Posts by Duncan McKenzie
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If asked, I'm voting for Nort and Sout Islands. Got to get rid of the surplus aitches.
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My Lucinda Williams experience was not quite as positive as many of yours - I was seated close to the back of the stalls just under the balcony. It seems that this area has difficult acoustics - by the time the sound reached my ears all subtlety was lost and things were a bit fog-horn-like. A pity - i wanted to enjoy it and I am familiar with and do much like her recorded music.
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Who decides the resource consents?
Current practice among many councils is:
Low level consents, not requiring hearing, will be decided by council officers, using specific delegated authority.
A mid-level application, with a hearing, may be determined by local councillors/community board members. They will get standard meeting allowances.
High level applications are often heard by panels that have a mix of councillors and commissioners. Commissioners are professional people, lawyers, planning consultants or former councillors, who have passed commissioner exams, and who get well paid for their work (at the applicant's expense).
The big advantage of commissioners is that they are seen as professional and impartial and may bring specialist skills to a hearings panel. However, no-one elected them and they do cost.
An applicant with a lot at stake will often chose a Commissioner hearing over a local councillors' hearing, despite having to pay for it. This is because they feel that decisions are not being made by people with political ambitions or a constituency to please.
My guess is that things will not change much in the new super city - except all those local board members will be hanging out for something meaningful to do.
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Here's a cynic's view.
The last thing central government wants is a functional Auckland that knows what it wants and has enough clout (and the funding) to get it. The current arrangements let CG hand out the pork in a manner that suits its interests. CG can always claim a lack of mandate for inconvenient projects.
While the new super-city might be able to claim greater unity in its requests, there will still be dependence on Wellington for much of the money. There appears to be no alternative to rates as a source of funding. The proposed fuel tax was stopped (and along with it, the projects that a dangerously united Auckland intended to fund out of it, to be replaced by an amended list that better suits CG interests). With Rodney stirring along a low-level rates revolt, rates as a source will not grow significantly. So the super-city will still depend on Wellington for the allocation of pork.
I also suspect the proposed structure will be so unpopular that it, along with any meaningful reform, will be tossed out.
And the status quo will prevail.
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Re the Royal Commission's report.
My prediction is that the current government will try to bury the recommendations of the report, or at the most, significantly water them down. The ostensible reason will be the loss of democratic representation, but the real reason will be that a super-city that contains a third of NZ's population would terrify a conservative central government. The new city might demand a revenue base that is wider than rating. (The most recent attempt at that was the regional petrol tax and that's been seen off). It might then want more autonomy in determining and meeting needs. That means that central govt politicians don't get to decide who gets the pork.
So expect to see some cosmetic changes, more central government directed "co-ordination"*, but no real change, with the potential loss in local democracy being cited as a reason for retaining the status quo.
Anyone serious about having the new proposals adopted needs to seriously address local representation issues, for example by proposing a larger number of 2nd-tier councils than the current six.
*In the early 1980s, I worked for a branch of the Ministry of Works which serviced the Auckland Public Expenditure Committee, a co-ordination group which was the then National Govt's attempt to hold off pressure for amalgamation of the 25-odd city, borough and county councils that made up Auckland. That was done by making the local mayors feel important. Expect to see something similar.
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Makikihi
At least it was (and still is) bigger than Otaio, a few km up the road, where I came from.
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Liquor outlets - it's all a matter of class.
I worked as a planner for the old Waitemata City in the 1970s when it changed from being "dry" to "Trust Control". Before that time the area was not really dry - liquor used to be sold in a whole array of clubs - sports clubs, cozzy clubs, workingmen's clubs, the RSA... It seemed every park had a sports club building, the major feature of which was a bar. (This included the New Lynn under-14 league club - the kids did the running around, their parents did the drinking - it may still be going). The club system had the perceived advantage that members had some control over who could join and therefore could keep the riff-raff out.
Anyway, we had to find some means of accommodating the brave new world of liquor outlets. We invented the concept of the community cafe - rumored to exist in France but never really seen. We needn't have bothered - the Trust built three booze barns and a few bottle stores and put their feet up.
I'm still in two minds about Trusts - they distributed fire extinguishers, torches and smoke alarms to the population and funded the Waitakere Stadium which got built with none of the drama that faced other stadiums (actual and proposed) in Auckland. But that's something a community tax on alcohol sales could do. And this appears to be at the expense of pretty dreary and widely-spaced outlets in the West. Interestingly, the supermarkets and liquor trade managed to initiate a referendum on whether trust control should be dropped in favour of the free market - and were soundly thrashed.
The local Pak n Save has found a way around it - they have a defined beer and wine sales area with separate till, ostensibly operated by the licensing trust but selling at PnS's (considerably lower) prices. And the local Foodtown in New Lynn has a separate wine shop (they purchased a heritage wine-shop license).
I am not entirely convinced that the free market in the West would lead to the opening of those funky little bars, cafes and specialist wineshops beloved of the residents of Grey Lynn. My theory is that these need a sophisticated and well-off clientele to prosper, and these people tend to be concentrated in only a few parts of town. Elsewhere, the free market will be the usual array of hole-in-the-wall liquor stores, supermarkets and chain restaurants.
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I went to the Gillian Welch concert a couple of years ago. As she chatted to the audience, she revealed that she had eaten her first ever kiwi that day. There was something of a gasp from the audience, before we worked out that she was not talking about people or endangered birds.
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Its not so much being able to get the names, as getting access to the pages and pages of on-line discussion that could be attached to those names.
Not that there is going to be the same interest in the alleged crime of a poor person from South Auckland as there is in a top cop or TV personality.
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I think I can see where Judge Harvey is coming from.
A year down the track, the case comes to court. At the end of the first day, with the case unfolding at its usual snail's pace, a juror goes home and googles the defendants' names just to remind him or her self what went on at the time.
And there it all is, the case analysed down to its last detail, the complainant's credibility scrutinised, the defendant declared guilty or not guilty, and sentence passed - all by people unencumbered by evidence but endowed with strong opinions. And that's been going on for the last year.
Well at least that would be the case if the defendant's name was Tony Veitch.