Heart of the City chief executive Viv Beck. Photo / Alex Burton
Frustration with Heart of the City
As an inner-city resident, I am aware of the anti-social behaviour occurring in our CBD.
There is a lot of work happening to counter this. My office and central government are funding community safety hubs as places for police, Māori wardens, community patrols, and other safety-related agencies to operate out of as part of a frontline patrol service. This is a big piece of work not carried out by my predecessors.
My office is also putting together a safety framework to clearly define the different pillars that make up a safe city.
These are:
Reducing crime (what the police can deal with, coupled with negotiations for a greater police presence in the city centre)
Social wellbeing (the most efficient and appropriate ways to address homelessness and begging; how do we work with government and non-government organisations to solve issues)
Positive activation: how can we provide attractive areas that encourage more people to be there, which creates safer environments?
There are limitations as to what we and the police can do in terms of direct enforcement. In some instances, people may not actually be committing a crime or infringing a council by-law. The council is currently reviewing rules and is taking guidance on alternative enforcement action.
So, it is frustrating to see Heart of the City (NZ Herald, October 23), the business association for the city centre, asking for more to be done when they are in the financial position to do significantly more to assist their area.
Last year, Heart of the City collected $4.8 million in BID targeted rates and only spent $256,913 on security according to their 2022 audited accounts. This was also despite having $1.9m in the bank. Heart of the City received earlier this year an additional $136,954 as part of government support to address issues of retail crime.
Other business associations like Ōtāhuhu spend around 40 per cent of their BID funding on security; there is nothing stopping Heart of the City from doing the same.
Wayne Brown, Auckland Mayor.
Pedestrian crossing issues
I wonder if Auckland Transport could explain to the ratepayers and citizens of Auckland why seemingly every major thoroughfare road is being ruined by new pedestrian crossings being installed every 200 metres? (Raleigh Rd in Northcote being just the latest example!).
It also seems most odd to me that every pedestrian crossing now has to have hideously expensive traffic lights installed also, when every single driver in New Zealand knows that you must stop for pedestrians waiting to cross.
This is a grossly unnecessary waste of money, resources, and our time.
Auckland Transport staff’s insistence on ruining every major thoroughfare (just to keep themselves “busy” in a job) has a significant negative impact on all Aucklanders except those same Auckland Transport staff and the looney left (who seem to have missed the fact that 57.8 per cent of Aucklanders voted two weeks ago to “chuck the bums out” who introduced this new “safety” madness — espoused by Labour and City “Vision”).
How can we stop the destruction of our town centres and roads by the insufferable and arrogant Auckland Transport bureaucracy? They are now clearly spending and wasting our money as fast as they can before Simeon Brown, Winston Peters and David Seymour collectively shout “STOP!”
Worse still, they are wasting our money on “projects” that no one asked for, no one needs, no one wants to pay for (during a cost of living crisis) and that fail the value v cost equation in every instance.
Here’s just one tiny example: the council (Waitematā Local Board) ostensibly cannot afford to fix the Leys Institute library building to the standard that 83 per cent of researched locals selected, but are simultaneously allowing the total waste of $1,500,000 on lifting three pedestrian crossings at Three Lamps/Ponsonby Rd into “raised pedestrian crossings”. To what end?
Not content with that, Auckland Transport are also proposing mindlessly closing off one Ponsonby Rd lane in each direction at Three Lamps — for “safety reasons”. There have not been any significant “deaths or serious injuries” (DSIs as AT likes to call them) at any of the three designated pedestrian crossings, all located very closely together. What are they thinking? Nothing is broken, so nothing “needs fixing”.
Auckland Transport are hell-bent on ruining our ability to get around and are wasting literally hundreds of millions of our ratepayers and taxpayers’ hard-earned money.
Where is Mayor Brown and his alleged war on waste and his campaign promise to “rein in Auckland Transport”? The mayor has gone deathly quiet and has let down all those who voted for him.
Roger Hawkins, Ponsonby.
