Post box pleasure
Editor,
I would like to thank the Aotea people who returned their survey forms and requested there should be a post box in Aotea.
I am very pleased to report that we now have one outside the nearly completed shops at the corner of Aotea and Te Puia drives. I hope everyone will support the new, long-awaited post box.
Thanks must also go to MP Kris Faafoi and his team. Without their support this project would not have been successful. plan to super-size itself now seems to be having a myriad unintended consequences.
By helping to open the gates and letting the Trojan horse of amalgamation in, Porirua is destroying its ability for locals to raise and spend our own rates on local projects.
Politicians rely on the voters having short memories.
The Auckland super-city model was forced on the north by Act and Rodney Hide, being given a free hand as payback for supporting John Key’s Government.
Act supporters looking to milk ratepayer cash cows must have thought all their Christmasses had come at once. Only problem was John Banks missed out on the super mayor job.
The propaganda spin to allay Auckland voter fears included the need for one ‘‘strong voice’’ to speak to the Government. This would deliver super efficient ‘‘integrated’’ systems such as transport. Initially they even tried misinforming residents that economies of scale would reduce rates.
Two years later what is the reality of the Rodney Hide Auckland experiment? Len Brown’s transport solutions are being ignored by Mr Brownlee. So much for the unified strong voice getting ‘‘Wellington to listen’’.
In Auckland the Act agenda of shrinking democracy now has 70 per cent of the region’s assets and a third of the rate take being administered by non-elected board directors on Community Owned Enterprises. One of which has just been fined for unlawful practices.
Act party founder Roger Douglas used corporatisation as a halfway house to privatisation in the 1980s. Now, under the guise of efficiency, the CCOs are just another halfway house to privatisation of communityfunded income steams.
The Act Party may be on its death bed but the Wellington Regional Council seems intent on breathing life into its policy for local government. those of us who need them, and who treat us as ordinary people, whose legs don’t work so well, whose day would be eased by having an accessible car park.