Resounding vindication of Hood job creation scheme

The Dominion Post reported today that regional airline Air Chathams would be “interested” in establishing a regular link out of Masterton once $10 million of public money has been spent upgrading the town’s Hood aerodrome.

Wow. If the government wanted a ringing vindication of its plan, there it is, right there.

The story was a follow-up to one in the Wairarapa Times-Age (which I covered in a sceptical blog post yesterday) announcing the proposed investment of $17 million – $10 million from the government and the remainder from a mysterious source so far undisclosed – in a project that would see Hood's runway lengthened and widened, along with improvements to other aerodrome infrastructure.

My scepticism didn’t relate to the actual construction project, which I’m sure will proceed, but to the promised benefits, which seem as substantial as a wisp of smoke.

I pointed out that previous attempts to run scheduled services out of Hood had failed and no one seemed in any hurry to try again, regardless of whether the airport was improved. Well, we now have Air Chathams general manager Duane Emeny saying his company would be “interested” once the job is done – but that’s hardly an emphatic commitment, so we’re left with the prospect that Masterton will end up with a flash new airport with no more users than it has now (most of whom, judging by my own admittedly limited observations, seem to be recreational fliers and topdressing planes).

What’s more, Emeny pointed out that because starting a new regional air service was not without risk, Air Chathams would seek a “significant support package” to underwrite potential losses. So as well as stumping up for the airport upgrade, the taxpayer would be expected to subsidise whichever operator, if any, is prepared to use it - at least until such time as it's proven (again) to be uneconomic.

Pardon me, but am I missing something here? Finance Minister Grant Robertson says the project will transform Hood into a “modern, functional airport, with capacity for growth beyond its current activity” – but where will the users come from? Has anyone undertaken any research into potential demand, or is the government simply taking a punt and hoping for the best?

Alternatively, should the good people of Wairarapa, once the upgrade is complete, expect instructions to concentrate very hard and by sheer force of collective will, wait for planes laden with tourists to appear magically over the horizon? It almost looks that way.

Failing that improbable outcome, the project looks suspiciously like an extravagant job creation scheme – but one with potential side-benefits for Labour in an electorate that the party has held before and would love to win again.

Fairy dust spotted falling over Hood Aerodrome

A story on the front page of today’s Wairarapa Times-Age announced that the government will spend $10 million improving Masterton’s Hood Aerodrome. An obvious, if inconvenient, question immediately arises: Why?

Sound economic initiatives in the Wairarapa deserve to be applauded, but it’s hard to see any benefit in upgrading an aerodrome that no airlines use. Scheduled services in and out of Masterton have been tried twice since I moved to the town, first by the now-defunct Air Wairarapa in 2002 and later by the Air New Zealand subsidiary Eagle Airways from 2009 till 2014. Both were abandoned because they made no money, and I’m not aware of any evidence that suggests upgrading the aerodrome will magically increase demand or make flights to Masterton profitable.

Certainly there was no suggestion in this morning’s story that Air New Zealand or any regional operator is eagerly waiting to provide a service once Hood’s infrastructure is upgraded. The only regular user quoted in the Times-Age was the Life Flight trust, which operates air ambulances from the aerodrome. Life Flight’s chief executive welcomed the announcement, saying the weather in Masterton was often a challenge (Really? To pilots who constantly fly in and out of Wellington?) and the length and width of the runway could be “a little bit of a challenge as well”.

That hardly sounds like adequate justification for committing $10 million of taxpayers’ money to widening and extending the runway (which will involve buying more land and re-aligning the adjacent road), upgrading lighting, improving effluent, water and power on site and funding improved security. It rather looked to me as if the Life Flight CEO was roped in because they needed someone to make positive noises about an announcement that otherwise didn’t make a lot of sense.

Alternatively, I wondered whether the Times-Age might have inadvertently omitted a vital paragraph explaining why all this investment was justified. Perhaps that missing paragraph referred to an imminent announcement that Air New Zealand ATR 72s bulging with tourists will be flying into Masterton as soon the project is completed.

Then again, this act of regional boosterism may be primarily about creating jobs for people put out of work by the coronavirus. That seemed to be the focus of Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s speech, in which he talked of the 53 construction jobs that would be created and airily speculated about the prospect of 200 employment opportunities once the airport was fully operational. The government went looking for projects that were ready to go, Robertson was quoted as saying, and this one ticked all the boxes.

There seem to be a lot of wildly optimistic assumptions built into his prediction and I wondered whether a rigorous business case had been prepared. If there was one, I could find no mention of it on Robertson’s website; in fact no mention of Hood Aerodrome at all.

Naturally there were other people on hand yesterday to applaud Robertson’s announcement. Wairarapa-based New Zealand First MP and cabinet minister Ron Mark said the proposed upgrade would improve viability for a commercial airline – something he had advocated since he was mayor of nearby Carterton. “We’re back in a good space again,” Mark was quoted as saying. “What I’m really keen to see is an airline recommence flights from Masterton to Auckland.”

This falls somewhat short of a cast-iron assurance that the taxpayer’s investment will pay dividends. A couple of phrases come to mind. One is wishful thinking; the other relates to carts and horses. Or perhaps Mark is placing his faith in the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, [they] will come.” There’s something distinctly cargo-cultish about the expectation that if only you throw sufficient quantities of money at something, providence will reward you.  

