Dedicated to democracy, enjoying and restoring the Mahurangi, meaningful climate action, and curiosity—
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Sir Peter is Te Muri Crossing cocktail party guest of honour
Self-identifying as a Westie, Distinguished Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, after 21 November, hopefully, will also identify as a Mahu Westie. Time was running out, and the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Trust was facing the ignominy of sending out invitations to its charity...
Regional parks review round-1 feedback deadline extended
Round one of Auckland Council’s 10-year regional parks management plan review began 1 September. It was to end next Monday afternoon, close of play, but has been extended to 26 October. The 12 October date continued to appear in the discussion paper linked, but has...
Act now and Aotearoa could own Democracy Day 2021
With Donald Trump’s best prospects now being immediate resignation and prompt a Mike Pence pardon, the United States’ flawed democracy might now survive long enough to face redemption. Shy seven weeks, it is 20 years from the United States election that…
25% less democracy doesn’t equate to 25% less can-kicking
Blamed for everything from the lack of climate-action mobilisation to the lack of a capital gains tax, to the failure to raise the retirement age, the three-year parliamentary term—it is persistently opined—must go. Evidence for the efficacy of longer parliamentary terms….
$30 million Mahurangi action plan
$3 million over 5 years seemed, for a moment there in 2004, as though all the Mahurangi Harbour’s Christmases had come at once. Even in today’s money, $9.06 million is more than twice the 2004 amount, but nor, back then, does it mean that the Mahurangi’s sediment woes…
Depraved indifference to humanity and the home planet
Aotearoa has demonstrated that democracy can work. Globally, however, covid-19 demonstrates the deadly degree to which governmental and intergovernmental governance, democratic or otherwise, is grossly unfit-for-purpose. The world’s ascendant…
Making molehills out of mobilisation mountains
What should have been no worse than a four-thousand-death epidemic is determinedly on its way to becoming an at-least-four-million-death pandemic—a cruel and unnecessary global demonstration of the nothing-to-see-here-folks instincts of bureaucrats and…
Democratic climate-action mobilisation or martial law
That which should have been one of the most influential books of all time ranks 302 209 places behind Nevil Shute Norway’s On the Beach in Amazon’s best sellers, speaks volumes. Comparing Shute’s fiction with Dr James Hansen’s non-fiction Storms of My Grand…