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    • Could Young be caught offside in sports funding debate?
      • Sports funding for teams such as the Hurricanes, Lions, Phoenix, Pulse and Saints could shape as a key battleground this campaign. It has become a hot topic and one that looks likely to separate the mayoral candidates. Deputy Mayor, Justin Lester, has jumped at the chance to back funding support for the embattled Phoenix football team as part of his campaign to knock off his boss. While Paul Eagle has come out saying he wants the Council to sponsor Wellington Rugby in return for players acting as champions for community initiatives. Eagle has also highlighted the risk of those pesky northern neighbours in Porirua, luring the Saints basketball team to Te Rauparaha Arena after already securing the vast majority of Pulse netball games. Hutt City of course has tried its hand at taking sporting events from Wellington, hosting Phoenix games at Hutt Recreation Ground as well as All Black warm up events. Of course, none of this is unique to Wellington – Auckland Council pour money into the Blues Super Rugby team and the Warriors league team and even paid World Cup winning All Black, Jerome Kaino, $100,000 to promote public transport. But mayoral candidate and Lambton ward Councillor, Nicola Young, has come out swinging, saying that Council should not be providing funding to ‘professional sports teams’ and that the focus should be on community or grassroots sports facilities and clubs. Young has made no secret of not being a big sports fan – and would probably struggle to name many ‘grassroots’ sports clubs. But she is well known as a big supporter of the arts sector… which is where things could very well come unstuck. WCC pour money into the arts and prides itself on branding the City as the cultural capital of New Zealand. So the question is, will Young apply the same policy of only funding community or grassroots arts and cultural activity, and effectively remove the subsidies paid to professional outfits such as the NZSO, creating the risk that they may move to Auckland. The New Zealand Festival is already battling head-to-head with the now annual Auckland Festival. Would Council support for WOW end? Auckland Council with its events war-chest would no doubt jump at the chance to pick off events like that. Even the relatively small Wellington Jazz Festival would be under threat if Young applies her sports funding policy consistently. The Jazz Festival only attracts a few hundred people each year and is almost totally reliant on Council money. But this funding goes directly towards attracting and paying for American Grammy Award winning professional jazz musicians and singers… not exactly community level. Where would Wellington be without any major sporting or cultural organisations? And would drawing an arbitrary line that blocks funding to professionals such as rugby teams or the NZSO provide a helping hand up to Auckland Council?        

    • Helene – even the parking wardens say time’s up
      • After being first elected before the Beehive was finished, before God Defend New Zealand was even officially our second anthem, before the Erebus disaster and even before carless days, Helene Ritchie is once again grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons. Like any time-serving politician, the sense of entitlement knows no bounds. Ritchie decided it was OK to park across a pedestrian crossing in the carpark at Wellington Hospital. As Ritchie approaches the 40th anniversary of her first election to Council, the arrogance and contempt for the public is palpable. I guess Wellington Free are just thankful that she didn’t parallel park across the front of A&E or halfway up a wheelchair ramp. If you live in the Northern Ward – do the right thing this year and send the Ritchie-mobile to the wreckers.

    • Hutt City Councillor calls out budget ‘trickery’
      • It wouldn’t hurt a few of Wellington’s supposedly opposition Councillors to take a leaf out of Wainuiomata Ward, Hutt City Councillor, Campbell Barry’s book and actually put a spotlight on Council finances. Barry has done an excellent piece on his blog highlighting what he calls trickery and a lack of transparency. He calls out how Council will claim a project has come in under budget, when in fact all they have done is shift a chunk of the cost into another line item. Most in Lower Hutt will be aware that over the past 3 years the Council has undertaken a bold strategy to revitalise our City through a number of capital projects. Something that I support for the most part. Unfortunately, what people don’t always see is the tactics employed to get some of these projects over the line. Budget ‘reworkings’, off-loading of extra costs (taking from Peter to pay Paul) and a lack of clarity around the total cost of projects are just a few of the tactics that I have witnessed. Labour MP, Trevor Mallard, commented on his Facebook – Poor management and inadequate governance from senior councillors has resulted in a $25m capital budget blowout this year. That’s 30% of residential rates or $625 per ratepayer. Most Hutt families just can’t afford the council taking on that level of extra debt for them to pay. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if we could see the real budgets of some of the pet projects around WCC. The infamous cycleway is the tip of the iceberg too, we imagine. This term we have gone into pot-plant-and-paver-upgrade overdrive with sparkling new plastic versions of Melbournes laneways popping up everywhere and of course the Victoria St pigs-ear-to-silk-purse transformation as examples of pork barrell projects that would appear vulnerable to what Barry has called out in the Hutt.  

    • Coughlan to make a run from Right-Field?
      • While Onslow-Western Councillor, Jo Coughlan, has taken a somewhat lower profile this term, we have heard that she is taking soundings on whether or not to make a run for Mayor. Coughlan is something of an enigma around Council – on paper she looks like a solid and seemingly obvious competitor. Multiple terms on Council, decent amount of votes, leadership on Economic Development, a business owner with clients and connections throughout the Government. Yet somehow, she just isn’t. Coughlan flirted with running last time around, but we understand that when the waters were tested she was well off the pace in polls. This time around the Council Friend-o-China in Chief, if anything is closer than ever to the Mayoral team of Wade-Brown and Lester, effectively as 3iC overseeing their economic programme. But at the same time she is often lampooned by staffers for her creative approaches to meeting attendance and for not having a whole lot to show for in terms to economic development. It was roughly three years ago that John Key said Wellington was ‘dying’, and while ‘stagnating’ would have arguably been more accurate, you could hardly say there has been a Coughlan driven explosion of growth in the Capital. Coughlan and Co stand by and watch as Auckland Council pick off the best bits of Wellington – its restaurateurs and bar owners were smuggled north, the Nines have copied and bettered the Sevens, the Auckland Festival has pitted itself head to head with Wellington (killing the Auckland market) and it is merely a matter of time before WOW goes as well. Even the Coughlan championed Convention Centre will be dwarfed by what Auckland is building. Then there was the odd situation of Coughlan distancing herself from the unanimous council vote in favour of the Call Active bribe fee backhander sweetener (?!). So after six years running the economic agenda for the Wade-Brown administration – what would Wellington really expect to get out of Coughlan becoming Mayor if she were able to pull together a credible run at the chains.  

    • Sarah Free opens a can of worms
      • Island Bay’s Green Eastern Ward battler, Sarah Free, may not have attracted a whole heap of attention in the last term – but she knows how to build a mean worm farm. Green credentials: TICK! Bottled worm piss: TICK!

    • New ways to waste money – it’s the #wadebrownwccway
      • We got a little bored with the Island Bay cycleway debacle – and judging by the Mayor’s lack of support in the media Celia Wade-Bicycle is also giving her troubled Island Bay project a wide berth. Instead we’re casting our steely gaze at WCC’s latest cycling initiative – trying to stop cyclists from running over penguins on the Waterfront. Wellington’s penguin community is decimated every rush hour, as Happy Feet, Pingu et al. are torn to pieces by spokes, bike chains, and it’s… … hold on, that’s not right… As anyone who’s been in Wellington since the post-container era knows all too well, the waterfront is overwhelmingly a penguin-free zone. Which makes the City Council’s decision to spend $15,000 on a ‘sharing the pavement with penguins’ safety campaign rather bewildering. It’s part of WCC’s ghastly #TheWellingtonWay campaign – and aimed at telling ratepayers not to be dicks and run each other over on their bikes. The designs are classic mission spread – if you have an enormous in-house PR department then they’ll just create work to justify their existence, and that’s what’s happened here: $15,000 for pavement stickers that our experience suggests are useless – we’ve seen chain gangs of cyclists powering over them. One email correspondent with WCC Watch pointed out rather acidly ‘of course, if that useless mayor had built a CBD cycleroute we wouldn’t need to tell cyclists to ride slowly on the waterfront’ – a sentiment with which our penguin friends wholeheartedly agree. And if the big white stickers were remotely effective then they should have been along the narrow section between Herd St and the Freyberg Pool, but predictably enough they’re nowhere to be seen on the narrowest stretch of Waterfront pavement. The official line is quite different. The self-appointed spokesman for everything Andy Foster (yes that guy is still a councillor) says ‘the campaign has proved popular, with people taking selfies with the illustrations and commenting on how they enjoyed the humorous scenarios and positive messages’ – FYI Andy, they’re laughing at your humorous scenario, not with them. While Andy Foster’s tri-decade career could be summarised as a humorous scenario, that hasn’t stopped WCC throwing more money at the project: free t-shirts are available from the council.

