that when you’ve been a politician, it can sometimes be difficult to take your political hat off. But he reckons that his time as speaker before being a High Commissioner helped prepare him for that.

Maybe that’s why we’re not hearing about former speaker Trevor Mallard putting his foot in it over in Ireland, where he’s High Commissioner.

But perhaps Phil Goff can take some comfort from Dr Stephen Winter, who is an international relations expert at Auckland University. He’s says if things weren’t so on edge around the world, Goff might have got away with it.

He says: "Goff can take comfort from the fact that he is right, even though he was not diplomatic.”

But things are on edge, and Goff is off.

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I'm neither happy or unhappy that Adrian Orr is no longer Reserve Bank Governor, but I do have a piece of advice for whoever ends up taking over from him.

Just be the complete opposite.

Because I reckon he fell into a trap that ended up with him getting too big for his boots. Which, maybe, is very hard to avoid when you’re in a job like his, but the next person needs to make sure they stay in their lane and keeps themselves in check.

When you’re the Reserve Bank Governor, your job is to work on creating a rock star economy - you’re not the rock star yourself.

No one can argue that his tenure coincided with a time when what you would consider to be the most grey and dull jobs in the world, took on a whole new meaning.

Ashley Bloomfield, for example. Because of COVID, everyone knew who he was.

And Adrian Orr. Because of COVID, he was elevated to a level no other reserve bank governor got to in terms of profile and recognition.

If you ask me to name another Reserve Bank Governor, the only name that comes to my head straight away is Don Brash. That’s because of his political career that he got into after he left the bank.

And if I think a little bit more, there’s Alan Bollard. But that's it.

But everyone pretty much knows who Adrian Orr is and I think it went to his head. I think he loved the limelight, and, in the process, he got a bit too cocky. I think he lost sight of what his job was actually all about.

Nevertheless, I don’t think he personally is to blame for everything when it comes to us feeling more hard up than ever.

And, if he hadn’t fallen into the trap of letting the job go to his head, he might not be copping as much criticism as he has and is.

I’m with economist Tony Alexander who is saying today that business people and homeowners who blame Orr for their cashflow problems are both right and wrong.

He’s saying that they're right in that he oversaw the continuation of excessively loose spending during 2021 and into 2022, which over-stimulated the economy and pushed inflation up to 7.3%.

He also was boss of the Reserve Bank when the official cash rate reached 5.5%. And then got it down to 2.2% by what Tony Alexander describes as Orr “crunching the economy”.

But he also says, let’s not forget Labour’s Grant Robertson’s role in all of this.

He was the guy who kept fiscal policy loose.

My understanding is that staff at the Reserve Bank had no idea this was coming until after it was announced to the media. Which is a shocker. And, apparently, staff at the bank have no idea what’s behind it.

I’m picking that he’s thrown his toys out of the cot because the Government wants to cut the budgets at the Reserve Bank. And a lot of that will have to do with what the Government probably sees as the former Governor’s obsession with things outside what it considers core business for the central bank.

But, from the very limited things that have been said since the announcement yesterday afternoon, it’s obvious that he’s quit.

Because when the chair of the bank Neil Quigley said it was “a personal decision” by Adrian Orr, that says he’s quit. It doesn't say he’s leaving for personal reasons, it says he’s walking away.

He’s going to be on the payroll until the end of the month, but he’s not Governor of the bank anymore. An acting Governor took over at midday yesterday.

The other thing too about all this secrecy, is that I don't think it’s acceptable when you’ve got a senior public servant who earns more than $800,000 a year quitting like this.

On the basis of what we kind-of know, I think we deserve more of an explanation.

If the guy’s thrown a hissy fit - tell us. Because, for someone who seemed to love the limelight as much as he did, disappearing the way he has is not only very strange, it’s also somewhat disrespectful.

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I’m still getting over the Prime Minister saying if people don't like the food provided by the school lunch programme, they should make a marmite sandwich.

And quite rightly, his comments are being described by the principal of a school in Kaiapoi as “absolutely disgraceful”. And I couldn’t agree more.

Jason Miles is the principal of Kaiapoi North School and he’s bang on – that talk from the PM was disgraceful.

And he says it just shows that Christopher Luxon has had a gutsful of the school lunches thing. He says: "He (the PM) is out of touch with the current inequities that didn't exist in his time."

Jason Miles is saying what we all know – that kids can’t learn when they're hungry because they are easily distracted, and they get restless.

He says: “A healthy, nutritious, tasty lunch could be the only substantial meal that child gets for the whole day and a marmite sandwich and an apple is probably ok some days, but we want to know we are going to get a consistently, healthy nutritious meal for our children so they can learn."

And that’s the point here. We can bang on all we like about us going to school when we were kids with just a marmite sandwich - maybe a bit fancy on it some days with a piece of lettuce as well. Or sandwiches with luncheon in them.

And yes, we did just fine. Just like Christopher Luxon did. But here’s the difference - we went to school in the morning with some breakfast in our belly and we went home at night to an evening meal.

But that seems to be lost on the Prime Minister. Which is why this principal from Kaiapoi North School is saying today that Christopher Luxon’s appalling comments show just how out of touch he is.

