Dedicated to democracy, enjoying and restoring the Mahurangi, meaningful climate action, and curiosity—
primarily pre-pandemic content accessible from this page. Go to lastest content…
Conspiracy theories also opiate at local level
She writes refreshingly rationally. Titled Conspiracy as the Opium of the People, columnist Tracey Barnett warns: We’re fostering a world where the truth can be picked out of a hat. Arabs, Jews or Americans themselves felled the Twin Towers, depending on whether you...
Harry Bunn was indeed a wonderful man
What a great photograph of Jaap! Jaap’s reference to Harry at the end of his is Harry Bunn, former director of the biggest division at Forest Research Institute for many years up to his retirement in the mid-1980s. Harry, who died a couple of years ago…
Preferential voting better representation of results
Trawling through the results of the 2007 local body elections where single transferable voting was used, I was somewhat discouraged by the various representations of the data involved. Some results were simply listed as Elected and Not Elected. Others…
Thank you the fabulously appreciated four hundred and eighty-five
Membership of Mahurangi Action once reached 330. That was on the back of the launch of Jade River : A History of the Mahurangi. Since then it has slipped back to around half that figure, where it has been, more or less, for much of the group’s existence. The...
Distinctly dispiriting campaign climate
I last stood for council 33 years ago. A candidate for the Hibiscus Coast District Community Council, I came, I was want to say, dangerously close to being elected. Not dangerous in the sense that I was too young, more that I was never comfortable with the adversarial...
High-impact cartoon could spark low-impact design revolution
Earlier yesterday, quite coincidentally, I tried to call Ross Kinnaird, to sound him out about a new personal project—the trifling matter of fixing MMP. I haven’t spoken to Ross for some time; the last was at Georg Kohlap’s funeral. We might have had a serious session...
Plucked from obscurity and patted on back
Goodness me, what a pleasant surprise. I thought I had already disappeared into history, not even making it to footnote status, and then you came along! Thank you so much for plucking me from obscurity and giving me a pat on the…
Mandatory marquee discussion begins with a few beers on Friday
A discussion over the planned scale of use of the Mahurangi West Hall is underway. The discussion is mandatory, a requirement of the Resource Management Act. Many rile against the act, but the common sense embodied in it is often lost sight of—specifically, the...