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 Property's lead by donating $58k to the National Party. It's 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 Gressons Road fast track process was enabled by Waimakariri District Council (WDC) 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, the Pegasus new town 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 (SC) which had plans for a new town. 

SC sold it to Infinity Investments Group (IIG) which also bought the farmland to the west of the town site. IIG reached 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, (PTL) 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 from Pegasus. 

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 proposed 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.

A con of the first water

The Neo-lib inspired management-governance split left local councils in New Zealand in the grip of central government by making party political divides in local governance opaque, by placing too much power in the hands of CEOs, and by imposing layers of regulation almost all of which have to funded out of rates, which residents pay out of their taxed income and on which they are then taxed again by central government via GST.

Back in the colonialist days of powerful provincial governance, some people longed for a strong central government to curb the untrammelled greed and rampant self-interest of those who controlled the provinces. 

We live in an era in which those venal, self-serving attributes are firmly in the driving seat at all levels of both the governance and the management of a socio-economic system that is rooted in exploitation in pursuit of private profit. Calls for more local power in that socio-economic landscape are a chimera.

As a case in point: I live in a district with a population of just under 14k in a land area of 8,600 square kilometres. Our rates have skyrocketed, not solely because of the abandonment of Three Waters but because of decades of poor management and governance.

We have water which meets WHO standards but due in part to a council strategy of mixing water from different sources (funded by the last government), our water is so heavy with minerals and chlorine it destroys water heaters and whiteware unless softened and filtered as most people are now forced to do at their own expense. 

The reticulated rural water supply is old in places, and leaks are frequent with untold amounts of potable water being wasted.

The bulk of the district’s roads are unsealed and poorly maintained, due largely to the inefficiencies and false economy of the Neo-lib contract culture in which local councils are firmly enmeshed. 

As a rural property we were forced to install a sewage system which, thanks to the regional government's subservience to the Neo-lib ethos, requires on-going maintenance, initially by the company which installed it, then by a large corporation which bought that company which now out-sources the job to a self-employed contractor. 

We have no rubbish collection, and the council effectively destroyed one of the country’s most advanced and innovative community-led recycling initiatives to pass a key contract onto a private sector provider. When questioned about what was widely perceived locally as a conflict of interest, the then mayor laughed and said, “This is XXX, there’s always a conflict of interest.”

All that aside, NZ’s total population is half that of Seoul. It is skewed, not just in relation to the numbers in the northern island, but in greater Auckland. 

The larger island (also the location of the great, state-funded hydro schemes which supply 60% of the nation’s now privatised electricity) is home to just 1.2 million people, half of them in one province. 

There is a pressing need for governance and management to be genuinely efficient and economic,  and to be responsive to local needs. We simply cannot afford to have deep layers of both national and local governance and management. 

The creation of the all-important buffer zone, the various strata of which have a financial and  status stake in the economic status quo, has resulted in layers of bureaucracy which are all-too often parasitic on essential front-line services. 

This is at its most obvious in the public sector, and at present it provides useful ideological cover for a crackpot coalition government to make swingeing cuts in the sector –  partly as a bone to divert some of its more rabid supporters, but mainly to fund the juicy steaks it intends to serve up to its main financial and political backers.  

They point to the layers of bureaucracy that their ilk created as a buffer zone, and to the struggling, front line service providers who have been starved of funding and ham strung by regulations, and they sacrifice some of the former, not to improve the latter, but to divert the “savings” into the pockets of the already-rich. 

Or, even more brazenly, to create new layers of bureaucracy to facilitate yet more asset stripping. 

It is a con of the first water; unparalleled in its callous impudence.

Open Letter to Judge Kevin Glubb

Dear Judge Glubb,

Let me say at the outset that I am against sending people to prison unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. I would much rather New Zealand's judges did not use remand and custodial sentences for young offenders as often as you all do. 

I know that people, and especially young people, can behave in uncharacteristic ways when under the influence of alcohol or drugs and/or hormones, and/or due to peer pressure or mob mentality. 

Given a criminal record can have profound implications for a person's future, I accept that in some instances a discharge without conviction, and granting of permanent name suppression are warranted.

All of this is why, in principle, I approve of your ruling in the case of the young man who, at the age of twenty, punched a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother, in the face, causing her bodily and psychological harm.

According to the reports I've read, you described the offending in question as "moderately serious" given the blows were to the head. 

