SPECIAL REPORT FROM THE NEWSROOM: Luxon-led government gets economy back on track

Minister of Transport finds trillions of dollars of potential savings

It’s good news at last for a government struggling to find the cash to fulfil all the promises made in the last budget as Transport supremo Simeon Brown has uncovered a source of extra funds – road cones.

The Minister of Transport outlines his plans to trim costs, save money and have three biscuits with his bedtime milky cup.

Last Thursday, the Minister, currently on leave from high school doing work experience as a Minister of the Crown, spoke to a select committee scrutinising ways of obfuscating just how badly the Coalition is performing. He advised them that New Zealand was experiencing an “infestation” of road cones, on an unimaginable scale that nonetheless hasn’t stopped him imagining it might be a safety issue.

The Minister believes a surfeit of road cones is actually making road construction and safety more difficult than it needs to be. “I’ve received advice that in some cases it’s actually more dangerous putting out the road cones than it is actually doing the work,” Brown said, according to a sentence we just pinched from RNZ. “So we actually just have to take a safety at a reasonable cost approach, rather than a safety at any cost approach.”

The Minister went on to say that NZTA, NZ’s preeminent supplier of outdated road information and potholes, had no real idea just how many road cones there were in the country, what condition they were in or even their first names. NZTA sources, speaking on condition we didn’t quote them, told WWNews there were around 27 trillion orange cones, most of which were not perched on top of trees or statues. “That represents a book value of around $12billion,” one source said, which would, if unneeded cones were disposed of on the open market, get the Minister of Finance out of a considerable hole even if some road users then drove into other considerable and unmarked holes.

According to Transport Ministry policy advisers, surplus road cones could be sold, at cost, to homeless people and others looking for ways to anchor cheap plastic sheeting and tents against the cold winds forecast for the next two years.