Labour list MP Kieran McAnulty, who lives in Masterton, lined up to claim his share of the credit for the announcement too, proudly declaring that his proximity to ministers as the party’s junior whip meant he was able to promote awareness of key local projects and arrange meetings with influential Wairarapa figures such as former Masterton mayor Bob Francis and veteran government trouble-shooter Dame Margaret Bazley.

Not mentioned in the story was that both Mark and McAnulty are standing for the Wairarapa seat in the general election and both fancy their chances, especially since sitting National MP Alastair Scott is standing down after two undistinguished terms and the man hoping to replace him, local farmer Mike Butterick, has virtually no profile.

Join the dots and you get a distinct whiff of unashamed, old-fashioned pork-barrel politics. The only name missing is Shane Jones, and that’s presumably because he’s busy promoting the New Zealand First Survival Slush Fund – sorry, the Provincial Growth Fund – in Northland.

In praise of the Remutaka Hill

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, October 3.)

There’s a man named Graeme Farr who’s standing for the mayoralty of all three Wairarapa councils. He’s using his candidacy primarily to promote a road tunnel under the Remutaka Hill.

I can’t see a tunnel happening, because the economics don’t stack up. But I have a sneaking suspicion my wife voted for Farr, contravening my strict instructions. She’s Polish, and genetically programmed to disregard orders.

No doubt there are others living in the Wairarapa who, like her, don’t much care for that steep, winding road over the hill, and many more who believe that a tunnel would unlock (to use a vogueish word) the region’s untapped potential.

But as for me, I want a Remutaka road tunnel about as much as I want a third nostril.

I like the hill. I like the sense of geographical separation from Wellington and the Hutt Valley. When I go to Wellington, it’s always a pleasure to get into the car at the end of the day and point it in the direction of home.

I especially relish the drive back over the hill, which has the almost mystical sensation of passing into a different realm. There’s a point about halfway down the northern side where the Wairarapa valley suddenly comes into glorious view.

It’s always bathed in golden sunshine, no matter how foul the weather on the Wellington side. (Okay, perhaps not always, in fact very rarely at nighttime, but often enough to make me feel smug.)

John Hayes, a former Wairarapa MP, once tried to whip up public interest in a tunnel and approached me for support in the tragic misapprehension that, as a columnist, I might wield some influence.

I politely told him to bugger off. I didn’t want the Wairarapa being invaded by the masses then, and I still don’t. No offence to my friends in Wellington, but I love the fact that there’s a big, formidable barrier to deter interlopers.

I’ve seen what happened to the Kapiti Coast when it morphed from being a pleasant and sleepy seaside retreat to a choked, claustrophobic extension of suburbia.

We lived at Raumati Beach in the 1980s and I knew the rot was setting in when the council insisted on laying a footpath along our street, which had previously had the charming feel of a country lane. We sold up just before they built a housing subdivision in the paddock where our kids used to play.

Since then I’ve watched Kapiti’s infrastructure vainly struggling to catch up with its burgeoning population. It can only get worse when Transmission Gully kicks in.

There’s a lot of growth here in the Wairarapa too, but there's room for it, and it’s manageable.

New subdivisions are going up all over the place and the traffic has intensified to the point where, in what passes for rush hour, you can get stuck at a roundabout for … oh, maybe 20 seconds.

But the Wairarapa still has the distinction of having no traffic lights. How long would that remain the case with traffic pouring through a tunnel?

We can tolerate weekend visitors, with their convoys of motorbikes and classic cars streaming across the hill in search of wide blue skies, open roads, rural pubs and charming rustic scenery, just as long as they head back home at the end of the day.  

We’re okay too with those refined, affluent types from Wadestown and Kelburn who buy weekend retreats in Greytown and then decide it’s so nice that they can do without their house in Wellington. That’s the sort of place Greytown is.  But who knows what impact a tunnel might have on the town where I live?

One of Masterton’s charms is that it’s still a traditional farming town. I like the fact that when you drive into town, you run a gauntlet of agriculture machinery dealers.

I love hearing topdressing planes flying out at first light from Hood aerodrome and returning home at dusk, and I like the tractors and stock trucks that constantly rumble past our place.

I like the friendly and obliging shopkeepers and tradies, and I like the fact that when I ring a plumber he’s pulling up outside before I hang up the phone. (Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration too.)

I don’t want any of this put at risk by intensified urbanisation and more people, which would be the inevitable result of a tunnel. So my message to Graeme Farr is the same as it was to John Hayes.

On the other hand, if Farr promised to lobby for a high-speed bypass around Carterton, which is surely the world's most boring town to drive through (though only by a slim margin over Dannevirke), he might get my vote in 2022. A flyover would be better still.

Most beautiful city? Not sure about that, but it suits me

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 17.)

I’ve been copping a bit of stick lately. Not because of anything I’ve said or done, or even how I look, but because of where I live.

Last month’s announcement that Masterton had been declared New Zealand’s Most Beautiful City was the cue for much chortling and guffawing at my expense.

I’ve lived contentedly in Masterton for nearly 15 years, but I concede it’s not a town that immediately springs to mind when you start thinking about beautiful places.