The outcome for the victim was a fairly minor physical injury; the psychological harm is much harder to assess but importantly, the assault had the very real potential to cause serious, possibly fatal injuries. 

That fact should have featured in your sentencing, if only to use the opportunity to send a message to all men who punch women, and to young men who punch anyone in the head but especially old women, that it is an extremely dangerous act.

You may not be aware of it but men on average punch 160% harder than women. A man punching a woman is seldom an even contest; a young man punching an old woman is about as uneven as it gets.

That aside, women's ability to withstand the force of a blow to the head is significantly less than men on average because of sex-based differences in the musculature of the male and the female posterior cervical spine.

Add to that, the probability of age-related osteoporosis in a 70-year-old woman, and any blow from a man, especially one in the grip of adrenaline and testosterone disinhibition, is likely to result in fractures. A blow to the head could result in a catastrophic cervical fracture.

The young man's defence was that he is "neurodiverse", ie he has ADHD and mild autism, which make him more prone to acting impulsively. 

However, despite his reduced impulse control, he had got to the the age of twenty without any prior arrests or convictions which suggests either he must have had a sequestered life, or controlled himself pretty well, or there was a trigger in that situation, i.e. the anger he felt on behalf of trans people who he thought were being attacked by the mainly older, female rally attendees.

Whatever one's opinion of the victim vis-à-vis her reasons for being at the rally, her actions in challenging a person who was removing lines placed to delineate the rally and the protesters, her refusal to engage in restorative justice, or the use of the case in the on-going arguments about trans and women's rights, nothing can reasonably be said to mitigate such an assault.

It's as reasonable to argue that the young man's action, far from being impulsive, was somewhat calculated in that it is highly unlikely he would have lost control of his fists if the person he was confronting had been a large, muscly man.

It is noteworthy that in 2014, you were faced with another twenty-year-old man who was charged with a similar assault. 

In the grip of extreme alcohol and adrenaline/testosterone disinhibition, and after a domestic dispute, three police officers attempted to arrest him. In the course of the arrest he punched a detective in the face causing a small cut and a black eye.

The two defendants were the same sex and age; they both suffered a serious loss of impulse control, and there were analogous injuries caused to their victims.

So, what was so different that the young man in 2014 deserved to be sent to prison for thirteen months, with no reporting restrictions, while the young man in 2024 got discharged without conviction and was granted permanent name suppression?

Was it being drunk as opposed to being neurodiverse?

Was it resisting arrest by three police officers and in the process punching one of them in the eye, as opposed to launching an unprovoked attack on a 70-year-old woman?

Was it being working class and brown skinned as opposed to middle class and white skinned?

Or was it having prior convictions – which of course may well have been connected to being working class and brown skinned?

Conniving and conspiring or confused and confounded

Someone replied to this on Bryan Gould's blog suggesting that he needed to distill the argument down to something short and "matey" in tone so that voters could understand it.

Here's my effort; it's not short nor especially matey but might help untangle the web a bit.

The SIS had a confidential record of a briefing they'd provided Phil Goff, then Leader of the Opposition.

Various media asked for information from the SIS under the OIA but ALL requests were denied except for that of an unaccredited rightwing blogger – Cameron Slater – whose request was granted much faster than usual.

It was widely known that Slater's a mate of leading National MPs and was close to the PM and his office.

Slater used the information, which ONLY HE HAD, to attack Phil Goff in the lead up to an election.


We know about the background to this because Slater talked and boasted about it to his various mates – one of whom worked in the PM's office – and after he'd taken his usual obnoxious behaviour into the realms of the truly repugnant, someone hacked his computer and gave the information to Nicky Hager.

All very embarrassing to Key and his government and looking suspiciously like a set up to make Phil Goff look bad just before the election.

Key claims he wasn't told about the SIS release of information until much later despite 3 pieces of clear evidence that he had been told – evidence from the SIS, the Ombudsman and his own mouth.

Key then claims that when the SIS said they'd briefed HIM – as they are legally and ethically obliged to do – they actually meant they'd spoken to someone (as yet unidentified) in his OFFICE.

So, we're supposed to believe that this anonymous person – presumably senior enough to be briefed by the Director of the SIS – failed to tell the PM that the SIS had decided to release information EXCLUSIVELY to a notoriously partisan right-wing blogger with close connections to the National Party – when that release was bound to cause embarrassment to the Leader of the Opposition and piss off the accredited media whose OIA requests had been denied.