    • Council prioritises Chinese Garden and Cycleway over Hospital Water Supply
      • Capital and Coast DHB Board Member and Porirua Mayor, Nick Leggett and Southern Ward Councillor, Paul Eagle, have highlighted a bizarre decision by Council to refuse to fund the emergency water reservoir that serves the Hospital. WCC have obviously missed all those warnings we grew up with that it is a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ Wellington is pummeled by an enormous earthquake. So by most peoples judgement, a decent emergency water supply to the Hospital might be something worth investing in… particularly given water is a Council responsibility. Civil Defence estimate it could take as long as 50 days to get the water supply back on in Wellington after a quake and the Hospital is left with a maximum of 5 days worth currently. For some reason, WCC have decided that it doesn’t want to fund the vital extra reservoir as it has higher priorities than emergency water supplies for the Hospital. The Council chief asset manager Anthony Wilson, said – “It’s not a local government responsibility to supply emergency water to the hospital.” Instead Council wants taxpayers to cover the cost – even though it is a council responsibility in every single other major centre. As Leggett said: “Nowhere else in the country has a local authority held such an essential project hostage, pending funding from district health boards whose budgets are already stretched to breaking point.” The Mayor says there are other priorities that are more important in the near term. It is worth remembering what the Council has prioritised over emergency water supplies for the Hospital under Celia Wade-Brown’s leadership: The shambolic Mayoral bedroom-to-boardroom Island Bay cycleway The Chinese Garden at Frank Kitts Park – a cool $6million on a Mayoral zen tea house and some sweet water features. A shitload of too-cool-for-school, hipster pleasing, painted alleyways and laneways that might fool suburban types into thinking they’re in Melbourne. Shrubs and paving for Victoria Street. Oh and untold legal costs for the up and coming Wade-Brown vs Lavery Living Wage debate when it hits Court. Leggett and Eagle want Council to get its priorities right, saying the city needs to front up and pay for it. Eagle planned to submit the project for inclusion in the council’s 2016-17 Annual Plan. “The planned new reservoir would greatly improve resilience in the face of natural disaster,” he said. “Without it, we risk facing catastrophic consequences, especially for residents in the CBD and the city’s southern and eastern suburbs.” You have to wonder how on earth a council could be so dumb. Hopefully the tremors will hold off until this is sorted, huh.  

    • Cycleway Shambles the hot summer BBQ topic
      • We are back for 2016 and if there was one issue that kept getting brought up around BBQs across the Capital this summer, it was the Mayoral Cycleway Omni-shambles. The new cycleway is going down like a plastic cup of cold sick. The design rammed through by the Mayor in the face of massive local opposition falls well short of international best practice, and puts cyclists running the gauntlet of vehicles pulling out of driveways and car doors being thrown open. You only have to pick up the Dom to see the people are unhappy… Really unhappy. Or talk to just about anyone in the area! For example, just last week I encountered this myself after a kick about at the park with guys who don’t normally touch politics, while having a few beers, the hot topic that caused the most colourful language was Celia’s Cycleway. No one can quite comprehend how ill-considered the whole thing is. A mate from Lyall Bay put it nicely – “They’ve made a decent road, ridiculously tight. Two buses can’t even pass each other. It’s fuckin chaos.“ Then there was the infamous Facebook post with over a thousand likes, showing the daft new layout  with the comments from motorists, cyclists and pedestrians almost uniformly criticising the new cycleway.   What is going on here?Whoever designed this new cycle way in Island Bay must’ve done so at 430pm on a Friday.I can… Posted by Bob Laloli on Friday, 18 December 2015 A cyclist has already suffered a broken arm in an accident on the new ‘safer’ cycleway and the local bus drivers find the new tighter roads harder to navigate and maintain their schedules. Not a happy situation. Even the mayor’s personal Facebook page isn’t safe – a shared post (now deleted) on ‘the fight for people friendly streets’ was met with met with a blunt “You’re a fucking idiot and have ruined Island Bay. It’s dangerous and stupid – sort your shit out lady!” Quite. Sadly none of this is surprising as the Island Bay Cycleway’s design is not recognised as international best practice – in fact most Wellington cyclists were against the cycleway for the simple reason that The Parade as it used to be had plenty of space for bikes and cars, and was a nice cruisey street to ride down. Wade-Bicycle has always seen the bedroom to boardroom as a ‘legacy’ project, which at the time was understood to mean a legacy of her difficult spell as mayor. 2016 is election year afterall, so it is worth remembering that with wasn’t Wade-Brown alone that pushed this through. Below is the list of Councillors who pushed this through.Worth keeping in mind come October. Mayor Celia Wade-Brown Deputy Mayor Justin Lester (Northern Ward, Labour Candidate for Mayor) Andy Foster (Onslow-Western Ward) Sarah Free (Eastern Ward – Green) David Lee (Southern Ward – Green) Iona Pannett (Lambton Ward – Green) Mark Peck (Lambton Ward – Labour) Malcolm Sparrow (Northern Ward)

    • Golf Club Hits Back
      • A recent post by northernwccwatch provoked quick responses pooh-pooh’ing everything about it. The mayor moved shut debate down on Twitter, deploying her caps button, stating that there are better options elsewhere: @WCCWatch this is Town Belt land NOT a cheap option for housing. Plenty of inner city, suburban centre & northern green-fields available. — Celia Wade-Brown (@WellingtonMayor) November 8, 2015 Meanwhile golf club president Raymond Tuffin responded via email with the statement below. Unsurprisingly he wasn’t impressed at the idea of re-assessing the golf course’s current arrangements. I am writing in regard to the letter (edit: blog post) written re the 100th year centenary of the Berhampore Golf Course. The writer is so out of touch with not only the history of the golf course, but what the asset provides the community today. The course was established in 1915 to provide the working class an opportunity to play golf, still very relevant today, it was also the birth place of ladies golf. The course is used by the community to walk, run, walk their pets, used to access to WCC walking tracks, sight seeing by tourists. There is 1 golf course within 15 minutes drive, not the many the writer stated. The golf club attached to the course has become a community centre for the Southern Ward, with local schools using the facility for their sports days, community group meetings, fundraising nights, aged concern. It has built a multi-sports facility that houses its very own parent and play centre, dance club, Special Olympics bocce & golf, First Tee Junior Values & Life Skills Programme, lawn bowls, indoor bowls, Tai Che. The club has also supported special needs and disability kids by offering a range of activities. The asset has been supported by the WCC and it is a facility that all rate payers should be proud of, it is a facility second to none around New Zealand. It is disappointing that we have individuals publish incorrect and misleading information to the community and I challenge whoever wrote it to have the courtesy to come and see what we do for the community. Both rebukes to a reasonable post and questions (by northernwccwatch’s usual standards :-)) is telling. What are they afraid of? He hardly demanded it to be burnt to the ground, concreted over, and replaced with a 8 lane flyover. Or completely flogging them off as David Farrar highlighted with Auckland Council’s Trump-like portfolio of 13 golf courses. Wellington’s town belt is a wonderful asset. Most people living and visiting would agree and is being rightfully protected. But I would bet most would also agree that it wouldn’t hurt looking into how a niche ratepayer-funded resource of this size could be leveraged (and not eliminated) to best meet the needs of Wellington of the next 100 years. For example: @WCCWatch Could partner with the university to build social housing for students. — Rory McCourt (@rorymccourt) November 8, 2015 Don’t hold your breathe.