Motions of sewage
The current Watercare debacle at Parnell has horrified many Aucklanders, and rightly so. It also dredged up childhood memories of holidaying at our family bach on Rangitoto Island in the late 1950s. At that time, Auckland’s sewage was collected at the plant on Tāmaki Drive, now occupied by the Kelly Tarlton’s complex. Raw sewage was held in huge concrete tanks under the road and discharged into the Waitematā Harbour via an outfall pipe beside the Ōrākei wharf, when tides and winds were “favourable”.
Sometimes a strong southerly wind would cause effluent to wash up on the southern shore of Rangitoto, east and west of the ferry wharf.
When that occurred, friends visiting us at our bach were informed that “you can’t go swimming at present, you just go through the motions”.
John Walsh, Green Bay.
Voters took a swing
To quote the media, the Labour Party’s defeat is a “bloodbath”, “horror show”, “utter devastation”, “a loss of biblical proportions” and a “historic defeat”. Not sure why this hyperbole was used, but one fact is that the rave writers have short memories. National’s defeat in 2020 gave the party 25.6 per cent of the vote: 1.3 per cent less than the Labour Party has this time (2023), which is 26.9 per cent so far.
What these low figures show is that a quarter of the vote is committed to each major party; nothing unusual here. As for the two major blocks: in 2020 National/Act got 33.2 per cent, compared with Labour/Green this time at 37.67 per cent. Hence the left loss is considerably less a defeat than the right loss was in 2020. So much so that National/Act is bringing Peters in, and may lose a seat on October 3. Labour also currently dominates its coalition partner by over two-thirds of the left total vote.
With the wealth of information churned out by Labour this election, one could possibly have expected them or their block to win. But this did not appeal to the all-powerful swinging voters.
Sandra Jacobs, Glenfield.
Trust lost in Labour
Labour, led by Jacinda Ardern, handled the mosque attack and the Covid pandemic in a manner I could not fault.
I too was grateful, as expressed by other correspondents also, for the safety net that saved lives with expert advice and financial aid where needed to keep the economy afloat. However, after giving Ardern’s Government absolute power in 2020, our loyalty was abused when ambushed with other unacceptable policies not campaigned on prior to the election.
Apart from absurdly expensive light rail and the monstrous Erebus memorial proposed for Parnell’s Dove-Myer Robinson Park already flagged, we were faced with the Three Waters, co-governance and intensive housing laws pushed through against much opposition.
It was too late for Chris Hipkins to try walking some of these policies back in a desperate move to be re-elected. Trust was lost and consequently the right to govern.
Coralie van Camp, Remuera.
French rugby junket?
Grant Robertson, as the outgoing sports minister, is jetting off to the final of the Rugby World Cup in Paris.
Given the poor state of the New Zealand Government coffers and the extreme level of spending and borrowing under Robertson’s stewardship as the finance minister, I would have thought that economic austerity should have the order of the day.
Surely the New Zealand High Commissioner in London could have represented our Government in Paris for a fraction of the cost?
Sorry to be a spoilt-sport but tight fiscal management must be a priority.
Randal Lockie, Rothesay Bay.
On sport and politics
This time next week we would have won the Rugby World Cup and Labour would have lost more seats to special votes. Bring it on.
Bernie Walker.
On Trump
In a gobsmacking statement that redefines the term “chutzpah”, Donald Trump’s announcement that “we are innocent of everything” strongly suggests the opposite.
Larry Mitchell, Rothesay Bay.
On Hamas
There should be a ceasefire and more aid going in to Gaza as soon as Hamas releases all the hostages.
Nick Hamilton, Remuera.
On Hosking
After the defeat of Labour, I’d hoped for a more forgiving column from Mike — one that I could finally enjoy reading — with less vitriol, less political bias and less “I told you so” ... oh dear, silly me.
Lois McGough, Ōrewa.
On NZX
No one can be surprised that the NZX is tanking as investors wake up to the reality of the new coalition of chaos coming. Markets foretell the state of business in the future and with the New Zealand economy larger now than at any time in this country’s history, it seems there is no confidence about what the future holds. Seat belts on, everybody.
Mark Nixon, Remuera.
Police arrested 20 Greazy Dogs members over alleged meth crimes in Bay of Plenty.