Hmmmm. "Now, there are other groups where things *effect* voting – for example English language fluency"

Replace pohutukawa trees with Victoria Square, more lanes with hmm, nothing?, and this piece sums up the situation here in Christchurch.
And as for resource consent hearing ... you should be so lucky

4th paragraph - should be "1846 lunatics ordinance"

The police don't seem to need a complainant when they go out to gather evidence of crimes, from the trivial - deploying speed cameras to the serious - putting officers undercover into gang situations to gather evidence of drug, arms or other crimes to the farcical sending a swat team and helicopters to arrest 'copyright violators'

"Yeah, we've been watching this gang's facebook page for a couple of years now, waiting for them to publish some evidence."

And apart from prosecuting criminals, where is the aspect of protecting the public safety crime or not in the police response?

Re the cycle map thing - if you have a GPS and are willing to upload your tracks, or map them from personal knowledge, take a look at OpenStreetMap
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-36.8811&lon=174.8433&zoom=14&layers=00B0FTF

Mapping "unofficial" paths is particularly valuable, as they probably won't get into the map another way (e.g. mass import of LINZ road data)