    • Is it time to draft Leggett?
      • TV3’s Duncan Garner has come out and slammed Mayor, Celia Wade-Brown, saying Wellington needs new leadership. Garner highlights the lack of achievements under Wade-Brown: “Simply put, the capital lacks leadership – and as a result is suffering from inertia. Perhaps she was only ever an accidental mayor anyway, winning by just 176 votes in 2010 under the STV voting system. Wade-Brown talks about projects still to come but hasn’t she had her time? Surely the city needs a fresh, dynamic leader. Consensus politics sounded like a nice idea but has proved a failure.” However, arguably just as damning is his call for Wellington to draft in its northern neighbour, Porirua Mayor, Nick Leggett. While probably a decent idea, has our city really plunged to the depths of English rugby where there are no local options left to lead us? Do we really need to look beyond our borders? Now it is early days in the mayoral campaign, but Garner has highlighted that neither of the alternatives, Deputy Mayor, Justin Lester, or Lambton Councillor, Nicola Young, have burst out of the gates. We are yet to see a candidate come out and paint a picture of how they would improve and grow the City. “The Campaign” (if you can call it that yet!) seems to be mired in Town-Hall-centric debates over the Living Wage and Pandas instead of a decent plan for the City. Leggett would be a great option for an amalgamated City, but we arent there yet (and by all accounts he has no interest in swapping). What Garner has exposed is the desperate need for a real alternative.

    • Mayor (inadvertently) highlights land for social housing
      • In one of those quirks of history many New Zealand councils established golf courses to keep the people active and despite Government efforts being a little more sophisticated these days, Wellington ratepayers still own a course at Berhampore. Below is a release out of the Mayor’s office celebrating that the course is 100 years old. Now while I have no doubt there are a number of people who play the course – it does seem like something a council doesn’t need to own in this day in age. Given we have numerous courses (within 10 minutes drive of Berhampore) it isn’t addressing a market failure and I’d say the way we have embraced the waterfront for jogging and walking plus the ASB Sports Centre, Council is doing its bit to get us active. Admittedly, I am not much of a golfer, more accustomed to hacking my around Shandon or Makara with a few beers once or twice a year rather than being a regular at the higher brow courses. But I have played Berhampore a few times and it is not exactly Millbrook, in fact it is a miserable course in moderately bad weather. So do we need it? Or at least do we need a full course – couldn’t it be cut to 9 holes? Couldn’t this land be freed up to be used for something that at least involves a few more people? Council has talked about the need to address social housing – it would seem to be a much better use of Council resources for at least the front 9 to be freed up to address that, or even frankly sold to fund other projects. There has even been talk about a high performance sports centre targeting the Hurricanes, Phoenix, Saints, Firebirds and Pulse… could that be there and expanded for community use? Publicly funded and maintained golf courses doesn’t feel right and after 100 years, surely we could try something else? News Release 30 October 2015 New Zealand’s first ‘Municipal’ golf course 100 years old The Berhampore ‘municipal’ golf course in Wellington will be the focus of a festival to mark 100 years since it was built to cater for the ‘working class’ and provide a healthy sporting activity for people with consumption. To mark the occasion, Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown will don a 1920s golfing  outfit and try her hand at swinging a golf club. Berhampore was the first municipal golf course in the country and is credited with popularising women’s golf in New Zealand.  “The course is kept in top condition by our own greenkeeper and provides community recreation at a low-cost,” says Mayor Wade-Brown. President of the Mornington Golf Club which runs club competition, Ray Tuffin, says the course is kept in great condition through a working partnership between the club and the Wellington City Council.  “Berhampore has the greatest views of any golf course in New Zealand,” says Ray. “Membership has grown over the past five years and links with the former bowling club provide sports which cater for a wide cross section of the community including Olympic paraplegic competitors. “The centre is a true community asset,” he says. A Wellington Doctor, Robert Cameron, proposed the golf course as a cost-effective way of providing an activity to combat consumption which was an important health issue. Funds were raised and council eventually built an eight-hole course and attracted controversy as the Wellington workers could only play on their one day-off which was Sunday when sports competition on council-owned fields was prohibited. The issue was resolved following a case to the Supreme Court and Berhampore’s popularity resulted in the course being extended to a full 18 holes six years after being opened.

    • What more can a small boy do? Peck not standing
      • As we mentioned in the last few weeks, Labour members had been underwhelmed by Lambton Ward Councillor, Mark Peck, and that he was likely to see his candidacy for the Party challenged. The internal pressure and potential embarrassment seems to have been too much, with Peck announcing to his followers on Facebook that he was standing down at the next election: I have today informed Labour Party managers for the upcoming local body elections that I will not be seeking selection to contest the Lambton Ward, or any other ward for the Wellington City Council. I have decided to clear the decks so that good candidates can emerge to put their hands up for selection. I will complete my term and meet my responsibilities to the Council. I want to thank all those who have supported me during this triennium.  By the time the term is over I will have completed fifteen years of public service and it is time to pull up stumps. Given almost everyone who helped him campaign last time has run for the hills already, it seems unlikely the former MP for Invercargill and Parliamentary Select Committee chair will be missed down at Town Hall. He will be remembered fondly for uh… um… being there? Most of his colleagues from his time in Parliament only seem to recall him packing a sad for not being elected to the Cabinet by his colleagues – multiple times. While around Council his packing of a sad when called out by his Labour colleague, Paul Eagle, for back stabbing and siding with the Greens seems to have been the highlight… oh and of course refusing to pay his Cafe staff a Living Wage despite saying ratepayers should fork out more to cover Council staff and contractors. But at least Peck had the decency to pull the ripcord and go –  instead of hanging around with his nose in the Council trough for decades… some of his colleagues could learn from that.. So who might fill the mighty Peck shoes? Rawa Karetai, who co-ordinated the Greens 2013 Wellington local elections campaign, is rumoured to be entering the political fray – either as a councillor candidate, or as the Green’s mayoral aspirant. Karetai’s Twitter claims he’s a ‘Wellington-based businessman’ – perhaps pitching himself as the poor man’s James Shaw? Young Rawa’s bio on Karetai Consulting has a client list limited to fringe political campaigns, and work experience where he’s listed as an ‘assistant’ – yet on the same site he’s listed as the ’Senior Consultant’ at the business. I’m studying towards a Bachelor of Business Studies with a major in Human Resource Management and Management with a keen interest in Organisational Change and Development, Leadership, Strategy, Governance and Diversity at Massey University. I also enjoy project and event management, local and national politics and campaign management, I have decent media, lecturing, and workshop presenting skills and sometimes do work as a consultant. The leap from ‘sometimes do work as a consultant’ to ‘businessman’ is a bold one for an undergraduate, and we’ll leave you to form your own judgement. Our take? He’s another wannabe politico with zero commercial experience, eager to get his hands on the $82,000 WCC pay cheque as a way of livening up life at university. Perhaps he and Angus Hodgson could carpool back between lectures and the council chambers – with Hodgson widely expected to seek the Labour nomination for Lambton.

