by Russel Norman
As usual a mixed result in local body elections. Auckland City Council falling into the hands of Citizens and Ratepayers is bad news for anyone who cares about sustainability. Cits and Rats are responsible for the unsustainable urban sprawl that Auckland has now as they are the continuation of those who dismantled public transport post war and created the current transport chaos. But there is now quite a strong more unified left/green group who will help keep the pressure on the more-motorways crowd. The Auckland Regional Council is still a bit unclear. There is not a clear anti-sustainability majority, but nor does the pro-public transport group seem to have maintained a majority.
Wellington did well with Iona Pannett and Celia Wade Brown getting onto City Council and Paul Bruce onto regional council.
And Canterbury Regional Council has had a pretty good result for sustainability – especially with Eugenie Sage and Rik Tindall getting in, along with some others. Water is a big issue in Canterbury surprise surprise.
Unfortunately Mike Ward didn’t get the mayoralty in Nelson.
There were a few good results in Palmerston North (Chris Teo Sherell) and Kapiti (Lyndy MacIntyre).
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Sun, October 14th, 2007
Tags: environment
More posts by Russel Norman | more about Russel Norman
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
There you go again Russel.
Auckland City Council falling into the hands of Citizens and Ratepayers is bad news for anyone who cares about sustainability.
As I keep on saying the centre right are the ones with the sustainable policies because they will provide economic sustainability from which environmental sustainability will flow. If we fall off the bottom of the OECD ladder, as we are likely to do with our present Tax us rich and spend us poor governments then you can kiss goodbye to your environmental ideals and principles and we loose any chance of helping others less fortunate preserve their environment. But keep supporting the left for short term gain and long term pain, at least I will be proved right.
Cits and Rats are responsible for the unsustainable urban sprawl that Auckland has now as they are the continuation of those who dismantled public transport post war and created the current transport chaos.
- No, we are a democracy so the voter is responsible for what has happened. In fact it is the central government voter that has consistently wanted more, more more now now now and the expedient central governments have quite happily gone along with it instead of telling them the truth. The urban sprawl is arguably the result of the left insisting that everyone is entitled to their quarter acre and house price inflation and high profits for rabid developers are usually greater under left leaning governments of which most have been post war except your beloved labour in the 80s.
But there is now quite a strong more unified left/green group who will help keep the pressure on the more-motorways crowd.
QED everyone, your words betray you. Despite protestations on this blog to the contrary the left and the red-greens go together, hand in hand, horse and carriage,… But keep talking because I am a swinging voter and I’ve got to decide whether to go with Nats or a new blue-green party. I’m a bit scared of the nats over a couple of issues (urbans sprawl and foreshaw and seabed in particular) so you are helping me make up my mind …..
The Auckland Regional Council is still a bit unclear. There is not a clear anti-sustainability majority, but nor does the pro-public transport group seem to have maintained a majority.
Oh well, at least there are some very bright pro-sustainability C&Rs on there.
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Kevin – it’s important to realize the fact that various individuals within the Greens share different ideas on where in the political spectrum the party aligns with.
I stand by my statement that the Greens are not a left-wing party. The party has four principles, none of which have anything to do with the political spectrum.
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The devil is in the implementation of your “principles” in a globalised economy. The greens and labour lean towards the idea of equality of outcome being able to produce the utopia you seek. With a large faction being wedded to that concept in the short term, even if it could be implemented in the long term, I cannot see how say a labour/green alliance could successfully pull it off.
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Great result for Auckland, my only wish now would be for John Banks to ditch his new “nice guy” image and get stuck in.
At least he has promised to do away with all the PC rubbish.
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He has, look at the sunday star times. He’s ditched the handout to Eden Park and refused to go to Monday’s Powhiri until he’s sworn in.
I missed getting onto the ADHB for C&R by 100 nominal votes to Bob Tizzard.
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Or herald on sunday. The boy racers will be pissed off.
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Congrat’s to Iona, Celia and Paul, well done Green Team.