The parties involved of course never anticipated that the Boastful Blogger's computer would be hacked and the whole sordid story would end up with Nicky Hager who would write a book and publish it right before an election. Such sweet irony.

My lay-person's view on the matter:

•        It is, or bloody-well should be, unthinkable that the country's security service would take the decision to give a privileged response to an OIA request from a POLITICALLY PARTISAN attack blog after having denied similar requests from accredited news media.

•        It is, or bloody-well should be, unthinkable that the SIS would fail to brief their minister – who is the PRIME MINISTER  – about a release of information involving the Leader of the Opposition to any news media, let alone to a POLITICALLY PARTISAN attack blog.

•        It is, or bloody-well should be, unthinkable that a member of staff in the PM's office, who was SENIOR enough receive a confidential and highly sensitive SIS briefing, would fail to pass that on to the Prime Minister.

•        It is, or bloody-well should be, unthinkable that Key as the MINISTER IN CHARGE, can refuse to take responsibility for what happened on HIS WATCH and be backed up in that by sections of the media.

Key is EITHER up to his eyebrows in this and the excuses are just so much bafflegab to try to cover up his complicity in/approval of a "sting" devised by his dirty tricksters;


OR, he was oblivious to dirty tricks and machinations involving his office, the country's security service and a HIGHLY PARTISAN attack blog.

He simply can't have it both ways.

So which is it - conniving, conspiring Key or confused and confounded Key?

Rock Star or Rock Bottom

There was a story in the Press yesterday about 14 people sharing a small 3 bedroom house in Hornby after a family of 6 lost their rental and all their (uninsured) possessions in a fire and had to move in with the other two families already living in the house.

Their budget for a new rental, if they can find one, is a maximum of $440 a week. They are struggling to find anywhere because landlords in Christchurch have been allowed to price gouge and profiteer – i.e., do what uncontrolled capitalist markets will always do when supply is low and demand is high.


The man who is believed to have shot dead two WINZ staff members and injured a third, is sick, socially isolated and homeless. Sue Bradford was lambasted for remarking on the political dimensions of the tragedy and using it to "score political points".  

This is a horrible tragedy and we must respect the feelings of the family and friends of the victims but like it or not, it is political.  The fact that people cannot afford private rentals, that there is a shortage of social housing, that WINZ staff are instructed not to be proactive and advise people of their full entitlements, that WINZ staff are the buffer zone between government's social and economic policy and the people who are worst affected by it – are all political issues. 

The Auckland property boom and the Christhchurch rebuild are making some people very, very rich; some people's affluence has increased significantly,  but a lot of people are worse off, especially the  hidden homeless. Some have slipped off the radar completely,  some people hanging on by their fingertips, and a lot are "staying afloat by using their credit cards as flotation aids". 

The number of households that are under stress is steadily rising because rents are going up faster than wages, and inflation is increasing.  

Radio New Zealand detailed the case of a 45-year-old homeless woman in Auckland:

"Sandra and her 2 teenage sons and her 20-year-old daughter are living at the Monte Cecilia housing trust’s emergency accommodation in Mangere. Sandra says the last few years have been devastating. Until a year ago she was working at a plastics factory taking home $890 a week and paying $500 of that in rent for a 3 bedroom house in Papatoetoe.

'With the escalating rents every 6 months it was going up $20 and $20 every time. If I fell behind on the water rates then I was looking at Baycorp, if I paid the water rates then we had no power. If I could pay the water rates the power we didn't eat for that week. I was working 72 hours a week 6 nights a week, 6 at night to 6 in the morning and it just became too much of a struggle and I collapsed.'

"Sandra got arthritis in her hands, she lost her job and then the house. When her job seekers' support benefit couldn't pay the rent, they moved into a friend's state house until the friend was warned her tenancy could be terminated because of having extra people living there.

'So my children and I packed up and for 3 weeks we lived out of a Honda, my car. We would go to Manurewa pools for showers, you know I'd try to make a game of out it 'come on let's go to the pools, we'll have a morning swim and a shower and then we'll go to school.'

“In desperation Sandra turned to the Maori Woman's Welfare League who sent her to Monte Cecilia.

'I'm so thankful and appreciative of being in Monte Ceciia today I really don't know where I would have been if I wasn't here. Um CYFS was certainly an option for me to look at for them to take my children  I couldn't offer them anything, not a home not seven meals a week not 3 meals a day ,7 meals a week, clean water somewhere you know, safe to sleep I couldn't offer them any of that.’"

