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…
Some extra-ordinary goings on in Palmerston North this week, centred around the fate of the All Saints church in the heart of that flat and boring city. You may think that nothing much of importance ever happens in Palmy, but apparently you would be wrong. There’s not much of great architectural significance in PM, but All Saints is one. It is a Frederick de Jersey Clere…
Waking at 2.27am this morning, as we all were, for a moment I thought that my lover was gently rocking me to wake up. Then I remember that we broke up years ago and I’ve been single ever since. Who else was in the bed with me then? Why, it was my old friend Mother Earth, tugging at the heart strings with an earthquake revival a…
Not sure if you realise this yet, but the proverbial cat has just been thrown amongst the proverbial pigeons. Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (what used to be called the Historic Places Trust) has just announced three new grade 1 heritage listings in Wellington: Trades Hall, Wellington Central Library, and a combined Gordon Wilson and McLean flats as well. Trades Hall was the site of NZ’s…
Suddenly out of nowhere, a storm brews up. Media gets hold of a story, blows something up into a bigger storm than it deserves, and then away it goes. Social media gets hold of it and then you’re dogmeat – you get ripped apart in the court of social opinion. Pardon me for not getting as excited as some people are, but I just don’t think…
And Spanked is putting it mildly. The report on their progress so far makes for miserable reading. You can read them here. The Executive Summary doesn’t hold back: “LGWM in its current state is at risk of failing to deliver an integrated, cohesive, prioritised and outcomes-driven package of investments.” and then it goes on further: “a process-driven rather than outcomes-driven focus; a project-led (i.e. bottom up)…
No doubt there are more important things to write about today – Trump’s impeachment trial is on at the moment, the housing crisis continues to be a crisis, the pandemic continues to rage even while the vaccine starts to be rolled out – and New Zealand argues about whether men should have to wear a tie in Parliament. The big things – the important things. The…