I received an email about the award from a friend in Nelson, a city so lovely that its residents can’t help but feel smug. In the subject line he simply wrote “Oh, please!”. There was a world of incredulity and ridicule in those two words.

Even locally, the decision was regarded with surprise and scepticism. “You have to be bloody joking,” one heretical Masterton resident wrote on the Wairarapa News website. Another wondered whether all the other cities in New Zealand had been blown up - proving at least that Masterton people have a self-deprecating sense of humour, along with their many other virtues.  

In the same awards, Greytown, just down the road, was declared New Zealand’s most beautiful small town. Now there was an award that people understood and agreed with.

Greytown is pretty and charming. It has become Wellington’s favourite weekend bolt-hole. If you’re from Kelburn or Wadestown, you’re just as likely to see your next-door neighbour in Greytown’s Main Street on a Saturday as you are at your corner dairy. Locals grizzle that they can’t find a car park because of all the out-of-town Porsches and Range-Rovers clogging the street.

But to me (and I hope I don’t offend my Greytown friends by saying this), Greytown is a bit Midsomer, if you get my drift. I don’t mean they keep killing each other there by gruesomely inventive means, as in the TV series, but it’s all rather fashionably homogeneous.

Masterton, on the other hand, is a Decile 1-10 town. Every socio-economic stratum is represented here, from wealthy old Wairarapa farming dynasties to multi-generational welfare-dependent families living in P houses with dead Ford Falcons on the front lawn.

It remains a no-nonsense provincial farming town. Drive in from the south and you run a gauntlet of agricultural equipment dealers, which clearly signals what drives the local economy. On weekends the sound of chainsaws can be deafening.

People think there’s a lot of crime here, but that’s largely a residual reputation from a past era. In any case, I no longer cringe when I see a headline about a drive-by shooting or a senseless act of vandalism in M-town.

In fact I now take a kind of perverse pride in such incidents, celebrating them as evidence of a community that represents humanity in all its rich and wondrous diversity. There’s more to life in Masterton than being able to find the perfect soy latte.

But back to that award. Part of the reason it occasioned such disbelief was that the phrase “Most Beautiful City” is a misnomer. For a start, Masterton’s technically not a city. You need 50,000 people for that, and we’re barely halfway there.

More to the point, the organisers weren’t using that word “beautiful” in the conventional sense. No one could claim that Masterton is richly endowed with scenic wonders, although it certainly makes the most of the assets it has. Even my Nelson friend admits to a fondness for Queen Elizabeth Park, where you can imagine the thwack of leather on willow even when there’s not a cricketer in sight.

This is the sort of thing the judges were getting at. They praised the town for its environmental and heritage conservation efforts, and for the strength of its “community engagement”. 

I know what they mean, even if the sneerers don’t. It’s a place where people pitch in when there’s something that needs doing.

Trouble is, word seems to be getting out. Last year, Masterton’s population grew faster than any other place in the Greater Wellington region, other than the capital itself.

It’s certainly not one of those provincial zombie towns that you read about. Visitor numbers keep increasing, new housing consents are double what they were in 2016 and local builders are going gangbusters.

Most of the new arrivals are from Wellington and Auckland. Whatever Masterton’s got, they seem to like it. 

But the town is changing to meet their requirements. There are now bars where you don’t have to drink Tui and we're about to get a classy boutique cinema. Traffic keeps building up and next thing you know, people will be demanding traffic lights.

I have grave reservations about these changes. Thank God for the Remutaka Hill, I say. It’s our only defence against the interlopers. 

Farewell to a friend

(This is a longer version of a column published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, February 22.)

My friend John Schnellenberg died last week. For more than 13 years, we’d met almost every Friday for lunch.

We were both refugees from Wellington. John and his wife Sonia had moved to Masterton after retiring. My wife and I made the same move several months later.

We hadn’t known the Schnellenbergs in Wellington, although I had worked for the same newspaper company as Sonia, but we connected in Masterton because of a long-standing friendship between John and my sister and brother-in-law.

They had got to know each other through politics. John was by instinct a conservative, which drew him to the National Party. But he was a liberal conservative, as is my brother-in-law, and together they were active in a 1970s National Party faction – co-founded by John – that  did its best to resist the illiberal impulses of the party’s then leader, Robert Muldoon.

I say John had retired by the time we met, but that’s not entirely true. For much of his life he had worked for Shell Oil, but he had also owned a bookshop and an early Apple computer dealership. In retirement, he set up a one-man business consultancy. “I’m in commerce,” he would say when people asked him what he did. It always struck me as a very John thing to say.

I can’t recall how our Friday lunch habit came about. It just sort of happened.

At first we spread our patronage around. The True Blue Café, Food For Thought, Dish, The 10 O’Clock Cookie Company, Taste and The Village Grinder all enjoyed our custom. Each café catered to a subtly different demographic group, so we were exposed to a cross-section of Masterton society.

As a former business owner, I think John felt we owed it to the town to support as many places as possible. But as time went by, we ended up alternating between Café Entice (prosperous farmers, real estate agents, professional types) and Café Strada (a mixed clientele, but with a few tattoos and the occasional workman’s high-vis vest).

