A journey to Wellington and a fuel disaster

Saturday, 27 June 2026

Trouble struck on a Sunday afternoon, during a refuelling stop in Bulls.

Andrew Johnstone is a Waikato man with a farming background.

OPINION: A couple of weeks back I went down to Wellington. I was paying homage to a deceased friend and the plan was to drive down on a Sunday, do the things that I’d planned to do, and head home on the Monday afternoon.

It was going to be a marathon, but it would also save me an extra night’s accommodation. I’m prone to making decisions based on the money I think I’ll save, and from that perspective, it was an excellent plan.

Around 4pm on the Sunday afternoon I stopped to refuel in Bulls. I pulled into the forecourt and it was only when I was returning the bowser handle to the pump that I caught the whiff of petrol and realised what I’d done.

As Andrew Johnstone went to put the boswer handle back, he realised what he’d done.

Back in the 4th century BCE, a Chinese philosopher called Lao Tzu said, “Yield and overcome; bend and be straight”. He wasn’t wrong. There was no point being upset about it, so I got a coffee, returned to the forecourt and stood looking at the car.

A bloke wandered over and asked if I’d put the wrong fuel in. Before I could respond he explained that it happened more often than you’d think. I’d hear that several times over the next three hours. It was their way of saying, “Don’t feel bad about it, we all do stupid things from time to time,” and it was both kind and reassuring.

Before he wandered off, he asked if I’d rung my insurance company. I hadn’t, so that’s what I did. There wasn’t much point, but while I was on the phone it occurred to me that I’d better get the car off the forecourt.

I knew enough not to start it, but to get it into neutral I had to turn on the ignition. I’d hardly started pushing when a half-dozen blokes appeared out of nowhere and threw their hands in. As I said, Kiwis are kind.

Eventually I accepted that there were no mechanics available in Bulls on a Sunday afternoon and, out of ideas, I asked ChatGPT for help.

Andrew Johnstone found himself thinking of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu ’s phrase: ‘Yield and overcome; bend and be straight’.

In a jiffy, I was speaking to Luke, a mobile mechanic who lived about 40 minutes away.

“Did you turn the ignition on?”

Apparently the fuel pump starts when you turn the key, so he’d have to swing by Palmerston North to get me a new pump filter.

It took him an hour to get the car up and running and by the time I’d refuelled, I’d spent so much money that I could have stayed in the swankiest hotel in Wellington for the best part of a week.

“Yield and overcome; bend and be straight.”

‘I was not mentally prepared for the challenges of the section of State Highway One between Bulls and Wellington,’ Johnstone writes.

In another life I used to rack up around 80,000km a year and was well practised in the vagaries of the nation’s roads. These days, most of my driving is between Cambridge, Hamilton and Auckland and, accustomed to expressway comfort, I was not mentally prepared for the challenges of the section of State Highway One between Bulls and Wellington.

Basically a two-lane country road without median barriers, lighting and decent signage, it made for precarious night-time driving.

On the way home, Federated Farmers president Wayne Langford was being interviewed on RNZ.

How bad is State Highway One? Considering the complexities of the terrain and our low population base, we aren’t doing too badly. The World Economic Forum ranks our roading network 48th out of 141 countries. A mix of modern expressways and motorways, two-lane country roads and legacy highways, State Highway One isn’t the worst, but it’s far from the best and is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the state of NZ in 2026—adequate.

Like so many things in New Zealand, our roads suffer from a poverty of ambition and an irrational fear of spending money. Now imagine the opposite: a continuous four-lane expressway from the Far North to the deep south. One section opening, another under construction, a third getting underway and a fourth in planning. A nation-building project built on a simple principle: continue till it’s done.

But that’s way too big a dream for Luxon’s NZ, a risk-averse accountant with a nervous comb-over. Which is not to say it can’t be done. Cost aside, these sorts of infrastructure projects are fun. They engender a sense of national pride, pump oodles of money into the economy and provide manifest future benefit.

The RMA has become a consultant’s wet dream, Johnstone writes - but changes are planned.

At some stage during the drive home I listened to the president of Federated Farmers being interviewed on RNZ. He was laying out the organisation’s election wish list and making a case for their most prized dream—less farmer oversight.

Claiming that farmers had planted more trees than anyone else, he offered this as proof of just how much farmers cared about the environment and how they could be trusted to do the right things with water and effluent without a cadre of bureaucrats getting in their way.

It was a fickle argument that set the alarm bells ringing. The current government has given the Feds everything they asked for and I’m not sure that’s always a good thing. We might have revolutionised agricultural emissions, but rather than adapt and innovate, the Feds convinced the government that it was all too hard. They got what they wanted and called it a victory. It wasn’t.

The other big issue, according to Wayne Langford, was the cost of resource consents, and on this issue I was in full agreement. The RMA has become a consultant’s wet dream, a shower of money without end, and it’s not just farmers who are paying; it’s every sector of the economy.

The other day a friend was wondering why we can’t build roads as fast as the Chinese do. Lots of reasons, not least of which is the RMA. Environmental protection and democratic consultation have become an enormously expensive and time-consuming process that can hold up roading projects for years.

Infrastructure development in NZ used to be “rip, shit and bust,” but with the RMA came new perspectives and we are the thoughtful and inventive environmental stewards we are today because of it. The problem isn’t the principles that underpin the RMA; it’s the bureaucracy and consultancy industry that have grown up around it.

I got home about 10pm and was hardly out of the car when Meg came running in from the paddock, making a meow that I interpreted as, “Where have you been?” It was good to be home and, as I stepped inside and said goodbye to the night, I caught a glimpse of vehicle headlights flickering silently on the nearby Waikato Expressway, the road that we should all have.

(Who has planted the most trees in NZ? Forestry workers, whose work includes one of the largest planted forests in the Southern Hemisphere—the 205,000-hectare Kaingaroa Forest.)