Fare’s fair

It was rush hour but even so $98.40 for a taxi far from the centre of Auckland to the airport seemed pretty expensive.

However, I wasn’t going to argue with a meter, handed the driver $100 and was surprised to get more than $20 back in change.

I said I thought he’d given me too much. He said, no the change was correct, the fare was $76.60 and he’d given me $23.40.

I said, “But the meter says $94.80”.

He looked surprised then looked where I was looking, grinned and said, “That’s the radio station.”

The taxi driver test

The taxi driver who picked us up after the National Party conference yesterday was from Pakistan.

He’d been in New Zealand for 10 years and had voted Labour because that’s the party he knew, the only one which had led a government since he’d been here.

But he liked John Key and he especially liked the government’s stance on crime.

He had come to New Zealand because it was much safer than his homeland and he wanted it to stay that way.

He also had a problem he hoped we could help him with because we were from the government.

We explained we were only volunteers, not MPs, but he explained the problem anyway.

It was a convoluted story which started with alterations to his house and finished with a $9,000 bill from the Auckland City Council for a few metres of pipe.

We told him to contact John Banks.