In recent years we were joined by another Wellington refugee, the playwright Joe Musaphia. Two Jews and a Gentile.

I was very much the baby in this trio, John and Joe both being in their early 80s. They had known each other in Wellington through the Jewish community. John was descended from the Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Eastern and Central Europe as part of the Jewish diaspora, while Joe was from the Sephardic Jewish line that ended up in Spain and Portugal. Different backgrounds, but united by a rich and proud culture stretching back several millennia.

John was the more religiously observant of the two and would always tut-tut disapprovingly when I sat down with a slice of Cafe Strada’s excellent bacon and egg pie. Lightning would strike me, he would warn. He never tired of his little joke, and I always laughed. It was one of those lines that somehow got funnier the more predictable it became.

John was a gentleman and a charmer. He was a small man whose eyes twinkled behind his glasses – one of the very few people I know of whom that could be truthfully be said – and whose face almost permanently wore a genial, knowing smile. I learned at his funeral that Jews are enjoined to greet others with a pleasant countenance. John obviously took that to heart.

He loved to laugh – his whole body would convulse when I said something he found funny – and he loved to talk. He enjoyed engaging with people to the extent that it could become slightly exasperating.

He couldn’t place his lunch order (invariably something sweet and not terribly nutritious) without making small talk with the woman behind the counter, regardless of how many people were waiting behind him, and our lunches were frequently interrupted by John’s need to converse with whoever happened to be passing our table. Although a relatively recent arrival in town (by Masterton standards, at least), he seemed to know everyone.

He had a Jew’s interest in business and closely monitored the town’s economic prosperity, alternating between despondency and optimism depending on how many businesses were opening or closing down. The amount of traffic on the main street was a recurring issue of vital interest. Behind this, I suspect John was always thinking about what was happening to Masterton property values.

He was never entirely convinced he had made the right move by shifting to a country town, and not just because he was missing out on the boom in Wellington house prices. There was a part of John that remained firmly rooted in European urban culture, even though he had known it only briefly in childhood. He could at times be disdainful of what he perceived as provincial values and attitudes.

He also remained unmistakeably Jewish. His oldest and closest friends were Jewish and he was deeply engaged with the Jewish community. But while his Jewishness was central to his sense of identity, he considered himself first and foremost a New Zealander. 

Nonetheless, he sometimes gave the impression of remaining slightly mystified by New Zealand ways. In this respect he was notably different from our lunch partner Joe, who still spoke with a faint trace of an East London accent but had effortlessly absorbed the New Zealand way of doing things – indeed, made his living writing plays about it.

Having once owned the Mister Pickwick bookshop in Lower Hutt, John made a point of getting to know the proprietors of the Masterton book outlets and would regularly report on how they were doing. He was an avid reader himself, with a vast collection of books, mostly non-fiction.

History and politics fascinated him. He was a great admirer of Winston Churchill and must have read – often several times – everything ever written by or about the British wartime leader.

He acknowledged Churchill’s flaws, but I think what ultimately counted to John was that Churchill, almost alone at first, had stood up to Hitler. John had spent his early years in Germany but escaped to New Zealand with his parents before the Holocaust with the assistance of a British diplomat who knew his father. John’s grandparents were not so fortunate, dying in a concentration camp.

Living as part of a tiny Jewish community in overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Wellington can’t have been easy. New Zealand in those days was suspicious of outsiders – more so than ever during the war years, when someone with the name Schnellenberg was likely to be viewed as an enemy alien. The irony that he was Jewish, and therefore had far more to fear from the Nazis than anyone, would have been largely lost on insular New Zealanders.

That was the reason Hans Wolf Schnellenberg – his given name – became simply John, at the suggestion of a sympathetic schoolteacher. Even his death notice referred to him as John W Schnellenberg.

Paradoxically, John was an admirer of German efficiency and technological excellence. For a long time he drove an ageing Mercedes-Benz – replaced not long ago by a newer, sportier model – and would regale me every Friday with accounts of how it was performing. (Or not. It was what you might call a love-hate relationship.)

I’ve been trying to recall what else we talked about. Politics, certainly. Books, films, television and the media too. What I do know is that our conversation rarely flagged.

We didn’t always agree, and sometimes there was a degree of heat in the conversation. For all his geniality, John had firm views that didn’t always coincide with mine. He used to needle me about the failings of the news media, but gave up a few years ago when he realised I’d decided the news media were no longer worth defending. It was no fun for him anymore.

He was an admirer of George W Bush, and I wasn’t (neither was Joe). He predicted that Donald Trump would become president, and irritated Joe and me by reminding us of it.

I think his political views were shaped, at least to some extent, by his perception of where politicians were likely to stand on the issue of Israel and the Middle East, which is hardly surprising.

And now John’s gone. What am I going to do on Fridays? I dunno. Perhaps Joe and I will go on meeting. He’s an entertaining raconteur who has led a full and very interesting life. But our lunches won’t be the same.

Whatever this is, it's not democracy

(First published in The Dominion Post, June 10.)

I’ve always thought democracy is a pretty good sort of system. Not perfect, of course, but as Winston Churchill said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

In other words, it’s the best we’ve got until somebody comes up with something better.

Well, it seems someone has. In Masterton, of all places.

