OPINION
Christmas was well and truly launched at the weekend.
Joining the many performers including The Rodger Fox Big Band, Dennis Marsh, The Kars, Shortland Street’s Bella Kololo, school kids and choirs, Saturday’s A Very Palmy Christmas Concert set the scene for Sunday’s A Very Palmy Christmas Parade.
The weather played ball, and a great time was enjoyed by the many thousands who attended.
My grateful thanks to Kairanga Lions, the city council events team, the participants for their floats, volunteer marshals, Saturday’s performers, and to city residents and families for making the whole weekend special.
There’s another Christmas event to come this Saturday with the Ashhurst community Christmas celebrations. The annual market is under way from 10am followed by the parade at 11am.
If the day is anything like last year’s, it’ll be terrific. My congratulations to the organisers in advance.
Kairanga Lions will again play a role at New Year’s Eve in The Square with their pyrotechnicians setting off two fireworks display on Te Marae o Hine as we show the door to 2024, and welcome in 2025.
‘Tis the season to be grateful – especially for the many volunteers we have among us who play a huge under-the-radar role in making the city tick.
It was a pleasure to attend Hato Hone St John’s volunteer recognition event on Sunday after the Christmas parade.
On Tuesday night we presented the annual Civic Awards to four more deserving recipients who epitomise the spirit of volunteer community service.
At a special function Imtiyaz Bakshi, Guy Donaldson, Stephen Parsons and Annie Scoon were officially added to the city’s Civic Honour Roll in recognition of their invaluable contributions to Palmerston North over many decades.
The city benefits enormously from this kind of sustained and selfless input. We are indeed fortunate to have them and dozens of others like them, working for us in this largely unheralded and behind-the-scenes capacity.
So far, I’m putting a brave and cheerful face on what has been a really tough year. This, my final column for 2024 sadly looks like it could be my final Guardian column period.
By the end of this week, staff of the city’s remaining community newspaper will know their fate after owners NZME proposed last month to close it down along with 13 other papers around the country.
In 2018, we lost the Tribune, a community paper established by Terrace End businesspeople in 1958.
The Guardian, founded in 1972 only recently celebrated its 50th. Its closure, if the proposal goes ahead, would continue a scalping of the local mediascape and a loss of profile for our city and region where we already work doubly hard at overcoming unwarranted negative perceptions.
Yes, we still have a daily newspaper, the Manawatū Standard, but, in my view, that’s almost been totally absorbed into the Wellington Post. We still have local radio frequencies – but increasingly their network focus lessens the opportunity for local voices, views, visibility and promotions.
In a mediasphere dominated by Auckland, Christchurch and to a lesser extent Wellington, anything that happens in our region tends to be drowned out by the cacophony of their big city concerns.
Under this proposal there would be even fewer prospects for meaningful local stories to be added to national digital platforms due to restricted opportunities for local reporting.
Also, the scatter of social media platforms and their hard-to-verify or fact-check, often badly-informed echo-chamber content is no substitute for carefully considered, independent and professionally curated journalism.
The implications for city profile, for media marginalisation of our diverse communities, and for local democracy are worrying. Next year is local body election year, and the demise of the Guardian would mean one less opportunity to stimulate public engagement with the issues, for informed discussion and debate, or for full participation in the hard-to-sell local democratic process.
It’s tempting to think that the Grinch has somehow managed to clobber Christmas. But look, here it comes anyway.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Mayor Grant Smith, JP
