Beware Auckland City

Auckland City Council is dominated by free-market and neoliberal proponents. There is an almost desperate need amongst the Citizens & Ratepayers councilors, who constitute a majority on most city boards, to promote maximization of performance and financial productivity as the sole motivating factor behind almost all of decision making. And there is constant rhetorical recourse to making these financial savings for the sake of all ratepayers among this group. The overwhelming problem with this is that by only focusing on a single bottom-line the C & R are selling a short term Auckland to residents at the expense of long term sustainability and the development of a truly world class city. And, lets be frank, C&R are not working for the average ratepayers interests, they're working for the interests of developers, and multinational corporate and business interests. If you look at just who they are and where they come from , you'll quickly see that thats who they are as well; and it's not ratepayers interests, it's their interests that will ultimately gain from the injustices that they're dealing out upon the rest of Auckland's ratepayers.

For example:

David Hay is the son of Keith Hay, a former Mayor of Mt Roskill Borough Council, and is a director of the company founded by his father, Keith Hay Homes, a prominent New Zealand home construction company. Hay is known for the advocacy of Christian conservative values and is one of the founding members of the socially and economically conservative Maxim Institute think tank in Auckland. I also understand from an acquaintance on the Waiheke ferry that at one point in the 1970's he had yoga banned from Mt. Roskill!!!

Aaron Bhatnagar former member of the ACT party and now National party supporter ( he thought it was better for his political career) was reportedly a boy-racer of some repute in his St Kentigern College days in 1990's, seen on numerous occasions speeding down Remuera road in his yellow ... Ferrari! His dad Sir Rajeshewar Sarup (Roger) Bhatnagar was owner of the Sound Plus chain that became Noel Leeming when he and associate Greg Lancaster bought the Leeming business. He was the owner of a number of exotic cars as well as a 50ft launch, Enigma, and a fast catamaran-style launch called FU2, which is used to commute from Auckland to a property on Kawau Island in the Hauraki Gulf.

These two guys run the City Development Committee along with the support of David Rafkin, of whom the Auckland City website says is involved in the "... endless search for productivity and efficiency gains", and John Duthie a career bureaucrat supporting C&R policies and with a pro-development agenda.


Waiheke Waste Debacle

Lets make no mistake on this issue; it was the Citizens and Ratepayers councillors on the City Development Committee, David Rankin the Chief Executive, and John Duthie who sold out an internationally recognized, locally revered, and innovative community based organisation dealing more than effectively with waste issues on Waiheke Island (43% diverted from landfill compared to Auckland's 16%) to an Australian multinational corporation, Transpacific Industries. This is a company that is $2.1 Billion in debt and who's owner, Terry Peabody, threatened shareholders of NZ company Waste Management in 2006 that if his take over bid was not successful he would move in and compete with them anyways. Peabody has other interests in New Zealand, his family owns a number of wineries, the most well known being Craggy Range.

The tender process was skewed from the start towards a change of service provider by undervaluing and under-representing the social and educational processes and value that the current provider has increasingly shown are a significant part of the recycling and recovery process, and by continuously undermining the right of Waiheke residents to speak during the tender process. An email from late 2008 from a employee of Auckland City Council to the consultant writing the initial report on waste on Waiheke was uncovered and widely circulated around Waiheke and showed clearly that there was intent to change service providers and suggested to the consultant that the report need to present a watertight business case for such change. It also acknowledged that this would be a controversial issue on the island. Some dirty tactics by C&R appointed lawyers to eventually disqualify the local company and a glut of misinformation on the waste figures for Waiheke finally cemented the contract towards the outcome that appeared in many eyes to be likely predetermined or at least highly preferred by C&R.


Now

Last weekend a community meeting on Waiheke about what can be done now drew nearly 200 people to discuss a way forward through this injustice. There is a mixture of feeling on the issue, from welcoming in Transpacific Industries and presenting them with a charter of conditions that our community expects them to live up to if they are to provide a waste service on the island, to direct action and civil disobedience upon the new contractors arrival. There is a substantial legal challenge that is developing and either way the issue is not going to lay down and it will quite possibly expand to become a sore thumb in the upcoming process of Auckland Supercity-dom and demonstrate how incompetent (and possibly corrupt) the current C&R cabal of Auckland City really are at creating a future vision for the city and its residents.

Shame on them ...

Auckland's Citizens & Ratepayers councillors on the City Development Group have sold Waiheke's internationally recognized community based not-for-profit waste management organisation down the river by awarding the result of an absolutely awful tender process to an Australian multi-national corporation. The multinational came in with the lowest cost - gee! who would have figured that it would be very hard to undermine the community based organization on that ground by a multinational?! ... but the tender process took almost no account of the social, educational, and community aspects of dealing with waste on an island. As John Stanfield, board director of the local organisation Clean Stream says in this report on Campbell Live, dealing with waste is about dealing with people's behaviours and thats exactly what CleanStream did. TPI will just have people back to the old days of chucking stuff willy-nilly into a bin. Real shame that these bastards (and make no mistake - they are evil bastards) have no idea about social capital and can only see financial bottom-lines as the answer to every problem. I'd be a bit scared if I was TPI - there is quite a lot of talk about civil disobedience around the island and enough old greenpeace campaigners, protesters, social media activists, and lawyers to make this all get ugly for the company and Auckland City. If they wanted a smooth transition to a Super City then this wasn't the way to go about it.

