The Story-Teller: Asked to pronounce upon the wisdom – or otherwise – of the proposed Light Rail Network for Auckland, Prebble predictably opted for the telling anecdote. Viewers discovered that Prebble was not a fan of light rail. As a boy, they learned, he had travelled up Dominion Road by tram to school and the memory was not a happy one. “If anyone thinks trams up Dominion Road are going to solve Auckland’s transport problems,” declared Prebble with his trademark certainty, ”they’re dreaming.”
RICHARD PREBBLE has always been the master of the telling
anecdote. A born politician of prodigious talent, he needed little formal
coaching in the dark arts of political persuasion. From his halcyon days in the
Fourth Labour Government, to the years he spent keeping Act above the 5 percent
MMP threshold, Prebble’s knack for illustrating the need for change with a
telling anecdote was always on display. Facts and figures are easily forgotten,
but a good story settles into the voters’ memory and is extremely hard to
extract.
When the state-owned railways Prebble had pledged to save
were being “corporatized” (i.e. readied for sale to private buyers) a story
began doing the rounds which Labour insiders always insisted came from
Prebble’s Office. It was “The Story of the Disappearing Bulldozer”.
According to this tale, New Zealand Railways and its staff
were so incompetent (or was it corrupt and/or thieving?) that somewhere between
its point of loading and its final destination an entire bulldozer had somehow
been made to disappear into thin air. I lost count of the number of times the
story was repeated. In Parliament; at Labour Party meetings; in the newspapers;
on radio and television: The Story of the
Disappearing Bulldozer very soon came to stand for everything that was
inefficient – if not downright dodgy – about New Zealand’s nationalised
industries.
I was reminded of The
Story of the Disappearing Bulldozer only last Sunday when Richard Prebble
popped-up on the panel of TVNZ’s Q+A
current affairs show. Asked to pronounce upon the wisdom – or otherwise – of
the proposed Light Rail Network for Auckland, Prebble predictably opted for the
telling anecdote.
Viewers discovered that Prebble was not a fan of light rail.
As a boy, they learned, he had travelled up Dominion Road by tram to school and
the memory was not a happy one. “If anyone thinks trams up Dominion Road are
going to solve Auckland’s transport problems,” declared Prebble with his
trademark certainty, ”they’re dreaming.”
This was clever politics. The very idea that the
snowy-haired Prebble could ever have been a tousled school-boy was itself
preposterous. Surely, Prebble had emerged from his mother’s womb with a
lawyer’s wig in one hand and a copy of Parliament’s Standing Orders in the
other? Never mind. The image of this young chap making his way through the
Auckland suburbs aboard something as quaintly retrograde as a tram was an
arresting one. It spoke to the viewers of old technology and an Auckland that
no longer existed. Effortlessly, Prebble’s telling anecdote had made the
Auckland Light Rail project look like a costly and inefficient exercise in
political nostalgia.
But was it true?
The problem with anecdotes is that they are notoriously
difficult to verify. Though The Story of
the Disappearing Bulldozer was repeated endlessly by right-wing talkback
hosts and political commentators, I don’t recall ever reading even one
honest-to-goodness news story detailing the events leading up to the
bulldozer’s disappearance; whether or not the vehicle was ever found; and, if
it had been recovered, who was ultimately deemed responsible for misplacing it?
With this journalistic deficiency in mind, I set out to
discover whether or not The Boy on the
Tram story was true or false.
Thanks to the prodigious memory of Professor Google, I soon
discovered that if Richard Prebble had travelled up Dominion Road on a tram,
then he would have been a very young school-boy indeed. In fact, the oldest he
could possibly have been was five – which seems a very young age to be
travelling alone on any sort of public transport!
For the record, Prebble was born in 1948 and the tramline
along Dominion Road came into service in 1930 and was decommissioned
twenty-three years later in 1953. The reason for the service’s demise lay in
the Auckland Transport Board’s 1949 decision to replace all of the city’s trams
with trolley-buses. Accordingly, in 1956, the last of the highly-efficient,
non-polluting, electric-powered trams which had served Auckland magnificently
since 1902 ceased running and the tramlines were torn-up.
Auckland's Tramlines Network 1908-1956
My guess is that the young Richard Prebble who travelled up
Dominion Road in the 1950s and 60s did not do so on a tram (a vehicle which
runs on rails) but on an electric trolley-bus which drew down its motive power
from overhead wires via long flexible poles. These vehicles were very prone to
random stops and starts (as any Wellingtonian will tell you) on account of the
fact that the conducting poles were forever becoming dislodged – forcing the
driver to get out and very carefully reconnect them to the power source. [Trams
also draw their motive power from overhead powerlines, but because the vehicle
runs on tracks, allowing the conducting apparatus to be fixed to the tram’s
roof, they are much less prone to breaking down.]
Now, it may be that Richard Prebble was simply confused
about the modes of public transport he used in his youth. Then again, he may
not have been confused at all. What isn’t in dispute is that the opponents of
the plans for a light-rail-based public transport system in Auckland are
forever using the word “tram”.
The reason for this is obvious. In the public’s mind trams
are cumbersome, out-of-date vehicles from the days when men sported trilby hats
and women wore ankle-length skirts. Prebble’s Boy on the Tram story plays directly into these negative public
stereotypes. Regardless of whether or not his political anecdote is true, it
is, as always, bloody clever.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 15 May 2018.