Honourable mention to Tane in his first outing, Ohariu is a tough call.
Woohoo up the line to Lyndy and Chris!
Now the work really begins
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Did anyone quiz the candidates on some basic issues such as peak oil and global warming???
What worries me isn’t those who didn’t vote but those who did…. they must know something the rest of us didn’t???? I bet the Rotarians knew who too vote for, and the building industry…… This is another failure of democracy.
There is a world of difference between (say) a peak oiler and a cornucopian property developer…
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Kevin Says:
October 14th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
As I keep on saying the centre right are the ones with the sustainable policies because they will provide economic sustainability from which environmental sustainability will flow
…………………………………….
No one has much of a workable economic policy without energy. except that the alternatives to using a lot of energy are conservation (passive solar heating) and getting back to basics so that “the best things (really are) free”.
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– No, we are a democracy so the voter is responsible for what has happened.
—————
Except that there is often a heavy influence of interest groups. Beer Wine and Spirits lobbiest had her own parliamentary pass (which is rather sobering).
I see the political parties as being big lumps of dough with bits you want and bits you don’t and knobs and switches which don’t work.
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i dont care, i read the pamphlet they all seemed to say the same.
bunch of inbreeds
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From Kiwiblogg
“# Owen McShane Says: [developer, cornucopian, climate change opponent...... also candid and well qualified]
October 14th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
It is difficult to “read the tea-leaves? when having to peer into so many cups.
However, I am familiar with the workings of several councils round the country and it seems to me that the “upsets? have occurred where the voters have recognised that the bureaucrats are out of control and running riot with interventions and grand spending and are hoping that a new Mayor and a few new councillors will be able to change things by reining them in.
This is not easy but can be done. But the newly elected have to realise that the bureaucrats have been preparing for such changes and will immediately try to stop their efforts in their tracks.
Certainly, the most interventionist councils have seen the biggest turnovers. (speaking about those I know about.)”
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Did anyone see the word intervention on one of those smiling election hoardings?????
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‘All the people who didn’t vote were the pot smokers, disconnected and aleinated’, said a freind of mine this morning. Perhaps an exaggeration but there is a definate trend there (witness the dwindling support for the alcp despite the huge consumer base in NZ – circa half million)
The greens are wrong to write off the drug-law and order (crime reduction, genuine community safety, harm reduction etc etc) issue as electorally dangerous. There is far more POTential in this and the remedial aspects of hemp than given credit for (remember where the green landslide vote in1999 came from? Russel you missed that Cannabis got you’s elected).
How about some advocacy on the real social justice issue Greens – consider your own policy (decriminalisation) as integral to fixing whats broken in NZ – there are bucketloads of votes there but youve got to cultivate them- regards
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Decriminalization seems to have worked very well in the increasing number of places it is implemented.
It takes the fortune in illegal, non-taxed money out of criminal pockets.
It frees the Police to concentrate on crime that has Victims (pot is rated less dangerous than coffee and tea as a psychotropic agent)
South Australia & Adelaide made six plants per home legal – they had to drop it down to two because of all the interest from interstate buyers. General crime rates have fallen.
Same situation in the Australian Capital Territories (home of the Federal Government!!!). No resulting crime wave.
In England,Medical THC is available in pill form as a pain treatment. As a replacement for dangerous, physically addictive medicines (morphine etc etc) it is generally agreed to be a big success.
I think the problem lies in the Kiwi psyche – a refusal to stand up for, not only one’s rights, but also what is right, inevitably leads to the most unhelpful views being promulgated.
No Guts, No Gain.
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Why don’t you try this out on the Pot debate>>>>>
* We spend much of our lives debating with each other—and living in the consequences of those debates. But how often do we do it well? And can the process be improved?
* Public debates tend to be complex; with multiple data sources and perspectives and conflicting demands and values. Even relatively straightforward arguments can challenge our capacity to hold all the pertinent factors clearly in our minds. And, in complex debates, the volume of information and arguments can seem like an overwhelming obstacle to someone trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of the essential arguments advanced by all sides.
