stv-electing first Mayor of Mahurangi
Some dots can take longer to connect. And more obvious the dots, the longer it seems to take for them to connect. Since the announcement of the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, the Mahurangi Magazine has…
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stv bicentennial extraordinary town-hall talk
Ideally, the bicentennial of stv should be held where the Birmingham Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement held the world’s first election with it. But even if that ultimate location was the epicentre of a global celebration, two other…
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Crude reminder of royally half-cocked commission
First-past-the-post, 200 years after the first single transferable vote election, deserves to be a very distant memory. But, thanks to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance stvsingle-transferable-vote-ignoramuses, the region is about to elect its fourth mayor with the…
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Bay where no ships has been 60 years with no name
It was almost certainly a good thing, that 60 years ago the name of the Auckland region’s first European settlement slid unnoticed into the next bay north. Had the bay been known by a descriptive name, such as Spar Station Cove, or by any name…
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hmss Buffalo arrives at Mr Browne’s establishment
His putative youngest brother was Charles Dickens’ friend and illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, aka Phiz. Putative, because Hablot was in fact the nephew of the founder of the Auckland region’s first European settlement, George Davis Browne…
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Fourth Thursdays 3rd time lucky after 20 June
The clash wasn’t discovered until after 20 June was locked in for the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Taking Shapely town-hall talk. Having cheerfully ceded their second-Wednesdays slot to bpw Warkworth, the town-hall talks have found…
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Mahurangi Coastal Trail taking shapely
Most of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail is already in use, and has been for decades. This, thanks to the entire coastline from Waiwera to the Mahurangi Harbour becoming regional park between 1965 and 1973. Within that time, built by park staff…
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ipcc-understates-threat understatement
Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…
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