    • Dom Post on Wade-Brown v Young v Lester
      • Today’s Dom Post had a series of articles on the upcoming Mayoral race – below is the editorial which gives a good overview of the campaign. The Mayor’s incumbency would mean she will start on pole, but it remains to be seen whether or not she will front for battle this time around. The Dom highlights the relative low profiles of both Deputy Justin Lester and Councillor Nicola Young and the challenges before both of them. With Lester facing a Living Wage day in court and Young’s Odd Couple union with the left seemingly falling apart – this campaign has a long, long way to go before we can really pick a favourite. Wellington is the country’s most vibrant city and its politics should crackle.  That hasn’t always happened – only 40 per cent of voters turned out last time – but next year’s mayoral contest might change that. Two skilful politicians will present Celia Wade-Brown with her most serious challenge, and they offer voters a  genuine political choice. Wade-Brown’s achievements are modest: she has not been a do-nothing mayor, as her critics say, but she has not brought major changes either. Under her, the council has encouraged an already thriving IT sector. It has increased arts funding, upgraded some infrastructure, and made the city more bicycle-friendly. She did not bring light rail to the city as she originally promised, but this was beyond a mayor’s power anyway. She has important works in progress, such as the upgrade of the town hall. And her council, like previous ones, has worked hard to further quake-proof the city. Wade-Brown’s claims to be a major reforming mayor rest on promises about the airport runway extension, a film museum, and a new convention centre. Her council made a hash of the earlier planned convention centre. Can it succeed this time? The extension of the runway could be a major boost to the economy, but we still don’t know if the project will fly. A film museum in partnership with Sir Peter Jackson could be a huge international attraction for Wellington. But Jackson expects and routinely receives generous financial help from taxpayers for his projects. Can the city council do an affordable deal with him?  The mayor says good news is in the offing; she has said this before. So the voters must wait. Justin Lester, the deputy mayor, is an appealing politician, well-briefed, and a skilful manager of people. He has helped make the council run. He is a liberal and supports the living wage measures, which have infuriated business. But he is also a businessman himself. The party label cuts both ways: it connects with a substantial part of the voters in this liberal town. But Lester must win many others as well. And he is not a household name. Nicola Young is also a skilled politician able to reach out beyond her National Party background. She can appeal to the many voters exasperated by the lack of major and decisive city government. Her name resonates with older and politically aware voters; it means nothing to families in Johnsonville. She is trying hard to soften her image and extend her appeal: hence the slightly desperate – and unconvincing – “deal” with Labour councillor Paul Eagle. Hence her  desperate attempts to tell the world the deal is still on when it clearly isn’t. A year is an aeon in politics and the two outsiders have plenty of time to make their mark. One thing has been conspicuously lacking in our politics. Voters would welcome a mayor who is exciting and dynamic and can reflect their love of the city. Wade-Brown does not have the magnetism to do this, despite her Green persona and the charm of being a mayor on a bike. The last Wellington mayor with this kind of charisma, in fact, was Michael Fowler in the 1970s and early 1980s. Do the two challengers have it?  – Stuff

    • Biggest caucus ever, but it still isn’t easy being Green
      • The Greens have dominated this term with the Mayor settling into her role further, made easier by having a whole caucus of Greens. We’ve had a bit of a look at Labour in the last week, and while its light may be dimming, it is time to get our birkenstocks on and go Green watching. Lambton Ward councillor Iona Pannett is effectively chief musterer, driving the policy programme. She is regularly seen stomping around the office corridors demanding committee reports are changed to be in line with Green policy. Plannett’s such a regular in the Mayor’s office she has her own side entrance (sadly without a bead curtain), and the bizarre ‘mother-daughter’ relationship with Wade-Bicycle is often the subject of comment around City Hall. But while Pannett’s policy influence has been obvious, unfortunately that particular brand of policy incense doesn’t always smell good… for example, take a look at an email she sent earlier this month: Given we all attempted to deliver a balanced budget earlier in the year, why is there such a strong focus on economic development? As you may recall at the time, I did feel that there was too much of an emphasis on economic development at the expense of climate change. Others may feel that other areas of council require a stronger focus too. Is it officer advice that we should continue this strong focus on economic development? Wellington’s economy is grinding along in first gear, and Pannett’s priority is to wring her hands about climate change. Really? It is a strange world when a local councillor thinks a global environmental issue being handled by governments should take up more time and be a higher priority than local economic development. How deluded can you be to think that the City Council is anything more than just that. But even though climate change hasn’t been reversed despite all the important bullet points Pannett’s had inserted in policy papers, word is this may be her last term. Pannett’s always said she’d only do three terms, which means she’ll be looking for new (organically fertilised) pastures next year; Paris has been mentioned, although getting there would consume a huge amount of carbon credits, and could impact her income – she was on Newstalk ZB telling Tim Fooks that her councillor salary isn’t ‘extravagant’ (and we do recommend listening to her rambling interview here). While Pannett’s been the dominant figure in the Green caucus, the rest of the team have barely registered. Invisible Southern Ward councillor David Lee is understood to be eyeing a place on the Green’s List for the 2017 General Election, despite his lack of effort as a councillor over the past two years. Green Party Leader, James Shaw, is keen to have an Asian in the Caucus to reach out to the growing Chinese electorate and David Lee represents a nice quick fix. Lee’s political charms were on full display recently when he apparently teamed up with the nasty arm of the Green Gestapo, the cycling fundamentalists, to bully Island Bay shop-owners: one trader was so intimidated, he was seconds away from calling the police. The Green’s list would be a great fit for the former Young Nat, as he’s stated that the people side of politics is a “total waste of time when I could be drinking coffee or managing my parents’ property portfolio in Christchurch”. The good news is that his golf handicap has improved considerably; the bad news is he dumped on his Southern Ward colleague Paul Eagle with indecent haste after election night in 2013 It’s thought Eagle is biding his time in giving Lee a lesson in Maori culture – utu. The first (and only) lesson will be about Bad JuJu. We remain doubtful of Lee getting a place high enough on the Green Party List to enter Parliament though: what he gains in being NZ Chinese, he loses in being absolutely invisible. And where do we start with NZ First-reject Sarah Free? Full marks for moving into her ward (something David Lee and the Ritchiesaurus should do) she’s just proudly bought a house in Seatoun Heights recently, proclaiming it’s ‘really Strathmore’ making sure she was seen to be on the right side of the street, if you know what we mean. We’ll believe her when she mods her orange Subaru SUV with some sick bass bins. If you’re planning to talk with Free, bring a box of tissues, as most discussions end in tears (hers). Wakefield Street insiders tell us the formerly Reformed Baptist and now member of the Open Brethren gets upset when she isn’t consulted over the smallest of things, such as the paint colour in any community centre renovation – Wakefield Street staff are often seen darting for cover as Free heads down the corridors armed with a fresh shopping list of neediness. She’s an ineffective speaker at council, getting tied in knots over the difference between the substantive and an amendment, and making irrelevant points like ‘I don’t like the barrier arms at the airport’ when discussing waste water infrastructure. Worst of all, her colleagues report that any conversation when Free’s within earshot can be dangerous – she’s a self-confessed eavesdropper. Next year the Greens are planning to run two candidates in the Lambton, Southern and Eastern wards – historically Labour’s hunting grounds – if they can find enough candidates. This is smart, given the way STV ranks preferences, and could send Labour into its final Wellington City Council death spiral. Names being touted include George Darroch (who ran James Shaw’s leadership campaign and works for the Problem Gambling Foundation), Rick Zwaan (the outgoing president of VUWSA) and Asher Wilson-Goldman (a union media officer and cat-lover). If successful they’ll join Free, Lee and possibly Pannett in the Green’s WCC caucus along with the lowercase g greens such as Andy Foster – Wellington City Council will be one step closer to killing the local economy, ridding the world of nuclear weapons, roads and cars and making sure the only items on the agenda are cycling and climate change. Hooray!