* Public debate is all too often characterized by repetitive contributions, digressions, argumentative fallacies, rhetorical flourishes, manipulative framing, obfuscation and personal attacks that result in a high noise-to-signal ratio and confusion rather than clarity.
* Conventional media reporting of public policy debates often struggles with the challenge of conveying nuanced, reasoned positions in a compressed linear form, when simple heated oppositions deliver a more dramatic and rewarding effect.
* This, in turn, makes it harder for established public figures to think tentatively and creatively in public about new policy approaches and to acknowledge strengths and common ground in opponents’ positions.
* The human tendencies toward homophily (mixing with like-minded people) and group polarization (the self-reinforcing movement towards extreme positions in groups of like-minded people) can, if left unchecked, limit the diversity of arguments heard and stifle the creative discovery of new options in the clash of diverse arguments.
* Moreover, the significance people attach to arguments is often shaped by broader frameworks of value and belief, which are in themselves debatable; making the pursuit of a comprehensive appreciation of major debates harder still.
Our approach
* Our goal is to create a new kind of public service that enables local and global communities of people to think together by collaboratively building and editing comprehensive and succinct maps of complex debates that accurately present all sides of the debate from a neutral standpoint, free of repetitive clutter and ‘noise’.
* All aspects of the debate maps—both their content and structure—are continuously open to revision, refinement, comment, and evaluation by anyone who wants to join the community of thought. Each map is a cumulative work in progress that can be edited and expanded just like a wiki.
* The maps are multi-dimensional to reflect the nuances of real debate rather than being limited to one dimensional for and against arguments—and can be clustered into overlapping debates.
* Readers and editors of the maps can explore the top-level structure of debates and delve onto specific strands or sub-structures of a debate, without losing sight of the overall semantic whole.
* RSS feeds are available to keep everyone up to date with changes as a debate evolves, each element on a map has it’s own comments section to allow for open discussion and story-telling in addition to structured reasoning, excerpts of maps can be shared with other websites/blogs, and debates can be printed for offline reference or to create the framework for a written report.
* The objective with Debatemapper is not so much an absolutism of rationality as a transparency of rationality; creating a means for people to collaboratively capture and display all of the arguments pertinent to a debate clearly and fairly so that all of the participants in the debate have the chance to see the debate as a whole and to understand how the positions they hold exist within that debate.
* Although consensus can emerge from such a process, not least because it promotes the discovery of previously unidentified options, our hope is as much that the people who continue to disagree will do so on the basis of an enriched understanding of the reasons for their disagreement and having had the chance to test each other’s reasoning to the fullest.
https://debatemapper.com/sf/home.aspx
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I don’t like Banks’ “concrete the planet” philosophy, but at least he has shown some guts in the past over animal welfare. Maybe the ACC will be less gung-ho about killing dogs with him in charge.
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JH’s debatemapper [and other reductionist approaches] fall way short on resolving ‘complex’ issues like cannabis law reform. Why, because it is not complex at all. All it requires is effective advocacy. An in that, the GREENS have fallen way short.
If Israel can legalise personal possession of cocaine, heroin, lsd, mdma, and hashish (as they have done) then it is clear, we haven’t had the required conversation. On that there is no dispute. It’s not about what rule is the one that cracks the nut, or who came up with it. It is about creating a community of consensus that change is necessary, now.
When this occurs, the tensions are resolved and change becomes inevitable.
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PS: It’s about ‘participation’ and currently in New Zealand there is a massive demograph that dont vote (local or national) because no one is flying the flag for them.
PSS: “Is Nandor still in parliament?”
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Yair Blair – Think so….he’s just changed appearance – gone is the ‘elton john’s new wig with dreads’ look – gone for something altogether more down home and kiwi
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I don’t think so Blair, it depends how ideas are held in your briain (the neuron pathways and their strengths…. Approaches like this force people to take the path less trodden. I’d like to give it a go, anyway.
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