Nickie Muir: Bridging loan for new dress

Right before a local body election it must be really good to open something exciting such as a bridge.

I love the clean lines and the beautiful fish hook. The British designer has done a really good job and at least it will stop all the mud splashing on those cars coming from Whangarei Heads. We'll have architectural clairvoyance from Austria soon enough. All we need is a Japanese bath-house and a roller-coaster and we'll be cosmopolitan.

And it is beautiful, even if it was 30m, half paid for by rate-payers. So I wanted to party with the people on the bridge. It reminded me a little of the Menem years in Argentina - every time the natives got restless another football stadium would appear and there'd be parades and cavalcades and everyone would forget about that boring old fart the IMF wagging her finger at everyone.

And it would be fun - the MP and the local caudillos would be wearing hard hats and high fiving the guys who'd actually been doing the hard graft and there would be speeches about growth and economic development - by the many well paid organisations in charge of that as a substitute for the real thing.

With a bit of luck it would cement in the minds of the populace that the old council crew really rock and drown out the voices of any new candidates for council who may have something better to offer. Except I felt uneasy.

What if ... the Latin bought me a new dress and it cost a thousand bucks. A really beautiful dress with a British designed fish hook on the front. He bought it now, he said because it would be so much more expensive later and his best mate Stephen Joyce said he'd give him half so it was really a discount dress. Would I say "Thanks darling let the mortgage be dammed?" Or go berserk because I don't have engagements that warrant a thousand dollar dress right now? And if Steve is giving away money I'd quite like the deferred projects done and get the bridge later.

But stormwater and dusty roads are hardly sexy. I'd take the dress. And even though Whangarei came out as a "consistent cellar-dweller" on Larry Mitchell's fiscally naughty or nice league at $160 million worth of debt, I feel perfectly safe that we're not going all Kaipara mainly because mayoral candidate Warwick Syers confidently holds up the latest Standard and Poors announcement giving the WDC an AA rating.

Except in February this year the US government slapped a $5 billion lawsuit on S and P for highly rating companies that all later failed and practically accused them of being at the root of the GFC. That was right after 13 Australian local councils won a multi million dollar lawsuit against them, when investments the company had rated highly lost 93 per cent of their value.

The crux of the lawsuit is that S and P's own analysts questioned the accuracy of their ratings system and the executives ignored them. But then I'm not an accountant and it is a mighty fine bridge. And when else will I get to wear that dress?