Janette Walker, the Labour candidate for Kaikoura,  spoke passionately at a meeting last week about the working poor she has met in the south of the electorate – people displaced by the earthquakes, forced into low quality housing and living in garages, sheds, caravans – because rents have risen beyond their reach. 

These hidden homeless and the working poor are no longer the exception to the general rule of New Zealanders having a decent standard of living. 

The raucous claims by the right that poverty is caused by people making "bad choices" and spending their perfectly adequate wages or benefits on "fags and booze" are an ugly echo of all those voices throughout history which have lauded and defended the pathological hoarding of the rich, and claimed it as proof of their superiority in the natural order of things. 

Those same strident voices damn the poor as "feckless", as a "feral underclass" which does not have children but which "spawns" or 'breeds".  Commentators who call for them to be sterilised are applauded as having the courage to say what others are thinking.  Cartoonists who caricature and stereotype them are defended for simply telling the truth.  Bloggers who mock them get media awards.

The rightwing ideologues and their foot soldiers should throw off their shallow pretence to being socially advanced and call for bringing back the Workhouse – that at least would be honest.  

A Parable For Our Times: with apologies to real sharks

Just so we are all on the same page - this is a parable based on the Kim Dot-Com situation


Once upon a time there was a little shark who wanted to be a Great White when he grew up. Because he was a clever and devious hunter he grew to be a very big little shark.  He was not content to dominate the sharks in his part of the ocean and set off towards the zone of the Great Whites – the shark elite whose ranks he thought he was big enough and vicious enough to join. 

This elite of Great Whites allows certain other smaller sharks to scavenge the edges of their kill zone and if they are well fed, they may even let an enterprising little shark dart in to seize some prey for itself, but if a little shark starts to act like one of the Great Whites, or threatens their interests, they'll turn on him.  

The big little shark desperately wanted to be a part of the Great White elite but to them he was just a scavenging pest. When he started to muscle in on their kill zones, they decided to destroy him. He managed to escape and fled south but they were in a blood frenzy and pursued him across the oceans as far as the great southern ocean where he found some quiet waters in which to rest and gather his strength. 

The local sharks seemed a pretty dopey bunch and were easily bribed with a few fish to let him take up residence in their waters. Once rested, he took to his usual tactic of scattering around large amounts of fish offal to boost his reputation as the biggest predator in the neighbourhood and managed to gather a number of scavengers around him.  

But, unbeknownst to him, there was a Great White in residence – cleverly disguised as a dolphin. This shark in a dolphin suit alerted the Great White elite to the big little shark's presence in his waters, and a kill squad was sent to finish him off.

Using all his skills, the big little shark managed to escape the kill squads and found himself a spot where he could defend himself.  He thought that if the Great White elite was never going to let him become one of them he would be as much of a nuisance to them as he could – especially to the resident Great White.  

He looked around for allies. There weren't many as the waters had been so depleted of fish they could not support much in the way of predators, but he managed to find some prey species which were swimming around in an agitated and fearful state. 

He devised a cunning plan. He also disguised himself as a dolphin (a very large one it must be said) and persuaded the prey fish that he and his dolphin school would protect them from the Great White and its gang of scavengers if the prey fish would act as a diversion. They were to present themselves as a target while he and his school would sneak up behind the Great White and ram him – that being the way dolphins attack sharks.  Once deprived of their devious leader, the scavenger gang could be chased away by the dolphins and all would be well. 

The fish were so anxious for some leadership they totally forgot to question how come this particular dolphin had such huge teeth, not to mention the fact that dolphins also eat fish. 

After a lot of discussion, the prey fish agreed to band together to create a big enough shoal to attract the resident Great White's attention. The Great White duly sniffed out the prey and headed in for the kill. To the horror of the fish there was no sign of their dolphin protector.  Once the Great White had killed and eaten as many of the fish as he could catch and his scavengers had finished off the rest, he turned and found himself confronting the big-little shark.

"That was my gift to you," the big little shark said. "Proof of my good intentions. I want to stay here in these waters and if you let me I can promise you more prey, especially lots of tasty young juveniles. They can see right through your disguise because frankly it's wearing a bit thin, but they think I'm a real dolphin."

The Great White thought a while and being a very pragmatic sort of shark who didn't get to where he was by useless displays of overt aggression, agreed to let the big little shark stay, as long as he delivered a regular tribute of the tasty young prey he'd promised. 

And if he became too much of a nuisance, the resident Great White thought, there is more than one way to kill a shark.

The End.