Posts by Duncan McKenzie
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the tie/shirt wearing guy with the backpack on with the "one less car" covering in your picture Russell is Daniel Newcombe who works at Auckland City Council
Surely not the same Daniel Newcombe who let the Waterview/Mt Albert residents so badly down with his report to the ACC Transport Committee on the Waterview connection? Or are there two of them at the Council?
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Can someone help me here? We have a securities commission, a commerce commission, a serious fraud office, all of which have interlocking responsibilities and none of which have up until now have distinguished themselves with much action against the finance rogues. Two of them are or have been headed up by women, (and wasn't one of them not reappointed?). Is this new commission the consolation prize - benefit cheats being so much easier game than finance company cheats?
And then there are the trustees who supposedly oversaw the finance companies on behalf of investors. Perhaps they are being lined up for new jobs investigating something else - after all, they don't seem to have stretched themselves at their old jobs.
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I think you'll find the Waikaraka cycleway is in Auckland, not Manukau City.
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My late father in law, southern man to the core, told me "people down here don't think much of Aucklanders". I was considered the epitome of rudeness when I responded that Aucklanders probably didn't give a toss wnat "people down here" think of them.
A petrol pump jockey in Christchurch was perfectly willing to engage with me because he thought I was an Australian. When i admitted to being from Auckland, the conversation died.
I was born in South Canterbury and educated in Otago - didn't come north until my early twenties - that makes me a deserter and compounds the character deficiencies that being a resident of Auckland involves.
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I'm sure the residents of Royal Oak, Mt Roskill, Hillsborough, Waterview, Avondale, New Windsor, Rosebank, New Lynn, Te Atatu and sundry other suburbs ...will be relieved to hear that they actually imagine that their suburbs are utilised as conduits for airport-bound traffic originating from throughout the isthmus north of Greenlane.
Well as a resident of New Windsor/Avondalewhose local park is going to be taken out by the new motorway, I know what I would prefer.
But residents of suburbs further east than me should not get too complacent - a motorway was once gazetted from the CBD to Mangere Bridge running somewhere to the east of Dominion Road. Let action-man Mr Joyce and his friends in the trucking lobby get to think resurrecting that is a good idea and you could be toast.
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So who are the real beneficiaries of the Waterview connection?
The residents of Epsom.
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I agree that we have to give John Boscowan credit for campaigning hard. I did have him banned from campaigning on the buses but he does keep on popping up in other places.
He was at the "tunnel or nothing" march on Saturday. I suggested to him that he should support the tunnel because there could be an argument for a PPP and tolling to get it built. He didn't see that but was promoting a mad-arse alternative scheme that would take out quite a bit of Unitech.
At the speechifying at the end of the march, Russel Norman's reception was at least as warm as David Shearer's.
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Oh dear, got distracted and pressed post before finishing my train of thought..
should read "There's peak oil and the likely demise of motor vehicles transporting individuals."
It'll be the billion dollar bikeway (if you don't mind biking through tunnels).
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I am well aware of the inverse relationship between the physical distance from an issue and the level of interest in it. Personally I cannot get too agitated over Transmission Gully - if Wellington were to be cut off by an earthquake I probably wouldn't leap in the car and drive there.
But from where I am sitting (literally opposite properties that may be taken for a construction yard for the Mount Albert motorway), I think I can be forgiven for taking a greater than average interest. (My colleague Joshua Arbury sits in the room next to mine and I am pretty damn proud of him!).
I believe, however, that the Mount Albert motorway (note - Waterview is only one end of it) does merit more widespread interest. It will probably be the first such project to be fast-tracked through the RMA, skipping the Council hearing phase. It will probably be the last big-arsed motorway, anywhere in the world, to be shoehorned through suburbs where there has been no route protection. There's peak oil and the likely demise of individThere are politics (one cannot help feeling that if Mt Albert had voted national, like Auckland Central did, we would get a tunnel like Victoria Park). There's a bizarre by-election, although the stupidity of Melissa Lee will have been forgotten long before the machines start up. And who knows what shape Auckland City will be in to represent the interests of its residents.
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Oddly enough, when our car was stolen last year, it was found (by us, not the police) in a car park on Allan Wood Park.
Evidence suggests local Mount Albertians, not South Aucklanders, were responsible for the theft.
But what would have happened if the motorway was there...