In two elections, I told people some blarney on why I decided to run. In 2010: ‘I was working at Lew’s Diner and this guy had been picked on. I told him, “Stand tall, boy, show some respect for yourself. Do you think I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this […]
Tag: mayoralty
Do mayoral candidates dream of electric sheep?
The original link is long gone, but I sure wish the media here did its job during the 2013 mayoral election and administered the Voigt-Kampff (I know it was spelt differently in the movie) test from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This was from The Wave, 11 years ago, during San […]
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The Rongotai years
This came up today at Victoria University where an old client of ours asked about my 2013 campaign. I remembered there was something about education that I wanted to address at the time. One of the stranger emails during 2013 came from a former classmate of mine at Rongotai College. A brilliant guy at […]
Open the shop and strip away the jargon
I’ve been reading this Grauniad interview with Rory Stewart, MP, referred by Jordan McCluskey. I’m told that Stewart, and Labour’s Frank Field are the two worth listening to these days in British politics. On Stewart, someone who can speak with a Scots accent and has lived in Hong Kong must be a good bloke. […]
Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done
Back in September, The Dominion Post claimed on its front page that I have an ‘accent’ that is holding me back. It was a statement which the editor-in-chief subsequently apologized for, and which she had removed from the online edition—you can judge for yourself here if the claim was a falsehood. Still, despite having lived […]
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Responding to blog comments—and where to from here?
Wordpress, with its automatic deactivation of Jetpack after each update, messed up, so I have no metrics for the last two months of this blog. Nor did it send me emails notifying me of your comments. It would have been useful to know how the last couple of posts went, to gauge your reaction to […]
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Mind the gap
People have rightly asked me my positions on transport, the environment, the Basin Reserve flyover, and libraries. These weren’t put in my manifesto in April 2013 because I expected that candidates (whomever they might be—since only Dr Keith Johnson had declared then) would have largely the same views on them. I was wrong. […]
Campaign update: videos three to five
I have been posting these on the videos’ page as they became public, but maybe I should have added them to this blog, too, for those of you following on RSS. The multilingual one seems to have had a lot of hits. They have been directed by Isaac Cleland, with Khadeeja Dean on sound. Lawrance […]
Being answerable to your public (or, if you can’t engage now, can we expect you to in office?)
One of my supporters Tweeted to say I was the only candidate at Vote.co.nz who has bothered to reply to citizens’ questions. It’s good for me, but sad to see my opponents so disengaged. I was also surprised to see that only three of us have bothered to register for the website this time, despite […]
The statistics back up my manifesto: we need to help young Wellingtonians
One of the things I hear when campaigning is that one should not focus too much on youth, because young people do not vote as much. I think the first part of that is bollocks. While it’s true that the youth vote has never been strong, no one can claim to represent a city […]
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