Developer Entitlement Syndrome

In case anyone was in any doubt about the direction that New Zealand's Coalition of Chaos will continue to take if it gets another term – in February, GMP Environmental, a subsidiary of Greymouth Petroleum, donated $100k each to the coalition members – National, NZ First and ACT.  

Here in Canterbury, Williams Corporation followed Wolfbrook's lead by donating $58k to the National Party, a move that political cynics will view as being in anticipation of their future developments being fast tracked and green lighted. 

Like the environmentally bonkers 1500-section residential development planned on Gresson's Road just south of Waikuku which gobbles up 140+ hectares of productive farmland and will create even more traffic chaos on SH1.

Well, heaven forbid anyone with an advanced case of Developer Entitlement Syndrome should have to delay the treatment for the condition which comes in the form of making huge profits out of yet more unsustainable, car-dependent, satellite developments.

It seems that the Gresson's Road fast track process was enabled by Waimakariri District Council having rezoned the land residential – a decision which flies in the face of common sense and WDC's own claims to want to protect productive rural land.  

I'm told that WDC has carved up proportionately more of its rural land into lifestyle blocks and residential sprawl than any other district council in NZ. Of considerable interest to a logical person like me is why, having rezoned a 140-hectare dairy farm residential to enable yet another satellite housing estate, WDC turned down an application from the former owner of Pegasus golf course for rezoning of a 3-hectare lifestyle block on the edge of Pegasus. 

Speaking of which ...

You might be interested to know that Pegasus sits on coastal land that WDC originally bought to use as a landfill – the entrance to which would have been off Gladstone Road. 

The environment dodged a mortar shell when WDC sold the land to Southern Capital which had plans for a new town. 

SC sold it to Infinity Investments Group which also bought the farmland to the west of the town reaching a compromise with WDC over the rural zoning by making it the site of a golf course with 98 clustered "high-end" houses, and bisected by a new access road. 

IIG, via its subsidiary Pegasus Town Ltd, made a mint before PTL went bust owing final debts of $101m. 

IIG sold the Pegasus development to Todd Property Group and moved on to develop Ravenswood just across SH1. 

As IIG has retained ownership of, and intends to expand the Ravenswood commercial hub, the company is no doubt very happy with the adjacent Gressons Rd subdivision, and the possible further residential development of Pegasus. Ching ching.

It's ironic that WDC, the mayor of which publicly opposes residential development on the Pegasus golf course, may very well have paved the way for that residential development by having previously rezoned 7 hectares of the golf course for commercial development.

Pegasus residents and golf club members also failed to register any opposition to that development.

I can almost hear the fast track commissioner saying that the impacts on stormwater, traffic, sewage, visual amenity etc of a subdivision of say 100 houses on that rezoned land would be not much greater than the proposed 50-bed, 3-storey hotel plus a sprawling spa, with accommodation and associated commercial development.

Watch this space.

More on moral voids

Another draft post from last year that I never finished 

People who support the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza and more widely in the region either support the Zionist fascists who’ve stated openly that their intention is to destroy Gaza, annex the West Bank, remain in the occupied territories, and deny the Palestinians any sort of state – or they fail to challenge them. 

Either way makes them supportive of Israel as an openly far-right, aggressively colonising arm of US foreign policy in the Middle East. 

Who, in all seriousness can deny that the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, the occupied territories and the wider diaspora are the tragic victims of a vicious imperialist power play? 

Progressive Palestinians in exile and supporters in the 70s and 80s warned of the way that the US and Israel and their allies were demonising the Palestinian left, promoting factionalism, and backing terrorism and religious extremism. 

Fast forward to this century and Israel actively enabled Hamas by channeling Qatari money to the organisation, and there is compelling evidence that the Israeli state either orchestrated or let the October attacks happen to justify escalating the conflict with the aim of creating the Greater Israel that sits at the heart of the Zionist project. 

Israeli far rightists state openly and proudly that there never will be a Palestinian state; the choice for Palestinians is to live in perpetual exile from their homeland, or in forms and degrees of subjugation within it. 

The death of an Israeli settler in the West Bank as a result of what was effectively a suicide attack by two eighteen-year-old Palestinians from Hebron, gave rise to expressions of outrage from supporters of Israel. 

Given the events of the past seven decades and the massive escalation of IDF and settler violence against Palestinians over the past two years, such expressions of outrage over one dead Israeli serve to reinforce the Zionists’ precept that one Jewish life is worth one hundred or more Palestinian lives. 

It was the same with the Jewish man who was stabbed in London and the second victim who the police shot accidentally, the expectation that we should feel those deaths more keenly than the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, the West Ban, Lebanon etc.  

On a personal level we should feel pity for the victims and their families, but we must also see them, not just as hapless victims of a deranged or desperate Muslim/Arab/Palestinian, but as victims of malign geopolitical manoeuvres by the powerful psychopaths and malignant narcissists who dominate politics in the region.

A wise person said the only thing Jews fear more than antisemitism, is no antisemitism. I would add the rider – right-wing Jews fear that.

To paraphrase Golda Meir, the Nazi holocaust gave Zionists a perpetual get out of coloniser jail free card. It serves both to create a perpetual guilt among the descendants of the perpetrators and colluders, and a sense of perpetual victimhood, fear and anger among Jews which now combines with an ideology of exceptionalism that makes Americans look positively modest. 

It’s toxic and harmful to Jewish people, and it risks fuelling real Jew hatred, not the ideological confection that apologists trot out to deflect away from the Israeli state’s appalling actions. 

It’s why so many progressive Jewish people would never live in Israel or support the Israeli state especially now that it has now lurched closer to actual fascism. 

The fact is, most of the Jews in Israel today, including most of the illegal settlers, have not fled from anti-Jewish persecution or even a viable threat of it.

They are there because of an ideology rooted in a spurious claim of indigeneity derived from a 3000-year-old religious text. That text also served to breathe life into the patriarchal kinship arrangements which spawned many of the world’s phallocratic regimes and institutions – a fact that too many Israeli-supporting feminists choose to ignore. 

The politics of the Middle East and Palestine/Israel are hugely complex but what is simple is the fact that among the ruins caused by these geopolitical machinations, millions of real people who want nothing more than a simple life in peace and security, are suffering torments.

 

That is the horrible truth of it all.

 

Zionist Israel is wrong. It was wrong in its conception and its development. It may now be so wrong, it can never be put right.