Trevor Mallard is right. His stadium push did encounter a dismaying lack of vision. Auckland should have been easily able to afford and build the stadium if indeed it was a better scheme. It is stupid to waste $400m on a site that can’t be more than a glorified suburban footy ground, if instead Auckland could have created a Collosseum, a focal point for a city desperately in need of one. The Minister should feel despair at the power of the naysayers, the miserable whingers who look only for obstacles and reasons not to do things.

But he too should direct his frustration where it can do something constructive – against his drippy colleagues, the people who have empowered the whingers. You’ve created this culture Trevor. You gave us the constitutional barbarity of local government shackled only by law requiring “consultation” (dominated by the drones who have nothing better than politics to do with their time), the RMA’s nimby’s charter, which has half a million Aucklanders sitting in traffic jams every day, and poisons neighbour against neighbour (by tempting them to interfere with any plan to change the status quo next door).

You’ve been caught by your own trap Mr Mallard. If you had been raging about ERMA or the new Buildings law, or OSH liabilities or employment law that frightens small businesspeople out of giving risky looking employees a go, if your frustration was about the Auckland infrastructure paralysis, I would not have thought it so funny when the guy on the plane from Auckland referred to you as ‘Marcos’. The sudden focus on a stadium reminded him of his years in Manila, when the Marcos pair used their dictator powers to fast-track art gallery,theatre and stadium projects while the power flickered out every day and traffic jams blighted the lives of the millions who would never go to an art gallery.

Right sentiments Trevor, wrong target.