You probably thought, like me, that democracy works because it gives us the right to choose our representatives and to get rid of them if they don't measure up.

But Masterton District Council has decided that’s flawed, or at least not appropriate for Masterton. The council wants to improve democracy by appointing iwi representatives with voting rights to two of its standing committees.

Yes, you read that correctly. They would be appointed, not elected. But like elected councillors they would have the right to vote on matters affecting the rest of us.

Whatever this is, it is not democracy. It’s something else for which we don’t yet have a term. Perhaps we could call it part-democracy or near-democracy or almost-democracy until someone comes up with a better name.

I don’t want to sound alarmist. The appointment of iwi representatives to two council committees isn’t likely to be the end of the world.

The genuine councillors – the ones actually elected by the people of Masterton – would still be in the majority. And it’s possible that iwi representatives would make a sincere attempt to make decisions in the best interests of the entire community. But that’s hardly the point.

Democracy is a package deal. It doesn’t come with optional extras that you discard if they don’t happen to suit you. And the danger is that once you start subverting democratic principles, even with the best of intentions, anything becomes possible.

If there’s no longer a rigid rule that the people who make decisions on our behalf must be elected by us and accountable to us, reformers will soon find other ways to “improve” the system – all in the interests of fairness, of course.

This is how democracy gets undermined – by inches and by degrees. Ultimately someone might decide that voting is a clumsy and inconvenient process and that democracy would be much more efficient if we got rid of it altogether. It’s happened in plenty of other places.

Is it possible that 100 years hence, queues of international visitors will line up outside Masterton Town Hall to gaze admiringly at a plaque that says: “Masterton – the Place Where They Improved Democracy”? Somehow I doubt it.

I understand the worthy intent behind what the Masterton council is doing. In an ideal world there would be more Maori in local government. But it’s fanciful to interpret the Treaty of Waitangi as imposing an obligation on councils to provide seats for unelected iwi representatives.

In any case, democracy already provides the means by which Maori can stand for office. An obvious example is New Plymouth district councillor Howie Tamati, a former rugby league hero.

Tamati is standing down this year. He’s reportedly disenchanted following the defeat (by a referendum) of New Plymouth mayor Andrew Judd’s proposal for a separate Maori ward. But the irony is that Tamati has served 15 years on the council, which demonstrates that voters will support good Maori candidates. He’s a living, breathing rebuttal of his own argument.

In Masterton, where I live, there are no Maori councillors. That’s sad in a town where 16 percent of the population is Maori, but it’s dangerous to say it’s a failure of democracy. There are respected Maori figures in the town whom I would happily support if they put themselves forward for election.

And here’s another thing. If I were Maori, I would regard it as patronising and offensive if councillors thought the only way my people could get a say in governance was by being given a leg-up. That suggests Maori still depend on Pakeha patronage.

And I don’t buy the line that Maori have no chance of being elected because Masterton is a conservative, racist town. This is the electorate that elected Georgina Beyer – the world’s first transsexual MP, a Maori and a former prostitute. So the argument that we’re all unreconstructed rednecks here in the Wairarapa just doesn’t wash.

Perhaps most alarming of all is the urgency with which the deal has been rushed through.  A motion that the decision be postponed until after the local government elections in October - surely a reasonable proposition - was overwhelmingly defeated. The council was clearly eager to get the matter over and done with before those pesky voters get a chance to throw a spanner in the works.

The mayor, Lyn Patterson, says the proposal was discussed in last year’s annual plan consultation, as if that discharges the council’s obligation to give the public a chance to object. But hardly anyone reads the annual plan (I certainly don’t) and the council’s decision took most people completely by surprise.

It looks, well, a bit sneaky. But the voters will ultimately have their say – and as Mike Moore famously once observed, in a democracy the voters are always right. 

Masterton deaths bring out the excuse-makers

(First published in The Dominion Post, February 5.)

Driving down the main street of Masterton last Sunday morning, I noticed a cluster of traffic cones on the footpath. A few metres further on, a photographer was taking a picture of the street.

I didn’t give it another thought at the time. It was only later that I learned two 15-year-old boys in a stolen car had hit a pole and been killed while fleeing from police. A 14-year-old survivor has since been charged in connection with the crash.

The deaths touched off the usual debate about whether police should engage in such pursuits (which they say they abandoned in this case). This is an argument that will probably never be neatly resolved.

At one extreme, there are those who say police should never give chase. No young tearaway deserves to risk death merely because a broken tail light or loud exhaust has attracted police attention, or so the argument goes.

The short answer to that, of course, is that the risk is easily avoided. All the offender has to do is comply with the police instruction to stop.

That way, the worst that can happen is a court appearance and perhaps a fine or licence cancellation; possibly a jail term if there’s a list of previous offences. That’s surely better than dying.

At the other extreme, there are those who say that society is better off if lawbreakers kill themselves trying to flee.

This is the brutal view that got blogger Cameron Slater into trouble a couple of years ago when he wrote that a “feral” who was killed in car fleeing police on the West Coast did society a favour by dying. That statement was subsequently cited as moral justification for the hacking of his emails, which led in turn to the Nicky Hager “Dirty Politics” saga.