Auckland City is wasting our waste

Its not often that I use this blog for "local" matters but this is really getting up my nose so I'm essentially reposting this here in case there are any locals reading. But also ...I reckon that this is an educational issue as well and education is one of the predominant themes of this blog. Waiheke Island has over the last 5 years taught me about recycling. The Waste Resource Trust, the local organization that deals with our waste has educated me about what it means to seperate out my recycling, enlightened me on just what it means to actually deal with an entire communities waste, how to re-use waste that would otherwise just get shipped to a landfill in Auckland, modelled how to run a not-for-profit organization that employs 22 people in a community enterprise, and made me think about how my choices as a consumer impact the environment and the economy ... and now some beauracrats in Auckland City want to take that all away from me (from us) and centralize it by giving the contract for what we do better to an Australian company who's share prices are plummeting! So ...

Join us in the protest and to bear witness at the council meeting
Thursday 14 May, 9am, meet at Aotea Square City. Outside the council
building we will be singing the Waiheke Does it Better song and beating
our procession drum.

It’s not too late to save our waste, every person helps.

This Thursday Auckland City Council City Development Committee will vote
whether or not to give our waste resource to multinational company
TransPacific Industries (TPI). By choosing TPI the council is
ignoring local democracy.

TPI is an Australian owned multinational that has recently suspended
trading on the Australian stock exchange and whose share prices have
plummeted from $14.00 to around $2.00.

Visy, another multinational, that will recycle our recycling is
struggling to find markets for their low grade products (because they
co-mingle recyclables and compact them together) and is wanting a
government bail out.

We will lose local jobs, local income, local innovative solutions and
local decision making and be forced to use an unsustainable recycling
system replacing one of New Zealand's leading recycling projects.

One of their plans is to freight our green waste to Puketutu Island in
the Manukau Harbour for mulching and then sell it back to us. We think
this is ridiculous because we already process our green waste on
Waiheke. This will cost more money and cost the climate.

Join us in the protest and to bear witness at the council meeting
Thursday 14 May, 9am, meet at Aotea Square City. Outside the council
building we will be singing the Waiheke Does it Better song and beating
our procession drum.

We will have spokespeople for media and we will then go up to the
meeting at 09.30 to bear witness to the Council decision. We are trying
to get speaking rights at the meeting.

If you can come, please take the 08.00am ferry, dress well and warmly
and we will gather together on the boat to be briefed. If you are in
town meet in Aotea Square at 09.00 sharp.

Go to www.waihekedoesitbetter.org.nz for more
information. Keep checking back - updated often.

Keep Your Wheelie Bins In Auckland Central from Scott Ewing on Vimeo.

RSS and Archive.org

While I'm a huge fan of Archive.org for the hosting and archiving of podcasts and audio artifacts one of the things that has always been a bit of a let down about the site is the general lack of RSS. While most other sites are now creating RSS feeds for every imaginable content view, Archive.org only has RSS for newly added items to the entire site. Not much help if you are trying to use the site to host podcasts for an event or a project and want those podcasts embedded in the project blog. This recently came up for me specifically in developing the Waiheke Podcasting Project on the Ning platform. After looking at a variety of free podcast hosting solutions I still considered Archive.org to be the most preferred. Not only are they a non-profit organization like we are, they just seem like the best place to store heritage style artifacts to describe our community because they have some solid sponsorships and a good reputation for the work they're doing. Also for our project a big plus was that they don't have a limit on the amount of podcasts that can be hosted there or their file size. This worked well for us because although Ning was going to be great as a community podcast site, it only allows 20MB uploads of audio and there is a limit to the amount of audio each user can have on the site.

All the podcasts that we hosted on Archive.org have a tag applied to them ... so this was halfway towards where I needed it to be. As long as members of the project uploaded their podcasts with the "waiheke podcasting project" tag then we could get a page that displayed all the posts. But how to get this into Ning? The solution was to use a service called Feed43. Feed43 is a free online service that converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly. It's not as simple as just pointing the URL you want turned into RSS at Feed43 though, it requires a bit of tweaking but the results are pretty good and I now have an RSS feed from the Archive.org page that aggregates all the "waiheke podcasting project" tags, and displays them on our Ning page.

How It Works (the expurgated version)


Basically Feed43 goes off and grabs the URL you provide and displays the HTML generated from that page... so if you're scared of the sight of web page blood and guts then this might not be the job for you. From there you need to try to identify some unique HTML classes or IDs or whatever that is used to display the title, the URL, and any other descriptive information that you're interested in to generate your feed. This is called the search pattern and Feed43 uses the results of these patterns to create a fully formed RSS feed. There's a bit of mucking around in this bit and I didn't really have much luck with my trial-and-error start to this process until I had a good look at the tutorial - then it started to make sense, so I'd suggest doing that if this is something you need to do. Once you've got a result that looks like a nice feed Feed43 will generate you a URL that you can use as an RSS feed to link to from your blog or Ning site!