Last night, this thing came through on my social media feed and it was a video the “How to Dad” guy, Jordan Watson was fronting. It was promoting KidsCan and he was reading letters that teachers had sent-in talking about poverty in their schools.

One of them talked about two siblings at the school and how each of them only turned up every second day, and the teacher got a bit sick of that and went to have a word with one of them. And the kid explained that they had to share shoes, and it was his turn to wear the shoes that day and that’s why he was at school and his sibling wasn’t.

That’s the world that people like this Kaiapoi North School principal knows about. And I know the Prime Minister will say he knows about it too, but I don't think he does.

He’s out of touch.

Maybe he hasn’t heard what happened at that school in Murchison last week. The lunches arrived and they were so hot that the plastic had melted, and it wasn’t until the kids had been eating for a bit that they realised they'd been eating plastic.

How can he tell those kids to eat a marmite sandwich if they don't like it?

No wonder Education Minister Erica Stanford wants and explanation from Associate Minister David Seymour.

She must have had her head in her hands when she heard the boss banging on about marmite sandwiches on Newstalk ZB yesterday morning and then coming out with the same nonsense in parliament.

It was disgraceful and shows that, when it comes down to it, the PM has no idea what life is really like for some kids in our country.

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Labour Leader Chris Hipkins joined John MacDonald this morning to dig into the latest.

They discussed the latest from Ukraine and the potential for Trump to introduce agricultural tariffs in the wake of his over 20% tariffs on key trade partners.

Is talking to an overseas GP on the phone really a good solution to our lacking services?

And what on earth has gone wrong with the school lunch system? Is a marmite sandwich really sufficient?

LISTEN ABOVE

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In the first of their regular catch ups, Business Canterbury’s Leeann Watson joined John MacDonald in studio to dig into what’s happening on the business front.

They discussed how business owners are feeling, and what can be done to help them continue to gain confidence and grow in the region.

LISTEN ABOVE

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I am so glad that I’m not a member of the local rainbow community. Because if I was, I would be despairing at the weasel words the Christchurch mayor and the city council are trotting out about the Destiny Church's despicable disruption of the pride month opening event in Christchurch on Saturday.

And it just tells me that people are either scared of taking on the Destiny Church or they somehow think their hatred is okay.

So what happened at the weekend is the annual “walk for support” for LGBTQIA+ people wound up at the Bridge of Remembrance, and these muppets from the Destiny Church were there protesting against them.

They were carrying signs saying things about puberty blockers and child abuse and telling the people there to “repent”.

They also had a speaker system there, which they shouldn't have. But no one did anything about it.

Which is why a local rainbow campaigner is saying that the city council should apologise for not shutting down this illegal protest driven by nothing more than hatred.

And I agree. But I don't think that’s going to be coming anytime soon, considering the weasel words being trotted out by mayor Phil Mauger and the council's chief executive.

Phil Mauger is saying that everyone has the right to protest but it was “not polite” of the Destiny Church to set up their loudspeakers right beside the event.

He says it was “quite disappointing”, but he’s pleased things didn't get out of control like they did when the Destiny Church went awol at that pride event in Auckland the other week.

So that’s the mayor. But it gets even worse with what the council’s chief executive is saying.

Mary Richardson says: “We have to respect other people’s democratic right to protest, even if we don’t agree with their views.”

And the strongest action the council took was to send out a noise control officer - who found that there weren’t any noise limit breaches. Do me a favour.

That’s not all. There’s some classic passing-of-the-buck going on, with the council saying that it’s the job of the police to deal with public disturbances and the police saying permission to set-up loudspeakers is the job of the council and so the council has to deal with it, which is why the noise control officer was sent out.

But could you get a more lame response if you tried? But remember that this isn’t the first time that the Christchurch City Council has turned a blind eye to the Destiny Church.

You’ll remember how it waived $50,000 in fines that it had sent the church for the disruption caused by its anti-vax mandate protests during covid. That was all to do with Destiny Church not following the rules, not working with the council so it could make sure that traffic management was sorted.

But the council ripped those tickets up. Derek Tait from Destiny had a cup of tea with former mayor Lianne Dalziell and all was forgiven.

And it’s doing the exact same thing with these weasel words about the Destiny crew's behaviour on Saturday.

This is the council, let me remind you, that was all in favour of putting a rainbow crossing somewhere in town. Which, when it comes down to it, doesn't take much fortitude.

Yes, paint the crossing. I’m all for it.

But, when it comes down to it, painting a road crossing is nothing like staring down those clowns from the Destiny Church and telling them that their messages of hatred are not welcome.

And telling them that we’ve had a gutsful of them not giving a damn about the rules.

Rules that you and I would be expected to follow. And, if we didn't, there’d be consequences. Not if you're the Destiny Church, though, it seems.

So I’m with the pride campaigners who are saying today that the council could’ve and should’ve done a lot more on Saturday when the Destiny muppets turned up at this event. But the council didn’t - and, for that, it should apologise.

But that’s not all. The mayor and his council need to condemn Destiny Church for their messages of hatred.

If the strongest thing Phil Mauger can say is that “wasn’t polite” of them to do what they did, then don’t expect them to pull their heads in anytime soon.

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