Slater overstated his case, as he often does. But while it may seem un-Christian to say that death in such circumstances is self-inflicted, it’s a view held by many reasonable and otherwise compassionate people.

To crash into a power pole while trying to evade the consequences of what is often a trivial offence isn’t quite “suicide by police”, but it’s getting close. The pursued party presumably doesn’t want to die, but evidently places such a low value on his or her life that it’s a risk worth taking.

But the debate over police pursuits goes further than that. If police were to adopt a policy of non-pursuit, the inevitable consequence is that lawbreakers would be given carte blanche to defy them.

What a great leap forward that would be for society. It would be the exact reverse of the highly effective “broken windows” style of policing, in which zero tolerance is shown for even minor offences.

AS IS often the case in situations like this, the Masterton deaths have brought forth excuse-makers who seek to shift responsibility for the tragedy.

Alan Maxwell, co-ordinator of Wairarapa Anglican Youth, was quoted as saying he was angry at community apathy and the teenagers’ “limited choices”. 

“The bottom line is they’re just bored and if we don’t give them things to so, they find stupid things to do and make stupid choices.

“At some point, as a community, we have to take responsibility, otherwise these kids are not going to be the only ones [to die] this year.”

No doubt Maxwell is a decent man who’s grieving for two boys he knew personally, and in whom he saw good qualities. But since when did being bored justify stealing someone’s car? And why do so many people minimise criminal behaviour by referring to it as making “stupid choices”?

Maxwell’s comments reminded me of the Catholic priest in the 1990s who, presumably temporarily unhinged by emotion, blamed the government for the deaths of several young Maori men in a Christchurch marae fire.

Yes, the deaths of the Featherston boys was a tragedy. There will be people who loved them and cared for them. They will be mourning.

I don’t know what circumstances led to two 15-year-olds being out in a stolen car at 2.15am. I do know, however, that one of the boys was named Pacer, which was the name of an Australian muscle-car of the 1970s, and that he had siblings named Chevy, Dodge and Corvette. Hmmm.

I also know that “the community” doesn’t make teenage boys steal a car or make a run for it when the police try to intercept them. For that, the responsibility must lie elsewhere.

A hard choice on amalgamation

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 6.)

Me and my big mouth.

In my last column I wrote about two local government politicians from urban Auckland who came to Masterton to tell us what a wonderful thing council amalgamation was.

I pointed out that it would have been more relevant, from a Wairarapa perspective, to hear the opinion of someone from Rodney or Franklin, the two semi-rural districts that had been either wholly or partly sucked in (some might say suckered in) by Auckland.

A few days later I got an email advising of another public meeting at which the speaker would be the chairman of the Pukekohe-based Franklin local board, Andrew Baker.

Having painted myself into a corner, I had no option but to hear what he had to say.

Baker, a farmer and former policeman, turned out to be an enthusiastic and articulate advocate of amalgamation. He admitted having serious misgivings when Franklin was “pulled asunder” in 2010 (part went to Auckland, part to Hauraki and part to Waikato) and said he could empathise with people in the Wairarapa who feared losing control over their own affairs if the region was absorbed by Wellington, as proposed by the Local Government Commission.

He then proceeded to list the ways in which Franklin had benefited.

Within a year of amalgamation, council-owned Watercare Services had committed $130 million to the upgrading of Pukekohe’s “terrible” water supply. The old Franklin council could never have afforded that, Baker said.

Local roading had been greatly improved and the rural fire service, which had made do with 30-year-old trucks and second-hand hoses, had acquired a fleet of modern 4WD vehicles and shiny new gear. The bigger rating base made all the difference.

Baker said the board had control over its own $20 million budget and was well connected with local communities. The chairman was the equivalent of the former mayor and focused entirely on local issues.  

He had no opinion on what should happen in Wellington but noted that under the Local Government Commission’s plan, local decision-making powers would be greater than in Auckland.  

Perhaps his most potent argument, at least for a Masterton audience, was that Franklin rates were going down this year, the result of a rating system that puts most of the rates burden on high-value city properties.

A cynic might say that it’s in Baker’s interests to put the best possible spin on the system that employs him (the chairmanship is a full-time job), and he made no mention of the widespread and deeply  felt aversion to the new governance model in Auckland. But it was a good sales pitch nonetheless.

We are left with a hard choice. Do we place our faith in the Big Government model, or do we insist on the right of a socially and geographically distinct region like the Wairarapa to run its own affairs?

There are powerful arguments both ways, but they are more sharply defined in the Wairarapa than elsewhere because it stands apart from Wellington in a way that the Hutt Valley, Porirua and Kapiti don’t.

I can’t help wondering why the issue is presented as an either/or choice. Why not take a middle course? The three Wairarapa councils could merge, along with the two Hutt cities. Wellington and Porirua could join together, perhaps absorbing Kapiti too, and the regional council could be retained to do what it does now, though perhaps with slightly enhanced powers.

That might overcome some of the objections to the commission’s Big Bang proposal. It would deliver potential efficiency gains without re-inventing the wheel and there would be a more compelling logic to the new boundaries.

One important question that doesn’t seem to have been asked yet, at least publically, is this: assuming the commission’s plan goes ahead, who would be the super-mayor?

It’s important because whoever gets the job will not only be a powerful figure politically, but could largely determine how well the model works.

