Posts by Russell Brown
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Up Front: Five, in reply to Tess Rooney,
sort of feel guilty about Christchurch. I lived there from age 1 to my late 30s, (I grew up in the east) we moved to Greymouth in 2007 and so missed the quakes. I feel guilty that I avoided my hometown’s suffering.
I've felt something like that too. In a positive sense, it has reconnected me with the city where I grew up.
I think the fact that Public Address was able to be a space for Christchurch people to talk is the most important thing that's happened on the website.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The great full eight, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
*That’s the comic-writing Warren Ellis, not the musician one in The Bad Seeds and Grinderman.
Guess which one I immediately thought of?
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Hard News: Friday Music: The great full eight, in reply to LIISA,
Hi, the Apple Pie Bed embed is missing (for me).
Thanks. my internet was behaving a bit oddly yesterday – I thought it had loaded. Fixed now!
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Speaker: Correcting Auckland 2040's…, in reply to Swan,
dont mean to be argumentative, and obviously you know your street better than I do, but I find the argument that we cant have any more development because unpriced kerb parking is already full (in general) a bit hard to swallow. Yellow lines on one side would fix this problem by the sound of it.
Don't think I've ever seen a suburban cul de sac marked up like that.
But it's not just parking. Kids play in the street at the end of the cul de sac. Apart from half the duplex at the top, which is fairly itinerant, the HNZ tenancies are stable and well-integrated with the neighbourhood these days and we look out for the old people.
As I noted in our submission, I'm not confident of HNZ taking up the duty of care for potentially five or six times as many tenants, given that we almost never see them now. When old George across the road panicked because a neighbourhood phone outage disabled his medical alert button, it was me who called Telecom to see what they could do, me who loaned him a mobile that his number could divert to.
So this isn't some nimby zoning fear for the future, it's the reality of living with a landowner that wants its own properties given an anomalous zoning on which it seems likely to act pretty rapidly.
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Speaker: Correcting Auckland 2040's…, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Except they’re building a Day Care not a Kindegarden, but that’s a whole other story…
Latest situation is that it's going to be both. Which seems reasonable given that there was demand for both.
Not such fun for immediate neighbours of course, and it's going to considerably increase traffic in the surrounding area (which includes our little street and more especially the intersection with Meola Road) but it did have to go somewhere.
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Speaker: Correcting Auckland 2040's…, in reply to Swan,
Im not saying it is its main purpose. But the Ministry of Ed owns a lot of property and has budget constraints. If it wants to sell off a slice of an underused field to pay for classroom renovations thats a choice they can make.
This isn't the case in the central suburbs, though – certainly not those west of Queen Street. I wrote about the local school capacity crisis in 2011.
That said, I'm happy for Unitec to rationalise its facilities and develop the parts of its rambling site it no longer needs. That makes sense.
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Speaker: Correcting Auckland 2040's…, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
As Russell says above,
anomalous and inappropriate
, not to mention against planning best practice.
The main problem with what Housing NZ is (still) seeking in our street isn't height, it's that there actually isn't enough room in the cul sac. It's already often only wide enough for one car to pass when residents are parked up.
I would fully expect Housing NZ to redevelop at least two of its properties under MHS (one's a small house on a large section), although it might also decide to cash up and take the millions. But MHU is too much. MHU has been significantly expanded in Point Chev in the PAUP, but it's all on or near main roads.
There is no justification for schools in Central Auckland that have recently had ~100 million$ in new building work completed and are bursting at the seams to be rezoned as residential.
There's critical pressure on school capacity in Western bays as it is. The ministry has actually done the opposite in Point Chev – finally releasing the pressure on the local primary by skittling several adjacent houses around the corner from us to make a new site for the kindergarten currently co-located at the school.
Of course, it would have helped had the ministry allowed Point Chev primary to build two-storey blocks like it wanted to several years ago.
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Speaker: Correcting Auckland 2040's…, in reply to Marc C,
I see two levels, if there is a garage under the ground, or half under the ground in perhaps one home, that does not equal a three storey residential home, I would think, certainly not for the majority on the photo.
To be fair, all the garages are at street level, not underground.
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Speaker: The Shaken Generation, in reply to Moz,
I wholeheartedly agree with that. We should start at the top, by demanding that the prime minister produce 10% more prime ministering on 10% less money, every year.
I believe you've got to the nub of it, Moz.
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The Herald editorial is here if anyone wants to read it. And it's a truly pissweak effort at editorial-writing.
This paragraph:
The point, economists will say, is to put public hospitals under the sort of financial discipline that works in the private sector. The so-called "required savings" should really be called a return on operating capital. In theory, managers of a public service should not need that obligation in order to ensure their operations are not wasting money.
But in real life, human nature does need this sort of demand. We tend not to worry about waste and inefficiencies unless we have to find savings.
Could we get a citation up in here? If "economists will say" that, could we perhaps name one who does say that? And if we're declaring what happens "in real life", might it be an idea to note a real-life example?
It really is the most awful example of faux reasoning. It tries to invoke evidence without the bother of actually canvassing any evidence.
And it concludes thus:
Labour's health spokeswoman, Annette King, says boards are taking the easiest option by not filling vacancies. She is probably right.
It is easier to make do with fewer people than to negotiate more efficient rosters to make maximum use of equipment or maintain a culture in which all professional staff are accountable for the resources they use.
But these are the sort of disciplines that perhaps can extract better value for the taxpayers' outlay. It has to come from the top where the demand will never be popular.
It all seems so easy when you put it that way, doesn't it? The author might have, you know, done some work on how DHBs actually do manage resources. He might have told us something. Instead it looks like nothing so much as someone carrying water for Jonathan Coleman.
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