    • Living Wage turns into Lavery v Wade-Lester
      • Roll up, roll up for the latest Wellington City Council circus. The Council has voted on extending its diluted (half-arsed) ‘living wage’ to external contractors. The ‘living wage’ is the Council’s bluntest tool to help those on low incomes – it targets a select few, while Wellington’s working poor have just been clobbered with a 5% rates hike to pay for it. Council CEO Kevin Lavery took the unusual step of making a formal statement. He told councillors his job was to tell them ‘not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear’ – explaining his job was to ‘find a way to implement council’s will in a legal way’, and setting wages for external contractors ran a ‘serious risk of losing a legal challenge’. Lavery finished by saying ‘I would have a problem directing my employees to do something that is potentially unlawful’. It was a remarkable intervention, and to any sane head it spelt D-A-N-G-E-R. And then the madness kicked off – it is really worth the watch. The Mayor dumped on Lavery saying that ‘in most respects I highly appreciate the advice of our CEO’, but ‘cost effectiveness is important, but it isn’t a precise art’, and started a whacky economic analysis including the social worth of Christmas decorations – which she scrapped in 2013, only to reinstate them when Wellingtonians made it clear dishing out Christmas recycling bags on Facebook was not a substitute. Iona Pannett talked about lifting people working 90 hours a week on the minimum wage out of poverty, not realising that would give them an annual income of at least $65,000 with four weeks of holiday. But that’s the level of economic literacy we have around the council table – our representatives can’t do basic maths. There then followed a string of grandstanding from the left. Helene Ritchie interrupted her muttering commentary to rant about the runway extension and Ray Ahipene-Mercer (née Mercer) talked about ‘slave wages’. [Note to Ray: New Zealand has a minimum wage, so if you know someone working on slave wages, then call the police.] He reckoned the move wouldn’t cost the ratepayer – only to be countered by NZ-First-reject-now-Green Sarah Free, who said the council would foot the bill, as the increased wage costs were not being passed onto the contractor. Then Justin Wade-Lester delivered a speech that he’d spent hours practicing in the mirror: his hand gestures looked exquisite. The media training paid for by the ratepayer was on full display, as was his biro – used to dramatise lines like ‘we’re a beacon, we’re a place where talent wants to live, but are we for the many or the few?’ We were just about to wipe away our tears at his Tony Blair quotes, when we remembered Lester famously doesn’t pay junior staff at his Kapai the living wage, explaining in an email before the vote that: We make sure that every staff member with dependents is on a living wage along with senior employees and, by the end of this year, every employee with more than one year’s service. Food retail has a high turnover of young staff, so the ‘every employee with more than one year’s service’ line is the mother of all fudges. Also is it kosher to be asking staff if they have dependents and offering them more than those without dependents? How does that work?? Paul Eagle was beamed in via live video feed from Perth and it isn’t easy to catch it all over the video clip. Eagle is normally a voice of sanity on the council, but he’s up for reselection soon so no surprises around his position. Maybe it was the video connection, but his speech was like one of those cheap clockwork toys. Labour’s apparatchiks had wound him up to go through the motions, he did his thing, and by the end of his three minute slot he’d come to a stop. Mark Peck then drew himself up to his full 4’11½” and tried to out-Lester-Lester. “We have a moral responsibility to ignore unjust laws!” he exhorted, and then mumbled something about Martin Luther King and how he was plagued by Tory trolls on his Facebook page for not paying the living wage to staff in his cafe Little Peckish a name that perhaps sums up how his employees feel when they’ve surviving on their slave income, if you believe the rhetoric of the Lower Hutt bloke who sets the living wage (which, by the way, is now ‘officially’ $19.25). A quick thought for anyone who works at Little Peckish or Kapai: why not have a crack at bidding for Council contracts? It’s your best shot of being paid the living wage, given that your employers Cllrs Peck and Lester refuse to extend the largesse of the ratepayer to their private businesses. By now it was clear that the pro-living wage faction had the numbers, but there then followed a glorious uprising that will be likened in the annals of history to Warsaw ’44 and Tiananmen Square ’89. First to stand up was Andy ‘Tank Man’ Foster, who asked why the proposal to fund the increased wages expenditure by cutting the council’s travel and personnel budget was being offered only months after finalising the Long Term Plan – which supposedly had provisions for the living wage. Why, asked Foster, hadn’t these costs been pruned by the Council already? Ratepayers will of course be concerned a reduced travel budget might force the Mayor to cut her jet-setting leadership and blight the city with more time in Wellington. Nicola Young’s contribution was to bring the debate back to the advice from officers, reminding people of the threat of legal action. Then she quoted Cllr Peck from the Council’s Governance, Finance & Planning committee the previous week: “Very few people around this table realise that people have to open their cheque books to pay their rates bill. There will reach a point when ‘enough is enough’.” And how right he was, although he seemed to have forgotten his flash of prudence. Simon Marsh spoke eloquently about bringing the council’s parking operation in-house, observing that ‘parking officers are better paid now because they are doing more: better training has helped people to earn more’. He could have mentioned that many of the parking wardens lost their jobs when they were moved in-house: they got the dole rather than the living wage. And Simon Woolf said he was nervous about the proposal, stammering and crossing his legs more than usual. We felt nervous just watching him, to be honest, but at least he voted in line with the council’s legal advice. As expected, the vote passed. Representatives of the city’s businesses are expected to take the council to court. Justin Wade-Lester will be happy he has survived a tricky hurdle to establish his ‘Redder Than Mickey Savage’ credentials before Labour’s local government selections next month – and Mark Peck’s political future remains about as good as a frog a blender. And, because council officers see the issue as politically charged, we haven’d seen the last of this. Repeat ad nauseam.

    • Labour go looking for candidates… Clock ticking for Lester
      • Things are really starting to get underway with Labour sending a broadcast message out to all and sundry to try and unearth new candidates for the Wellington local body elections next year. Most interest will centre on whether or not Deputy Mayor, Justin Lester, will run for Mayor on the Labour ticket – and unfortunately for him, there are only a couple of weeks till D-Day. The email that went out informs members that nominations for Mayoral candidates open today (28 October) and close on November the 19th. In other words, if Lester wants to finally reveal his Labour credentials and stand for the Party, then he has to play his cards in the next month. Lester has made no secret of his desire to be a heroic Labour Prime Minister, but his unwillingness to be open about his membership has irked many in the Party, as has his refusal to pay the staff of his company a living wage, despite voting for ratepayers to fund living wage increases for council staff. But Lester needs Labour. While the voters of Tawa and Churton Park may not like a red-washed Lester, he knows full well that he isn’t well enough known in his own right to run without the Labour Party machine behind him. Celia Wade-Succession Plan has sprung into action to help build his profile, but she is hardly regarded as having the Midas Touch. It will also be interesting to see who else Labour can dredge up to run in the wards. We understand the Party is in turmoil over its inability to find any decent women candidates. There is concern that few, if any, electable women have approached the Party to run and that it may again be forced into allowing borderline candidates to make up the numbers again. By all accounts the Party is facing the very real prospect of having Paul Eagle as its only elected member in Wellington local body politics.

    • A-wim-o-way-Wade-Brown channels Peg Bundy and lashes Seven Sharp
      • Not content with helmet hair for Hillary and onesies for the papers, the Mayor of our Capital city, Celia Wade-Faux-pas decided to go for a Jungle Book/Peg Bundy look as she talked to the nation on Seven Sharp when it covered the $54 million Panda Palace. Meanwhile, the kodiak bear of Island Bay, Paul Eagle opted to look rather more mayoral be in a sharp suit and tie (although no doubt the Labour crazies will be up in arms at his lack of red tie this time, opting for an All Black friendly alternative). But it was the combination of the faux leopard print jacket with the horrendous inability of the a-wim-o-way, a-wim-o-Wade-Mayor to handle a light interview on an obvious topic, that caused jaws to drop at the opening of Wellington Zoo’s new ‘Meet The Locals’ exhibit.   Some zoos in the UK have apparently banned people from wearing leopard print clothing as it freaks the animals out… And no doubt the long suffering zoo CEO is looking to put such a policy in place as she tries to keep the Mayor and her embarrassment of pandas at bay. (Was there ever a more appropriate collective noun??) Leopard prints aside, why on earth was the Mayor so  unprepared for Seven Sharp? A show like that was always going to ask about the pandas, so you would like to think that our Mayor might do a bit of prep instead of just hoping they will do a puff-piece on a new area of the zoo. Of course, in typical fashion Wade-Brown doubles down by having a crack at the young journo, calling him “pathetic” for asking about the panda palace while she assumed the camera was off… Just FYI – it’s always on the record with shows like Seven Sharp. As another famous leopard skin wearing ginga once sang: Welcome to the Jungle!