There’s little doubt that some of the negativity surrounding Auckland is due to people’s dislike of Len Brown. It follows that the public has an interest in knowing who might be the supremo of a Greater Wellington.

Most informed observers seem to assume that regional council chair Fran Wilde has her eye on the job. Certainly, she has pushed aggressively for amalgamation. But when I asked her about it this week, she kicked for touch. Whether she stood for the mayoralty, she replied, would depend on the shape of the final governance arrangements and her personal circumstances at the time.

It was a politician’s answer, as you’d expect.  But Wilde didn’t rule out standing, and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t part of her grand plan.

God put the Rimutaka Hill there for a reason

(First published in The Dominion Post, February 20.)

On Monday night I went to a public meeting in the Masterton Town Hall.

The hall was full, which might have something to do with the fact that not a lot happens in Masterton on a Monday night and a meeting in the Town Hall provides an exciting diversion.

On the other hand you might say this was the beating heart of local democracy, even if most of the heads in the hall were grey.

The meeting was organised by Sustainable Wairarapa, a group of business people who believe the region stands to benefit from the Local Government Commission’s proposal to establish a “super city” encompassing Wellington, the Hutt Valley, Porirua, Kapiti and the Wairarapa.

To promote their case they enlisted former Waitakere mayor Sir Bob Harvey and Greg Moyle, who serves on the Waitemata community board in the Auckland super-city. The idea was that they would tell us how much better off Auckland was following amalgamation.

They might not have been the best choice. Here were two politicians from New Zealand’s biggest, most densely populated urban area presuming to tell the residents of a sparsely populated farming region at the other end of the North Island that joining a super city could only be good for them.

I would have been more interested in hearing the views of someone from Rodney or Franklin, two semi-rural districts that were either wholly or partly press-ganged into joining Auckland.

Even those two districts are not strictly comparable with the Wairarapa, which is rural heartland rather than a lifestyle belt, but I imagine their residents might have quite a different verdict on the benefits of amalgamation.

Besides, Harvey and Moyle are insiders, embedded in the system. It’s in their interests to talk up Auckland’s governance arrangements.

Harvey chairs Waterfront Auckland, one of the highly contentious CCOs (council-controlled organisations) that have caused so much ill-feeling among Aucklanders since the supercity was created in 2010.

He’s a sincere man and an engaging speaker with long experience in local government, but he can’t claim to know the Wairarapa.

He also seems to have an ad man’s faith in empty slogans. “You have to trust the future”, he said at one point, sounding like one of the billboards he might have created in his advertising agency days.

Moyle spent more time talking about himself than about the issue and admitted he knew nothing about the region he had come to advise, “apart from drinking a lot of Martinborough pinot noir”. He even struggled with pronunciation, referring more than once to “Waipara”.

All this leaves me in a bit of quandary. My wife and I have lived in Masterton since 2003. It suits us, as it does the many refugees from Wellington who have moved here.

I’m open to persuasion that amalgamation would be the best thing for the Wairarapa, as many respected business and community leaders argue. But no one has convinced me yet.

In fact, although not a religious man, I find myself slowly coming around to the view that God had a reason for putting the Rimutaka Hill where it is.

Much of the propaganda seems to hinge on what might happen to us economically if we’re cut loose from wealthy Wellington. We’re too small and weak, the argument goes, to survive on our own. The proponents of amalgamation have played the fear card rather too much.

I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t think it would be a good idea to merge Masterton, Carterton and South Wairarapa councils. But amalgamation with Wellington? That’s another proposition entirely. We’re different from Wellington culturally, demographically and economically. 

Most of all, I worry about what it would mean for representative government. The Wairarapa would have only two of the 21 seats on the proposed supercity council. The centre of power would be too far removed from those affected.

Do I trust Wellington-based councillors to understand what’s best for the Wairarapa? No, and it doesn’t help that when I look at the Greater Wellington Regional Council, which is the closest thing we’ve got to a super council, I see a coterie of former Labour and Green MPs – professional politicians who seem unable to wean themselves off the public teat.

Am I convinced that the democratic deficit will be made up by the proposed community boards? No. It certainly doesn’t seem to have worked out that way in Auckland.

Do I trust the Local Government Commission, with their misplaced faith in the virtues of Big Government? Not for a moment. They can’t even get their figures right.

 

The Masterton you don't read about

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 4.)

SIGH. It’s happened again. Masterton has been back in the news, and for all the wrong reasons.

The town where I live is also home to the four people found guilty last week of bashing Featherston supermarket worker Glen Jones to death, supposedly in revenge for an alleged rape.

It’s also where police raided three properties a few days ago in a crackdown on cannabis and methamphetamine. Among the seizures was a loaded sawnoff shotgun.

I could imagine people reading those newspaper stories and nodding as if to say, “There you go – Masterton again.”

Masterton people are accustomed to a bad press. I call it a decile 1 to 10 town. Sociologically speaking, there’s a bit of everything here, from the genteel rich to a few families with multigenerational problems of violence, drugs, alcohol and welfare dependency.

Inevitably it’s the bad stuff that gets reported. News, by definition, is anything out of the ordinary, and what’s out of the ordinary is often bad: crime, car crashes, death and general unpleasantness. Ordinary people leading good lives – bringing up happy kids, supporting community organisations, doing useful work, playing sport, paying the bills – are not newsworthy.

