Mahurangi magazine
Dedicated to climate-action mobilisation, curiosity, democracy, and the Mahurangi
Act now for Aotearoa to own Democracy Day 2021
With Donald Trump’s best prospects now being immediate resignation and prompt a Mike Pence pardon, the United States’ flawed democracy might now survive long enough to face redemption. Shy seven weeks, it is 20 years from the United States election that…
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25% less democracy doesn’t equate to 25% less can-kicking
Blamed for everything from the lack of climate-action mobilisation to the lack of a capital gains tax, to the failure to raise the retirement age, the three-year parliamentary term—it is persistently opined—must go. Evidence for the efficacy of longer parliamentary terms….
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$30 million Mahurangi action plan
$3 million over 5 years seemed, for a moment there in 2004, as though all the Mahurangi Harbour’s Christmases had come at once. Even in today’s money, $9.06 million is more than twice the 2004 amount, but nor, back then, does it mean that the Mahurangi’s sediment woes…
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Depraved indifference to humanity and the home planet
Aotearoa has demonstrated that democracy can work. Globally, however, covid-19 demonstrates the deadly degree to which governmental and intergovernmental governance, democratic or otherwise, is grossly unfit-for-purpose. The world’s ascendant…
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Making molehills out of mobilisation mountains
What should have been no worse than a four-thousand-death epidemic is determinedly on its way to becoming an at-least-four-million-death pandemic—a cruel and unnecessary global demonstration of the nothing-to-see-here-folks instincts of bureaucrats and…
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Democratic climate-action mobilisation or martial law
That what should have been one of the most influential books of all time ranks 302 209 places behind Nevil Shute Norway’s On the Beach in Amazon’s best sellers, speaks volumes. Comparing Shute’s fiction with Dr James Hansen’s non-fiction Storms of My Grand…
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Every global thing to gain by taking coalition initiative
Messiah complex is a label most would not want bestowed. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would likely run a Walker mile rather than be portrayed as the one who sought to lead the world through the 2020– Pandemic, and through its revolutionary planetary recovery…
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Last habitable landmass must lead covid–climate mobilisation
Last habitable landmass to emerge, and to be inhabited, Aotearoa, should now play to its strengths by demonstrating life after zero-carbon, and covid-19. New Zealanders have never been backward about being world-beating, whether sailing black-hulled America’s Cup yachts or…
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covid-19 climate and bird-flu-strength-pandemic clarion call
Spain, officially, has had not quite 0.5% of its population infected by covid-19, about a third of the rate the maligned country experienced during the 1918 Pandemic. But 10% of those undeserving more than 230 000 people have died, and its economy is in its worst…
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Yes Aotearoa can mobilise by example
As the epitome of physical distancing, Aotearoa is perfectly placed to lead the global project to survive the covid-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic global heating. In respect to climate, after petulantly insisting cop26 must proceed, on 1 April it was finally postponed…
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Splendid self-isolation opportunity for civilisation
Having wasted two months of preparation time, the challenge for civilisation now is to break its determined habit of wasting every crisis in its entirety. Aside from abiding by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s succinct advice to act as though one had covid-19, and stay strictly…
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Sweet Te Muri crossing consensus
In its 33-year story, the Mahurangi Coastal Trail has seen some meaningful milestones. Last Thursday’s is one such significant trail marker. Circa 1987, Auckland Regional Parks management had decided where a bridge was to cross Te Muri Stream; it was to run smack…
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Octavius Browne, second brother to visit Gordon
William Browne’s son Octavius Browne was born on 2 November 1809. Charles Browne says “the place of his birth and the date of his baptism is not known, but we have been told that just before he left Courtlands on the journey to Scotland in the course of which he died, he…
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Planning Mahurangi Regatta 2021 at the town hall
Revival of the Mahurangi Regatta was the direct result of 1970s Mahurangi River restoration efforts. Two years of determined advocacy for a more far-sighted solution to tidehead town’s sewage woes had comprehensively convinced the regional water authority…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2020 results combined list to come
