The Golden Mile is going to be pedestrianised – and that is great news. Great news to me, great news for Wellingtonians, great news for visitors to our city if they ever return, but apparently some of the retailers along Lambton Quay feel that this is not great news. I’m not sure why – nobody in their right mind tries to drive to their favourite retailer…
Fish
“Standing on shaky ground, ever since you put me down…” sang the Temptations and it resonates deeply with people of Wellington. We all know that our isles are shaky, and our city has the potential to be shaky in the extreme, but what we perhaps don’t know is just how shaky our particular patch of dirt is beneath our own two feet. I’ve been doing a…
How many 1 in a 100 year events have we had lately? 400mm of rain in Akaroa down south sounds suspiciously like this is more of a 1 in a thousand year event – that’s rainfall in Westport proportions! And meanwhile, of course, we have some rain up here in Wellington and inevitably, Plimmerton gets flooded out. Why is this? I’m glad you asked. Plimmerton Roundabout…
First thing I find when looking at the proposed new Climate Zones, is that in going from the current (somewhat silly) three Zones for Climate, they have instead gone for Six zones, nicely colour-coded, from Red for Hot in Zone 1, down through the rainbow of orange and yellows and greens, to end up with a cold southerly Blue for Zone 6. Brrrr!!! Chilly!! My question…
You know when you’ve been waiting for something to arrive for ages, and then when you finally realise it is here, the time for comment is almost up? No? Is that just me then? MBIE has put out a discussion document (a month ago, apparently, in April) that they want your / my / our feedback on by May 28th on their proposals for Building Code…
Last night, on Prime TV, there was a programme on living in apartments in NZ. Specifically, apartment hell living in leaking apartments and badly built apartments. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant doc, mainly because it had a maudlin speaker and poor sound quality, but I got the gist of it: NZ seems to be rubbish at designing and building apartment buildings. Some of the examples were…
Monasteries have always been freeloaders on society – for the last 2000 years or more. I’ve never quite understood the mystique of the monk or the nun – and their insistence that someone else pay for their way of life, essentially doing mindless things like praying 14 hours a day or keeping silent for years on end. Get a job, you schmucks! Try actually working for…
The Government is getting light rail back on track by involving Wellingtonians in a six-month process to come up with a city-shaping project. Transport Minister Michael Wood today acknowledged Wellingtonians had been shut out of the multibillion-dollar project between the CBD and Wellington Airport, which went on hold in the middle of last year after being blocked by NZ First. He said an establishment unit has…
Fascinating to see the hubbub over the announcements today from Labour of a revised policy over housing sales. From the Nats there is a wild panicked squealing as their fat little piggies suddenly realise that perhaps they should not have all their spare money in property. Accusations of a new Capital Gains Tax from Ardern, despite there already being a “Bright Line” test in existence, which…