Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Call on government to restore the ability to levy regional petrol taxes (with the income ring-fenced for regional public transport projects determined by local government themselves)
Given that that particular measure went with almost dizzying speed when National came to power - and the consequent damage to Auckland's public transport spending required quite the prostrations before the Minister of Trucks before we were, oh so graciously, granted a loan to get our trains electrified - you can't blame Brown for not thinking it's a call that's going to get a fair hearing.
Joyce pre-judged the CBD rail link without seeing a business case and has kept up the sceptical tone about its worth ever since, even in the face of high-quality BCRs. In Brown's shoes I'd be very hesitant to waste my breath on a man whose disdain for public transport is worn very firmly on his sleeve.
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On an "up" note, Tracey Barnett manages quite a nice line of "This Yank thinks y'all are awesome" about how Kiwis generally responded to the quake by just getting shit done and helping out all and sundry.
As individuals, as a community, as a nation together, your response to this earthquake has been nothing short of astounding excellence. New Zealand may have experienced its darkest day, but it was followed by its finest moments.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Emma Hart,
Auckland, which will be the prime destination for many of the IDPs from Christchurch
Wellington. At least for tech businesses anyway, 'prime' is Wellington. It's many Chch people's 'second city'.
Ahem. Wellington is probably not as attractive to refugees from the Christchurch earthquake as it once was.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yes funny how they decided to do that article at exactly the peak time for rentals when university students come back from where ever they go and run around Auckland trying to find flats.
Actually, peak time was the week before last. First semester started Monday for most students, as you know. Having this time last year been in a flat that was rated attractively for students, I'm pretty familiar with their renting activity trends.
Plus that ignores the people who had been searching since around Christmas, which is very definitely not peak student season, and still not found anything. Dismiss the stories based on timing if you want, but there were data points that were well outside your derisive snort of "student time".
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Ick. Don't. It's depressing enough thinking about how I won't be able to afford a house even vaguely close to the city for at least another two years. If I'm lucky.
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One thing I would find really helpful would be a graphic of incomes by suburb for Christchurch. I've heard of Fendalton, probably in the same way that people in Christchurch have heard of Remuera and we've all heard of Kandallah, but many of these names mean nothing to me. I don't know which are the "good" suburbs and which are the "bad", in the same way that I wouldn't expect someone from Christchurch to be able to order by rough social status the suburbs of Mangere East, Glendene, Unsworth Heights, and Ellerslie.
People talk of "the eastern suburbs" like we're meant to know where they fit in the social pecking order, and rattle off suburb names as information - except that they're just data for many of us, lacking as they are in context.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Greg Dawson,
gravity is not particularly well understood atm, so sure, maybe infinite. Solar radiation has a pretty clear end date of the point where the sun goes boom though
Yes, but nothing that humanity does (at least as far as solar radiation goes) will cause the source of those to diminish at a greater or lesser pace.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to George Darroch,
If there's a city that could take that without blinking, it's Auckland
Except that, actually, we're totally blinking. We can't even handle our natural increase at present, as witnessed by the situation with rental property - people just can't find any. Granny did a few articles about a month ago about how tough it is to get rental accommodation in Auckland at the moment, including 200 people viewing one property in half an hour and another woman who'd been searching for five weeks and not found anywhere. Not sure how far out that situation reaches, and I know a couple of friends found a place in Titirangi inside a month, but that's without thousands of extra people suddenly entering the market.
That's one of the things that's got me really worried about the talk of focussing everything on Christchurch. Auckland's struggling now, never mind in 18-24 months' time when it's finally possible to get tradies to move back north. What's going to happen to the cost of using the services of the few who'll remain in the interim? What's going to happen to our acute housing shortage when many of the people needed to build more houses have moved to Christchurch and we're trying to accommodate IDPs who're moving to Auckland?
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
relocation of people
Would require that money be put into the areas to which they would be relocated, and we've already established that Auckland, which will be the prime destination for many of the IDPs from Christchurch with or without official government assistance, is on its own for improving infrastructure to support the refugees. Potentially there's a multi-percent jump in the long-term population going to hit Auckland over coming months, but heaven forbid that any money be spent on Auckland.
If there's no money for Auckland, there's probably no money for anyone else, either, even where they're in worse positions to cope with floods of refugees. -
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Unfortunately like so much else with Mr Brownlee, the cake is a lie.
That's a bit rough. The cake is real, but there's no need to consider the long-term sustainability of producing cake and we should look at whether the standards to which the cake was produced couldn't be eased a little. For the purposes of ensuring cake is produced more quickly, of course, since quantity is more important than quality.