by Cimino | 25 Aug 2010 | MMP
First, it was a fateful decision. Then it became a cynical decision, when New Zealand’s parliament ignored the 81.5% of voters who asked for the house to be reduced to 99 seats—the cosy two-party duopoly had no desire to see mixed-member proportional… endure. In...
by Cimino | 22 Aug 2010 | MMP
Updated 9 September 2010 Grand coalition is the only honourable option. In yesterday’s election, neither major party obtained a mandate to lead Australia. The undisputed winner, out of the shameful defrauding of Kevin Rudd and the Australian people, is the Green...
by Cimino | 20 Aug 2010 | Action plan planning
A dozen years would have been an insufferable delay. Three dozen, for some, a lifetime. But as of Tuesday, Mahurangi Actionestablished 1974 as Friends of the Mahurangi founding chairman John Male’s vision for a Mahurangi plan is formally endorsed by the Auckland...
by Cimino | 17 Aug 2010 | Cartoons, Motorway
It was an entirely reasonable expectation. That the best features of the constituent local bodies would be melded into the new region‑wide council. Len Brown’s announcement that he would ‘take onboard the Waitakere eco‑city concept’ may be belated but is a nonetheless...
by Cimino | 16 Aug 2010 | Climate disinformation
Nobody should be above the law. Such platitudes will resonate with folk who welcome the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition’s latest bid to be noticed: Taking legal action against the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, in the name of the New...
by Cimino | 15 Aug 2010 | Regatta 2011
Event date Saturday 29 January 2011 High tide 16:02 (0.95 m from mean level of sea) Sailing events Mahurangi Cruising Club Shoreside events Friends of the Mahurangi Latest update It doesn’t get much better. The Friday night race to Mahurangi. The old-style...
by Cimino | 12 Aug 2010 | Cartoons, Motorway
A good deal of sense was talked in Auckland and Wellington yesterday. Auckland Regional Council listened to two options that put safety first, in quickly and affordably upgrading the dangerous highway between Pūhoi and Wellsford motorway, presented by the...
by Cimino | 10 Aug 2010 | Climate strategy
It was widely hyped as last chance for planet Earth. Then universally condemned as an abject failure. But the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen a year ago was neither of those things. And what it did produce, thanks to Barrack Obama, was the...
by Cimino | 10 Aug 2010 | Media missing in climate action
As threats go, they don’t come much bigger. Asteroid strike, global thermonuclear war, nuclear winter, snowball earth all have the potential to render Homo sapiens sapiens extinct. But these threats have either a low, in some cases infinitesimally low, possibility of...
by Cimino | 4 Aug 2010 | Nuclear power
Updated 10 September 2010 It was a sobering statement: There’s not enough power available to electrify Auckland’s transport. Gary Heaven knows a lot about such things, given that much of his information technology work is for power utilities. The immediate discussion,...