    • A look at Labour pains on Labour Day
      • The Red Cossacks are gearing up for war in 2016 – desperately trying to move on from their massacre at the last local council elections in 2013 (after suffering more than just the ‘one night stand’ treatment from their civil union partner, the Greens). Mark Peck and Paul Eagle were Labour’s only successful candidates in 2013, with Eastern Ward incumbent the late Leonie Gill beaten by the Green’s Sarah Free. Over at the Malvina Major Home for Retired Politicians (aka the Regional Council) Oriental Bay multi-millionaire and V8 SUV owner Sue Kedgeley did over “I’ve run so many times but only got on once” Daran Ponter. Of course there were Labour members who didn’t want to be on Labour’s ticket, and who can blame them. First up, Helene Ritchie who tells anyone who’ll listen that she masterminded the construction of the Cable Car in 1899. Why pay to see Tuatara in Zealandia when you can experience Wellington’s own living fossil in the council chambers. Plus the continuity candidate ‘Celia Mk 2’ Mayor-aspirant, Justin Wade-Lester. The Deputy Head Boy will tell you he’s Labour because he grew up in a state house somewhere down south, although he keeps it quiet because he knows no one in the Northern Ward would have voted for him if they’d known he was a Labour member. It’s obvious to anyone remotely interested in the Labour Party’s local efforts that all is not well in the red corner. Insiders tell us that rather than deselecting Peck (the pint-sized, reformed ex Invercargill MP) the Party is headed for a contested selection in the Lambton Ward with many disappointed with his total lack of visibility and dismayed at his unwillingness to pay his staff a living wage. Labour’s supposed left allies in the Greens haven’t been impressed with Peck either. His ward colleague, Iona Pannett is regularly seen out at nearly everything – whereas the extent of Peck’s engagement seems to be in taking his wife to the World of Wearable Art; at the council table he alternates between checking Facebook and snoozing during council meetings – perking up every few hours to annoy the Green caucus by making his usual demand for a ‘line-by-line analysis’. Young Labour have apparently had enough with 24-year-old VUW architecture student Angus Hodgson set to challenge Peck, although why someone would want to jump straight out of university into Peck’s admittedly small shoes beats us. In stark contrast, Labour’s Southern Ward councillor ranks as the city’s best. Paul Eagle holds a firm grip on the seat and is fiercely protective of anyone who suggests that campgrounds, cycleways or Pandas might be suitable additions to the fabric of the Ward without asking him first. But Eagle also got taken for a ride at the last election when he was sucked into helping the Greens. Eagle put up co-branded billboards and gave David Lee a leg up to the Council table. As soon as Lee got sniff of Pannett’s incense and was comfy in his organic hemp seat – he ditched Eagle. It remains to be seen whether Labour will now look to stand a strong candidate against Lee, but any chance of a co-branded ticket next year is a very long-shot. The handling of the cycleway issue by the Green/Lester/Peck bloc has also seen Eagle at war with his colleagues whichhas resulted in a tense and toxic atmosphere around the Council table. It’s widely suspected that Celia Wade-Succession Plan appointed Wade-Lester as her cycleway hachet man as part of her strategy to hand over the Mayoral chains to the Deputy Head Boy – but also further dividing the Labour-aligned councillors, entrenching the Greens as the main left force. Labour’s local election selection is rumoured to start next month, giving the party certainty over its 2016 Council ticket. Wade-Lester is putting his hand up to run as Labour’s Mayoral candidate next year, but early selection would leave him in a tricky position. He famously wants to be Labour Prime Minister by the age of 50, but he’s never stood under Labour’s colours and his refusal to represent the party in Ōhāriu at the last general election means there’s a black mark against his name. Now he’s frantically building connections with the local party, and glad-handing Andrew Little. Labour does have a few wise heads left, and we understand enthusiasm for Lester’s candidacy is limited ­– and he won’t be a popular candidate if he does get the nod (that sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Peck?). The Deputy Head Boy is hoping to shoehorn Royal Society scientist Peter Gilbert into Northern Ward, solely to destroy the Ritchiesaurus. Ritchie is understood to be fuming at the news that her fellow ‘Independent Labour’ colleague, Wade-Lester, is so blatantly trying to dump her – Helene, all we can say is join the queue of aggrieved women. Moreover Wade-Lester’s fantasy of blowing $54 million on bringing pandas to Wellington has been comprehensively ridiculed by his party leader Andrew Little who asked the PM whether ‘state house children will get free entry to the pandas so that they can finally get to see what a warm, safe, dry home looks like?’ A year out from the election, once again Labour is a bit of a mess – outplayed at every turn by the Green machine, and eating away at itself internally.

    • On your Wade-Bike – Mayor begins succession planning…
      • The worst-kept secret in Wellington is out of the bag: The Mayor won’t be running for re-election in Wellington’s local body elections next October. Having previously promised to go on and on, she’s now fudging questions about her political future. On Newstalk ZB last week, when asked directly by host Tim Fookes, Wade-Bicycle gave as clear an indication as we’re likely to get: “I haven’t yet made my mind up yet” (indecision is one of the hallmarks of her ‘leadership’) was followed by talk of “succession planning” and finding someone to carry on her pet projects. Politicians intending on sticking around don’t talk about the future like this. Kim Jong Il never talked about stepping down, but followers of Pyongyang’s politics knew what would happen once the Dear Leader popped his clogs. And so too with Celia Wade-Succession Plan, although the problem of civic elections might throw a spanner in her dream of becoming the city’s spiritual Mayor For Life once she pedals off into the sunset next October. Indeed we’ve suspected for some time that she’s coming to the end of her political career, and have pointed out how her conspicuous absence from major civic events (such as the official turning of the first sod at the Cuba Central campus) is giving the Deputy Head Boy Justin Wade-Lester increasing amounts of much needed media exposure. Wade-Succession Plan told Tim Fookes that she ‘had October 8th 2016 down in her diary’; presumably with something like ‘find a new job’. She’s been getting stuck into her LinkedIn network, and flicked connection requests to everyone she knows, wants to know, and a few she probably shouldn’t know. An amped up LinkedIn profile is usually the harbinger of a career change, along with a scrubbed up CV and attendance at management courses. Oh yes; that fits – earlier this year she spent a week at an Institute of Directors’ course in Queenstown – at the ratepayers’ expense, of course. Now in her third decade on Wellington City Council, you’d think Celia would be leading the training seminars (or maybe even running the city) – instead, she’s clearly getting herself ready for Life After Council. We suspect none of the Mayor’s 66 ‘Community Engagement’ endorsements are Island Bay residents, and her sole endorsement for ‘Staff Management’ reflects the notoriously high turnover of employees in the Mayor’s office. Sources in Wakefield Street suggest that ‘Making Staff Cry’ would get a much better score. Perhaps we might accept her connection request – after all, we hear she’s regarded as one of New Zealand’s ‘most prominent and influential progressive politicians’

    • WCC might think they’re GC’s but we expect more
      • Toyota created ripples a few years back by making the word ‘bugger’ parlance… but I doubt in their wildest dreams the creative team behind that would have ever expected to see a City Council attempting to normalise the C word. Yes, that C word… Being a GC – it’s the Wellington Way… In case you’re unaware of what a GC is… good old Urban Dictionary has a nice summary… Now either the Mayor’s crack squad of savvy marketing professionals are on crack and think this is cutting edge and funny… or they are really really dumb. In the patronising video that accompanies the tweet, the Deputy Mayor is featured chairing a meeting of GC’s too – we will let you decide what that might make him. But seriously, I’d love to hear why this is a good idea. Does Justin Lester think this is OK?  Does he and the Council Comms gurus really think it’s OK to brazenly refer to Wellingtonians by using the C word? If this is Council Comms trying to be funny – well it’s not and it’s not what we expect from people charged with spending our increase in rates. And either way, the reaction on Twitter seems to suggest people are laughing at you, not with you. This is childish in the extreme from Wellington City Council. You can imagine the Council Colouring-in Crew all giggling away thinking they’re being really clever. It is a bit like when, as a 10 year old, you would throw dirty words into a word find thinking the teacher would never notice and that it would be so damn funny. It was lame then and it’s lame now. Unbelievable. Do better Wellington City Council.

