Posts by Paul Campbell
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If so many candidates didn't make commitments on the stadium (which was a big issue) they should have been forced to do so or pay the price at the (postal) ballot box.
Part of the problem is that getting elected in local body elections has more to do with how well your name is known and how much money you're prepared to spend rather than what your ideas are - politics ought to be a marketplace of ideas where the best ideas prosper, not one of money.
I'm in favour of representative democracy, I don't want to vote on everything - but as I said above I think we do need safe guards over and above waiting for the next election - having a sizable percentage of the population being able to force a referendum (or even as a last ditch a recall) seems to me to be the simplest way to reign in a rogue council like the one we have today - in this case waiting until the next election isn't a solution. (I'll happily argue the numbers for how big a petition needs to be)
One advantage of having that remedy available to the citizens is that you don't have to actually use it to get a council to keep an eye on whether they have a mandate - just seeing the writing on the wall should be enough to keep them in line.
I'm also a bit pissed off that the council has largely stopped public question time at council meetings - apparently "there were too many cranks" - which I take to really mean "too many people with ideas we didn't really want to hear". After living in Berkeley for so many years I know that a council meeting can never have too many cranks ... there are always more .... and cranks deserve to be heard too
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Peter: there was an election - there were TWO anti-stadium groups that put up candidates and split that vote, one group won candidates - almost NO ONE ran in favour of the stadium - none of the incumbents came out in their candidate statements in favour of the stadium - most sat on the fence and didn't even mention it (like any sane politician would) - apparently there was a note going around the rugby clubs telling people which of them were really in favour of it. There was one guy out in St Kilda who ran on a pro-stadium plank, he didn't get elected.
So the results of the election were 3 councillors elected against the stadium, none elected for it.
Since then the plan has changed a lot - it's gone from "we're going to fund the bulk of it privately and use the city as a backstop" to "holy shit we can't raise any private money at all, we have to get the city to pay for it" - which is why the most recent survey showed 78% of the ratepayers are against paying for it through their rates
The previous city survey asked a different question showing that about 50% of the head of households surveyed would like a stadium built - so we can say that half of us want a stadium, but 80% of us want someone else to pay for it.
With 80% of the population against them if ever there was a case where a council should have taken a deep breath and said "you know we ought to have a referendum" this is it - but they didn't.
Some of the current council seem to be making retirement noises, (and of courser Mr Guest is currently starring on wikileaks), I think they realise that they've overreached themselves and the backlash isn't going to be pretty next year - others are raising lots of money for an ad campaign to make sure people don't forget who voted for the thing - but all this is too late, we're stuck with a spiraling rates bill for the next 20 years
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Well as one of those Dunedinites who are decidedly hacked off by spending all our cash for the next 20 years on a stadium - along with 78% of the community according to the most recent survey - I think something needs to change - not necessarily a Lhaws-lets-vote-on-everything sort of regime - but at least some sort of safeguard that citizens can invoke against a rogue council.
I've seen two reasonable proposals that I could live with:
- a petition by 10% of the populace puts an issue on hold until a binding referendum is held
- a petition of 25% of the citizens recalls the council and forces a new election
The last is pretty drastic but here in Dunedin if it were in place we'd have had an election rather than spending around $400M ($217M plus interest) - in essence subsidising every rugby game by $1M+ for the next 20 years
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yes - Dunedin North - but history shows us that if Labour throws up a crap candidate even the Nats can win it.
Elections during exam time suck - if the Greens were smart they'd sign students up for early voting before the exams kicked in
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yeah but to be fair no one's going to go out there and claim how dumb their supporters are - at least not in public
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I still find him something of a cipher - nothing real there - to me he comes over as every marketing guy I've ever worked with and that rings my BS detector almost pavlovianly
(which is not to put marketing people down - spinning reality is their job - but the rest of us need to be able to mentally puncture that reality distortion field to make real-world decisions)
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heh - apparently Goff refused to appear on TV opposite Slater - not surprising
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When we lived in the US in the late 80s/early 90s Lisa and I were part of a group doing clinic defense, it was really scary - the Operation Rescue people would send in a group of thugs to beat us up, they would disappear just before the cops or their 2nd wave of nice ladies in pastels from the 'burbs arrived.
We imported ideas we'd used during the Springbok tour - we built plywood shields that could be linked to form barricades, we had better communication than our opponents (we rented some of those new-fangled cell phones).
We even had spies within their organisation, so they couldn't tell their members where they were going until early in the morning of where they would be going, we'd be waiting outside to convoy with them and call ahead.
We'd put our 'scarier' members up front - the ones with piercings and purple hair, with suspect sexualities (this was 20 years ago) - a lot of those ladies from the 'burbs didn't come back
In the San Francisco Bay Area I had 40,000 phone numbers in my computer - we just plain out organised them and over time they stopped trying to shut down local clinics - as you can see the midwest is a whole other issue
Like any real lefty organisation as soon as we felt we'd won we turned on each other ....
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While we're talking about copyright stakeholders - here's an article about a group, the blind, that NZ is currently involved in screwing over
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yes it does pass - in time - I'm still glad I moved back 5 years ago - I do visit my old home in Berkeley on biz trips a few times a year and I feel much more out of place/time there - and felt that way the first time I went back, the disconnect only got worse each time I went back for the first couple of years.
There's a pretty well known 'happiness curve' for when you move to somewhere new (my wife studied it in psych class while I was going through it when we moved to the US) - basically it goes: at first you're on a high, everything's new, there are new people, places, sights, sounds - then after about 6 months you crash, you're home sick, you miss your larger group of friends, the world closes in a bit, you get depressed - it takes about a year to come out of it - by then the new place is home and you've settled in ....
Coming back I found we went through all that in a rush - our 20 years past friends had grown up, were respectable, lots had moved away - the novelty wore off really fast, more like 6 weeks than 6 months - but then the downside passed quickly too - the kids were on their won timetable and got dropped into school at about the time when the down side should have started which I think helped (we'd done the round-the-world thing for 4 months before we arrived)