Mahurangi magazine
Dedicated to climate-action mobilisation, curiosity, democracy, and the Mahurangi
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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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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On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches
Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…
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Ceding second-Wednesdays for fourth-Thursdays
As of midnight last Monday, dredging the town basin and river downstream became the most urgent Mahurangi project. Up until that deadline, feedback on the structure plan that will shape development of Mahurangi’s tidehead town for…
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Strikingly unfit for fossil-fuel-free future
Anthropogenic climate disruption is not just another issue. It is the issue that will bedevil generation after generation for at least hundreds of years. Just how hard and how fast global warming will impact cannot be accurately quantified, given that…
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Seriously steeling the green network backbone
Whether the green network proposed in the Draft Warkworth Structure Plan is fit-for-purpose for this week’s climate-striking school students, for their next 30 years, must be the question. And given that streets, once surveyed, tend to endure, the…
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Seriously serial structure plan submission
There is much to applaud and support in Warkworth’s draft structure plan. Submissions are invited, as is statutorily required, prior to the final stages, labelled “Changes to Structure Plan and Adoption” or, as the text explains, “Following consultation…
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Warkworth watermills millraces and weirs
A more apposite topic for the next town-hall talk could scarcely be conceived. The fact that such a topic has already been conceived, is another story, hopefully for the following Warkworth Town Hall Talk. On Wednesday 13 March, the historian…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2019 gallery
Just the beginnings of another mostly Bergquist beauteous gallery of Mahurangi Regatta images. Principal regatta photographer since 2006, Lyn Bergquist’s art positively pervades the Mahurangi Cruising Club Yearbook, looking at 20…
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Valiant and virtuous volunteer regatta crew
Virtually ahead of every regatta, the need for volunteers is ventilated. But to avoid repeating this year’s last-minute scrabble to make up an apparent shortfall, several measures are being planned. The first is to augment the ‘This Saturday’s Mahurangi Regatta needs volunteers…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2019 results
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 is appended below the division placings…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2019 lost and found
Given that more than a thousand people attended the prize giving and dance, that almost all the evenings detritus found its way into the dozen wheelie bins provided by Mahurangi Regatta principal sponsor Teak Construction is testament…
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Livestreaming the prize giving and dance
For many, the Mahurangi Regatta beats Christmas. But not all of those devotees can attend every regatta prize giving and dance. Until tonight. Thanks to the wonderful people who did the Warkworth Town Hall proud doing Mahurangi Action the…
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A little light for Saturday in the park
Light breezes are again the prospect for the Mahurangi Regatta. Nice for the picnickers, and dancers in the evening, but not what most of the sailors crave. Unfortunately, what is also a little light, so far, is the response of Mahurangi West…
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Super Masonic solution to blank riverbank wall
Mahurangi Magazine has stuck its neck out by soliciting support for its suggested solution to the ugly butt of the Old Masonic Hall. The timing was poor. Six days before Christmas meant that most folk missed the email and, as of this morning, only…
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2020 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Programme for the 2019 Mahurangi Regatta was unique in that it included the first Up the Mahu! parade to Warkworth. Tides prevented a repeat in 2020, and indeed will only really favourable twice between now and the end of the decade…
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‘Up the Mahu!’ day-after-the-regatta flotilla
There could only be one flagship for the ‘Up the Mahu!’ day-after-the-regatta demonstration. The Jane Gifford scow, aside from being the face of the Mahurangi Regatta since 2010, following her heroic restoration, epitomises the necessity of…
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Time for town hall to take it to city hall
Warkworth Town Hall, inescapably, is where the community should assemble to make decisions for itself. Not the Auckland Town Hall, with its region-wide responsibilities for a city of 1.7 million. In a slightly less imperfect world, Mahurangi…
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