    • Key says Capital is dying, Bronagh says let them pat Pandas!
      • On One News tonight, Prime Minister Key showed off Bronagh’s Panda seflie and it seems this is where the fantasy started. Naturally, Celia Wade-Brown in a Mayor-of-Fantasyland moment has latched on to the idea and has asked the Deputy Head Boy and Student Council Treasurer to wun the numbers. You can watch the news clip here. Apparently Key has thrown a few Kiwis into the mix to sweeten the deal for the Chinese Government… Labour Leader, Andrew Little, says if kickstarting the Wellington economy is reliant on a couple of Pandas “we’re in serious trouble.” Quite. Eagle goes on the attack again calling the Panda fantasy a “pet-project” for a couple of councillors… which seems to suggest that it is a narrow group in favour. If Key really wants to help Wellington, maybe take his flag war chest and Bronagh’s panda fund and use that to kick off the runway extension? Or another idea, maybe take Key’s pile of Kiwis for bartering and maybe convince the Chinese government to do something a little more useful like committing Air China or China Southern Airlines to fly direct to Wellington from Asia. But I guess a Boeing doesn’t make for such cute sefies for Bronagh and Justin.

    • Wade-Lester’s Panda Fantasy starts giant meme
      • You know election year is approaching when memes start filling the inbox… this one popped up earlier. Not sure who is behind this little gem with the YouTube account looking to have been set up this week – but pretty entertaining nonetheless!

    • Eagle vs Panda
      • Councillor Paul Eagle has called out Justin Wade-Lester’s business plan for pandas as a “fantasy”. By all accounts pandas are viewed as some sort of mythical catnip for tourists with the expectation that thousands will flock to the Zoo to see them. But Eagle is saying the numbers are bollocks and that it will never stack up. An initial “guesstimate” put the cost at $10 million, but the upcoming work would determine the exact costs and infrastructure requirements, as well as projected visitor numbers. But Wellington City Councillor Paul Eagle said it was “fantasy stuff” to believe the council had the funds necessary to make the idea a reality. He doubted the $10m figure, saying number-crunching on a 2011 panda plan put the capital cost at $28m. “But the 2015, 2016, 2017 figures would be $50m to $100m … If these [pandas] are so huge, would we have to close down Newtown Park, demolish that and build a car park? What’s going to happen to all the city streets, have we factored in road widening, pulling out all the car parks?” The Prime Minister has had pandas on his radar since 2011 and pushed hard for China to bring some here. Apparently they have been an attraction in Adelaide, but locally Auckland Zoo didn’t want to wear the financial burden and Christchurch remains preoccupied with its portaloo and carparks deployment programme. Mayor, Celia Wade-Brown, recently travelled to sister city, Beijing, and came back with a vague plan to play some soccer games between the cities, some cash for the airport and of course, pandas. So as soon as she secured her ten-speed in the WCC bike shed, the Mayor deployed her Deputy to run the pro-panda-athon. Lester said he was not committing Wellington ratepayers to following through on the business case. Once the work was complete, the proposal would be opened for public feedback. Even if ultimately found to be too costly, Lester saw the idea as worth exploring. I guess you can’t put a price on the proverbial pork barrel, or should that be panda-barrel, in the lead up to Wade-Lester’s increasingly likely Mayoral run.

    • A look behind the scenes of Capital 150
      • The marketing and communications department of WCC have provided a look behind the work they did on the Capital 150 campaign. The other day we touched on the opportunity for greater efforts on promoting Wellington as the Capital and to jump on the ‘constitutional tourism’ bandwagon. We were still in hibernation during the festivities, but they were done really well and added to the ANZAC anniversary events. Check it out on the Design Assembly website for some light weekend reading.

    • Eagle disgraces himself – saves wall, saves Pannett
      • Great news for Island Bay with confirmation that the sea wall will be rebuilt. As we had mentioned, Councillor Iona Pannett had come under intense community criticism for appearing to use the project to do the Greens bidding and rid Wellington of another pesky-earth-destroying road by demolishing the whole wall and the road so that the beach can you know, connect to the park, man. But after the community called her out, Pannett came out strong saying she would resign if the wall wasn’t built. And just as Wellington began to once again hope – Southern Ward Councillor, Paul Eagle, comes out saying he is “sick of” all the delay tactics and pushed hard for the project to proceed… Eagle’s work behind the scenes and the excellent efforts of community stallwart, Vicki Greco, has meant everyone has seen sense and committed to rebuild the wall... But Eagle’s efforts mean Pannett’s kind offer is no longer on the table. While Eagle has had a history of cosying up to the Greens with co-branded campaign hoardings, there hadn’t been a lot of love lost since the last election between the staunch Labourite and his Green colleagues. So you can imagine Eagle would have gone through something of a crisis of conscience as saving the wall would mean saving his Green colleague from her offer of resignation… Jokes aside, after two long years of inaction it is a good thing to see the wall finally getting sorted.

    • Pannett puts career on line over sea wall
      • In the Wellingtonian last week, Lambton ward councillor, Iona Pannett, said she would resign if the Island Bay sea wall was not rebuilt. Unfortunately she didn’t put a timeline on the resignation, so we can’t have a countdown clock, but we will keep an eye on this. For those of us who don’t live in Island Bay this is the back ground – The drama began after Wellington’s 2013 storm, which knocked a 50-metre hole in the seawall. The wall was later temporarily repaired, with plans to either fix it later or join the beach and Shorland Park. After a lengthy consultation period, Wellington City Council decided in December that the wall would be repaired by July and a cost of $821,000 was approved. It left the option of combining the beach and park for the future. So after two years, not much has happened and the community waits. Paul Eagle as the local ward councillor says he is “sick of it” and just wants it fixed. But other locals think there is something else going on and that Councillor Pannett is using this opportunity to wipe out a bit of roading by connecting the beach to the nearby park and forcing the waterfront traffic back through Island Bay, in the same way that the waterfront drive threads through Seatoun after dog-legging away from the beach. While it could make sense in some respects, it isn’t what the community asked for, nor is it what the Council said it would do. Vicki Greco said she was suspicious of the delay, made worse by the fact that the council is looking at delisting seawalls as heritage listings.   “[Council] were hoping over the winter that a storm would come and wash it away and it would be beyond repair and they would have to rip it out. It hasn’t happened. “I think they are trying to go back to what they originally wanted and to get rid of the wall and the road.” Pannett insists that she is just keeping options open for the future and that Council will rebuild the wall. But when?? It has been two years and bugger all has happened. Pannett denied anything suspicious was going on and said she was adamant the repair would go ahead. “I’ll resign if it doesn’t.” It is great to see a Councillor put themselves on the line – but with no end in sight and an election a year away this is an extraordinary statement.

    • Keep Kate
      • There is a petition underway to lobby NZTA to keep the ‘Kate Shepherd’ green pedestrian lights at the crossings near Parliament – you can sign it here. These were a really cool and simple way of highlighting a big part of our history and it would frankly be madness to lose them. But alas, wonders never cease when the make-work bureaucrats get involved, so we have to make sure it is clear that they are valued. You can find out more about the Kate lights here. Wellington has never really fully exploited the potential of ‘constitutional tourism’ – but in the last 10 years or so we have started to get it right – Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Pukeahu Park and Australian memorial, the upgraded cenotaph and these lights have all made Wellington that little bit more Capital-ish. The NZ Transport Agency gave Wellington City Council a year to trial the ‘green woman’ lights at pedestrian crossing around Parliament. But now NZTA is consulting the Council on whether they should stay or go. The lights are a great reminder that New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote. They’re quirky, and have helped to put Wellington on the map. Don’t let NZTA take the lights away – sign the petition to #KeepKate!