The Masterton of the negative headlines is not the Masterton I have come to know. It’s not a town of lowlifes and no-hopers, though of course it has its share. The Masterton I know is a town full of good people.

It’s the town where the family that won $37 million in Lotto in 2009 has donated more than $1.5 million to the Wairarapa ambulance service.

It’s the town where, according to the nurse who took my blood recently, the Blood Service gets more donors than anywhere else in the Wellington region.

It’s the sort of town where, when someone gets cancer, her friends quickly rally round and organise a roster to drive her to Palmerston North Hospital each day for treatment.

And here’s another thing. Masterton actually doesn’t feel like Detroit or Juarez. By that I mean you don’t feel you’re taking your life in your hands walking down the street.

In more than 10 years here, we have been the victims of only one crime. Someone – I suspect kids – took advantage of an insecure shed to reach inside and steal a fishing rod. I hope they have better luck with it than I had.

My wife and I have now lived here longer than in any other locality. Our habit of moving house every few years used to be a standing joke among our friends, but Masterton has cured us of our peripatetic urges. That speaks for itself.

* * *

IN A PREVIOUS life I once interviewed the great British actor Donald Pleasence. We talked about eyes.

His own eyes were his most striking feature. They were a pale, steely, penetrating blue that could give him a quite menacing aura.  But Pleasence – a friendly, obliging man off-screen – reckoned the eyes by themselves communicated nothing. He insisted it was the accompanying facial expressions that conveyed meaning.

I had trouble accepting this, and still do. I was inclined to believe, as Shakespeare said, that the eyes are the windows to the soul.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been watching Kim Dotcom on television, and Dotcom strikes me as contradicting the Pleasence hypothesis. Even when the Internet Party founder’s face is smiling, his eyes seem to express distrust, suspicion and hostility.

They invite suspicion and distrust in return. I’ve decided I’m with Shakespeare on this one.

* * *

PERHAPS the least surprising news so far this year was that Hutt City Council officials are excited about the prospect of a new sports stadium at Petone.

Of course they are. Municipal functionaries are always keen to talk up any proposal that promises glamour and excitement, particularly in towns that conspicuously lack it.

Besides, it’s easy to get excited when it’s other people’s money that’s at risk.

Invariably, when such projects are proposed, council bureaucrats flourish glowing economic reports from obliging consultants.  But just watch the bureaucrats and the consultants go to ground when the stadium turns out to be a dog.

For a cautionary tale, Hutt ratepayers need only look to Dunedin, where projections for the Forsyth Barr Stadium turned out to be grossly over-optimistic.

That city is now lumbered with a facility that cost a lot more than expected and has failed to deliver the promised returns. It’s massively indebted and running at a loss. Isn’t that always the way?

The proposal for a 12,000-seat stadium at Petone strikes me as particularly misguided. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem – namely, the embarrassment of the Wellington Phoenix at having to perform in an almost empty Westpac Stadium. But who’s to say the Phoenix will even exist in five years?

An audience of two at the Regent 3

Last night I had what can only be described as a Masterton experience. I went to the movies at the Regent 3, and for the first time in my life found myself sitting alone in the cinema. It was such a novelty I had to ring my wife and tell her. (Well, it wasn’t as if my phone call was going to disturb anyone.)

A few minutes before the movie started, my solitude was disturbed by the arrival of another patron. This again was pure Masterton, because I knew him; he was a well-known local journalist.  

We laughed at the oddity of the situation, but Alistair said it wasn’t the first time this had happened to him. On previous occasions, finding himself alone, he’d shouted out to the projectionist to skip the advertisements. That’s pretty Masterton, too.

Alistair sat down towards the front and the movie rolled (or whatever movies do in the digital era). It soon became apparent why there were only two of us. The rest of Masterton knew something we didn’t. Gambit was a stinker of a film.

I was half-prepared for this, because I’d read highly critical reviews as well as laudatory ones. In the latest Listener, Helene Wong gives Gambit only two stars. But I desperately wanted to like it because the screenplay was written by the Coen brothers – the same team responsible for Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and other gems. The Coens, I persuaded myself, are incapable of producing a dud. Perhaps the critics just didn’t get the joke.

Besides, there was a classy cast: Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman, Tom Courtenay and Stanley Tucci. How could it fail?

Alas, it was irredeemably rotten from start to finish. There were traces of the familiar Coen Brothers formula, which often involves bumbling amateur criminals hatching audacious plots that go hilariously, gruesomely wrong. But in this case (spoiler alert!) they pull it off. Perhaps that’s why the movie doesn’t work; it lacks that essential Coen Brothers blackness.

Whatever the explanation, Gambit never raised so much as a snigger from the audience of two at the Regent 3. Alistair gave up and left about 20 minutes from the end. I persisted to the last – partly because I was transfixed by its sheer awfulness but also, I think, because I was hoping against hope that it might redeem itself in the last moments. You never know with a Coen Brothers script.

Well, it didn’t. It ended as flatly and predictably as it had unfolded. As the credits rolled, I felt the situation called for a Statler and Waldorf comment, but Waldorf had left the building.