Results are ordered alphabetically by division, then by handicap place within each division. However, for those desiring an overall picture of the day’s racing, a combined-fleet list ordered by elapsed time will, in time, be appended below the division placings…
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Regatta 2020 lost, found and thanked
Effusive thanks have been lavishing the organisers, sponsors, and volunteers from even before Saturday’s Mahurangi Regatta began, but also in its immediate aftermath: ”Thanks mate. Such an awesome event—huge congrats to everyone involved…
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Climate action of the people, by the people for the planet
That government of the people, by the people, for the people, has perished from the earth, has placed all earth’s creatures in existential peril. All too foreseeably, the half-billion creatures and counting destroyed by wildfire this globally-heated Australian summer will later…
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Octavius’s brother, Gordon Davis Browne
Gordon Davis Browne was born in early 1805, and baptised at St Mary’s Lambeth on 22 March that year. The explanation for his given name of Gordon is not known. Charles Gordon Browne (who was born in January 1845, and whose own second name was obviously a…
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Compulsory voting cart before smarter-democracy horse
Big business would be the biggest loser, was a Labour-led government to legislate to prosecute non-voters. Currently, unlike Australians, New Zealanders are legally allowed to abstain from voting. But with global voter turnout in determined decline, New Zealand’s lack…
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Aotearoa might best advance stv by enhancing mmp
Aotearoa is not just the world’s first full democracy because it was first to enfranchise women. Thanks to New Zealand’s geographic isolation and late colonisation, a partnership approach was attempted from the get-go, with greater and lesser success. One uniquely…
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Climate and democracy at the mercy of plutocracy
Epically ironically, salvaging a survivable climate and a free society possibly now depends upon a one plutocrat deposing another plutocrat, turned dictator. Far preferably, Republican Party senators would suspend self-interest for the survival and dignity of their once…
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Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets
It is more than semantics. In the thousand-year war to survive anthropogenic global heating, a magazine of silver bullets the size of the 59 000-hectare Hawthorne depot, Nevada, will be needed. However, regardless of the problem, received wisdom would…
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Sunday Sunset Boulevard town-hall matinee idyll
In a former life, J Barry Ferguson, amongst many things, was “the garden curator of Greenacre Park on 51st Street Manhattan, a private ‘vest-pocket’ park, open to everyone and owned by the Rockefeller Greenacre Foundation.” Having been florist and event organiser to New York’s…
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stv bicentennial morphs into march-stealing breakfast
Unless it is Christmas, and it’s on the 25th, there is not good time in December to hold an event. Having said that, Mahurangi Action is in the sublimely salubrious company of the Birmingham Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement in having…
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Buffalo off spar station misses festival but makes history
Pictorially, at least, hmss Buffalo and Gordon Davis Browne’s spar station will make a fashionably late arrival to Auckland Heritage Festival 2019, which concludes at the end of Labour Weekend. Given that Browne’s Mahurangi spar station was the first European…
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stv-elect first Mayor of Mahurangi
Vote early and often to elect the first mayor of Mahurangi. Of course, only the latest vote an individual casts will count. Because somebody votes early, they shouldn’t later be penalised when some late-breaking information causes them to revise their preferences…
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Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote
It’s long since time to jettison the obligatory if-we-don’t-act-on-climate-within-so-many-years exhortation. The truth is that, since 1988, when not only Dr James Hansen but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for climate action, it has never been certain…
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Nominate someone as 2020 Mayor of Mahurangi
Mayors, to be legitimate, need to be elected by preference voting—known as stv in Aotearoa, and as rcv in the United States, where Barry resided until retiring to his country of birth. The need for a useful demonstration of stv to appropriately mark…
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stv-electing first Mayor of Mahurangi
Some dots can take longer to connect. And the more obvious the dot, the longer it seems to take for it to be connected. 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, antipodean, countries…
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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, Gordon Davis Browne…
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