    • Mind the gap: WCC PR team bigger than Boris’s
      • WCC’s press and media operation operation is something of a relentless beast these days, with #TheWellingtonWay being shovelled down our throats at great expense across a variety of media. I doubt anyone knows what #TheWellingtonWay actually means, unless it’s a nice way of talking about pissing money down the drain on marketing guff of dubious value. Examples of this include sprayed stencil marks on the ground and the six embarrassing videos launched in May that cost more than $70,000. That slick camerawork and drone footage is paid for by your rates, which have just been hiked up by 4.9%. And then there’s Our Wellington, the Council’s quarterly events booklet, or ‘The insider’s guide to kōanga in your city’. At the risk of sounding on trend, you would never rely on the public sector to give us the inside track on what’s going on. Besides, Our Wellington‘s liberal use of headlines in Maori make it a little difficult to navigate for those of us who haven’t mastered Te Reo Maori in the same way the Mayor has. The booklet is distributed to around 80,000 households in Wellington every three months and a quick chat to a friendly local print and mailing company suggests that the annual cost of this booklet would be at least $500k – not including staff time spend on producing the artwork, layout copywriting and photography. Which brings us to the staffing levels at the Council’s external relations team. WCC Watch’s insiders reliably inform us the Council employs over 40 people at Wakefield Street as part of its press and marketing operation – the figure of 43 is understood to be accurate. Council operations like Zealandia do their own press and marketing – they’d be on top of this. That’s a lot of people, and the problem with this scale of operation is that self-justification becomes hard-wired into the modus operandii – ‘the resources are there, so let’s print more booklets / commission more videos / come up with more crap’. Unsurprisingly the Mayor and Deputy Head-Boy Lester hammer these press resources – and it all builds up in a depressingly Soviet-esque manner. Official photographers, social media experts, designers, writers, etc. Those familiar with WCC’s media operation are scathing. Compared to the buzz at an external comms agency, the Council unit’s atmosphere is lethargic and amateurish. At this point we at WCC Watch became curious – it felt like our ‘coolest little capital’ has the press operation that you’d expect to find somewhere like…. London. We dug deeper, so bear with us while we talk you though some numbers – things are about to get crazy. Britain’s capital has two tiers of government, much like metropolitan Wellington. Mayor Boris Johnson leads the Greater London Authority (GLA), which is the top tier. The GLA oversees transport, fire, planning and housing for 8.5 million residents of Europe’s fastest growing city. Putting in new underground lines and housing an extra 1.5 million people in 15 years are huge challenges, but our man in the GLA (he’s one of Boris’s key lieutenants) says the GLA’s external comms team is no larger than 35. The GLA has 35 working on external comms, compared to WCC’s 43. Wow. The lower tier of London’s government is a better fit for our city. Borough councils like Lambeth and Camden have populations of around 300,000 (compared to Wellington’s 200,000) and deliver a similar range of services as Wellington City Council – libraries, streets, rubbish collection, municipal housing, leisure services, social services and some education. Most authorities have 3-5 people on their comms team ­– with press releases, website management, council newsletters, photography and social media being juggled by staff drilled in running a lean operation. That means London’s combined GLA and Borough council media teams are smaller than WCC’s operation. And when you look at the operation Celia Wade-Brown and Justin Lester have pumped up to churn out bilingual booklets, little watched cinematic productions on YouTube and so on, you begin to wonder – why does Wellington have a press and marketing operation that’s bigger than a city 43 times its size? If the council reduced its press / comms operation Wellington’s rates could be cut. And it would save some trees too. We’ve love to dwell on it longer, but alas we have to go out and earn money – the 4.9% rates hike has hit us, and we have the city’s press officers to feed. Keep It Classy, Wellington!

    • Onesie-Wearer in Chief
      • Not content with championing helmet hair to greet the US Secretary of State, the Mayor has once again dumped the Chains in favour of her own tastes… Shortly after we woke from our slumber over the weekend – this photo, tweeted by the Mayor (no, not her opponents!), was brought to our attention – Celia doing her best for Wellington Free Ambulance’s ‘Onesie Day’. Getting ready for Onesie Day @WgtnFree pic.twitter.com/kUE7513CLL — Celia Wade-Brown (@WellingtonMayor) September 2, 2015 Of course, it didnt take long for the Mayor to be lampooned – this was one of the variants to find its way into the WCC Watch inbox… Supporting charity is important and Wellington Free is a great service that needs us all to empty our pockets, but let’s not forget maintaining the dignity of the Office is pretty important too. Even Tony Abbott has kept the budgie-smugglers in the draw since taking office and while John Key has been known to camp it up on the catwalk, I doubt he would try this on. Mind you, it isn’t a stretch to imagine Metiria Turei in a onesie, so I guess it’s on-brand. But you can be effective without being daft – it wasn’t that long ago that Wellington Free Ambulance needed a new vehicle and its first call was to former Mayor Kerry Prendergast – not Celia. Kerry rang a few people and had the money sorted within the afternoon. Seems her replacement sees dressing up in a onesie as a more effective way of raising funds, but I suppose that’s #TheWellingtonWay… well Celia’s at least.

    • Celia giving Lester a leg up?
      • WCC Watch has woken from its slumber with the stirrings of the 2016 Mayoral campaign evident. Two time loser and municipal Walter Mitty Jack Yan declared last month, and first term councillor Nicola Young has made her ambitions clear, including fresh graphics on her German Corolla. However, the big talking point is the growing view that Celia Wade-Brown won’t run for re-election, with many noting she hasn’t shown up for significant events like turning the first sod for the new Whitireia/Weltec campus, or the opening of the revamped Wellington Central Fire Station. Instead she’s sent Deputy Head Boy, Justin Lester. Normally you’d expect the Mayor to attend, so she’s either jacking up her protege for a crack at the chains, or she really does think judging gluten-free quinoa cup cakes at a school gala is a bigger deal than bringing the city together to get the new Cuba Central campus off to a flying start. While we’ve never given her much credit for her political skill, you don’t complete multiple decades on Council without  some effort and it does seem more likely that the Mayor is giving Lester the proverbial leg up. Lester famously wants to be Labour Prime Minister by the age of 50, and with ambition like that he will take no prisoners and jump at the chance to piggy back on Celia to assist his thirst for high office. There are some small hurdles though. Lester’s politics aren’t transparent as he has always run as an independent and not acknowledged his Party membership. Labour is a far more partisan beast than most parties, and to win nominations, candidates need to be overtly loyal to the cause. For someone who sees himself in the same mould as Fraser, Lange and Clark he doesn’t seem tribally Labour, he seems a far cry from Paul Eagle who wears red ties, drives a shitty red car, and proudly keeps the red flag flying in the lightest of winds. It has irked many in Labour that he distanced himself from the Party when the polls didn’t look  good, even apparently refusing to stand in Ohariu when the going was tough. Also voting for Ratepayers to fun the Council’s Living Wage while not adopting it at his food chain. Celia’s backing will also only get him so far too and Lester will know he faces an issue with his profile. While he is obviously well known around City Hall – most people in Wellington would struggle to name the Deputy. He has never really made much of an impression in the Councillor ratings by The Wellingtonian which was somewhat dominated by Eagle and Young. Another big question is whether being Mayor will help or hinder Lester’s bigger ambitions? There are very few examples of it being a step stone to Parliament in recent history. Kerry Prendergast tried and failed at making the jump, Blumsky was invisible in Parliament – and in the current National Caucus, Jono Naylor and Ian whats-his-name from Rangitikei are hardly household names or heavy hitters, yet arrived with Mayoral chain bling. If he is serious about his prime ministerial ambitions then maybe doing the hard yards against Peter Dunne’s quiff is where Lester should focus – even if the Johnsonville nightlife isn’t quite as colourful as he is accustomed.

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