Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: Enter Audioculture, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Thanks Russell – and from those Cammick archives came a great image of the author of The Exponents story with Jordan, which I’m guessing is late 1980s?
Heh. I was looking at that this morning and I couldn't exactly work it out. Definitely not late 80s -- we were all in London at that point.
I'd say maybe 1984. And winter, by the way I'm rugged up.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Sacha,
The ‘supercity’ amalagamation process left unresolved tensions about the scope of where we each belong – street, neighbourhood, suburb, old city, new region. No surprise to see it playing out in some of the Unitary Plan discussion.
Good observation.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to J Browning,
Does Council merely exist to write rules to control and manipulate public behaviour?
I'm saying no, it doesn't.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And I’m not going to apologize for saying that way too much of what I’ve seen and heard is whistling for some remarkably unpleasant dogs, rather than making reasonable and arguable criticisms of the Unitary Plan. I think it’s very useful to call out people like Winston Peters and the racist rump of Grey Power trying to smuggle their anti-immigrant Yellow Peril bullshit into this debate.
And there's a bit of that going on, for sure.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Sacha,
And you deserve a range of options. Most of Auckland’s housing will still be single detached houses even after a flurry of terrace/apartment development over the next few decades.
The absence of any other choice in large parts of the city is a principal part of the problem.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to kiwicmc,
I dream nightly of a quarter acre pavlova paradise.
Fair enough, but there is and will continue to be a large majority of full sections in residential Auckland. And if you want the full quarter-acre for cheap, I can direct you to some delightful regional centres. Major cities? Gonna be cities.
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A good post from James Dann in Christchurch, looking at Auckland's Unitary Plan fight and thinking, if only ...
I’m not knocking the people campaigning for and against the plan. I’m encouraging you. I’m envious, really. You get to have all the heated, spurious, fact-based, hate-filled arguments that shape cities. We don’t. While it might be hard, even infuriating at times, at least you get to have it. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. While we may never have been paradise, that didn’t stop them covering the place with parking lots.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Sacha,
No matter what job you do or commitments you have, if you’re working long hours you don’t want to spend your valuable time outside of work stuck in traffic.
So true. Takes family time away from far too many people.
When I briefly worked in an office in the 1990s, the amount of deadweight time involved in getting to and from work drove me nuts. There are drawbacks to working from home, but it's bloody efficient.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Chris W,
But I’m really not sure that can be said about the “majority” of the opposition at the moment.
Thanks Russel, you just proved my point about opponents being labelled as mis-informed.
Okay ... on the basis of what I see and hear, I am led to believe that many people who oppose the Unitary Plan don't understand it very well. The email which forms the subject of the post being an example; others have been personally noted by people in this discussion.
Identifying and opposing flawed elements in the plan is a laudable part of the democratic process. Outright opposition to the idea of a plan at all is nutty, especially when it's accompanied by the voicing of weird ideas about population control.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Chris W,
Correct SteveL. There seems to be a trend of labeling all opposition as mis-informed. The majority of opposition is sound and is valuable to the council in their review process, just like the feedback for support. The whole point of the consultation process is for council to see what people think. If people submit objections on the basis of mis-information the council should be able to pick up on this and treat it accordingly.
I absolutely agree that it's vital for people to communicate what they don't like or see as defective with the DUP. People in the discussion here all have reasoned points of view. But I'm really not sure that can be said about the "majority" of the opposition at the moment.