During the campaign trail, people tended to ask me if I was left or right. While I cheekily said, ‘Forward,’ many a time (and had at least one imitator), there’s something to be said for abandoning what are, effectively, nineteenth-century constructs. And unless you are DI Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes, you need […]
Category: politics
Local, national and international politics.
Igovt hates my answers
I signed up to the Igovt site for the New Zealand Government today, allowing citizens a single log-on for e-government services (such as the Companies’ Office, where we have to file annual returns). In case you forget your password, you can choose from a variety of security questions they can ask you. The following […]
Stutterheim marks the Swedish mood
Sent to me by Stefan Engeseth, Stutterheim Raincoats’ website conveys a very Swedish feel, touching on one of the emotions we don’t always associate with Sweden: melancholy during the winter. The copy on the site even says, ‘Let’s embrace Swedish melancholy.’ With emotive photographs and a very Swedish soundtrack, it helps create an […]
How MG Rover mirrored the developments at Lada
I still have Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes. […]
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Wellington needs a new brand for a new decade
A very good Vista Group luncheon (Jim, Natalie, self), where we discussed: the Gap rebrand; The Hobbit, unions and the BNZ Centre boilermakers’ strike; and my mayoral campaign. On the first topic, we concluded that it was down to a simple cock-up. None of us could see any reason for the Gap to rebrand […]
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Thank goodness I did not have a ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ moment on Saturday
On Saturday, I called then-Councillor, and now Mayor-elect, Celia Wade-Brown to congratulate her. I felt sure that the special votes would see her ushered in, and in my Sky TV interview that night, I stated much the same: I would offer our new Mayor my support for programmes that would benefit the people of Wellington. […]
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How well we engaged
This was a nice souvenir of the campaign: Brenda Wallace’s summary on how well we engaged on Twitter. I hate to think where I would have been without social media. Although it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to my placing, I would be interested to know where the special votes will finally […]
Winding down after a busy, post-campaign 24 hours
At our campaign after-party: self, Karen King, and Chloe Oldfield and Aaron Hape. It is perhaps no surprise that the last 24 hours saw more Tweets to me than any other period in my life, as the results from the local body elections came in. I was overwhelmed by the messages, which were very […]
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Paul Henry is only the tip of the redneck iceberg
Yesterday, I began watching the Indian media get hold of the Paul Henry story. Indians are, rightly, up in arms with the TV host’s insult of Chief Minister Smt. Sheila Dikshit’s name—this, plus the incident questioning whether Governor-General HE Sir Anand Satyanand was a New Zealander, shows a pattern where Henry thinks poorly of people […]
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By all means, enforce parking, but it’s not a licence to write fiction
Today was a good reminder why we cannot trust a foreign company to look after our parking, and why things need to be brought back under council control. Parking enforcement is not about profit. Karen was unduly issued with a parking ticket in a P5 space after hours. And I received one today. You […]
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