Heritage a red herring
It is a bitter irony that the Ellice Street houses you feature on your front page(March 20) would have been demolished and replaced by a hotel in the late 1970s had it not been for a successful community campaign to protect Mt Victoria as a residential area.
The “heritage” argument is a red herring; it is a mixed residential area with the proportion of owner-occupiers and renters remaining much the same over the decades.
Why is the demolition and re-development of a residential area prioritised by the council over the hectares of vacant and under-utilised land in Te Aro? In particular, attractive avenues of housing could be built along the core public transport routes, and sewer and service mains, from Kent and Cambridge Terrace through Adelaide to Newtown.
These decaying areas are ripe for high intensity residential development, which has begun but needs council encouragement.
Instead a Labour/Green council puts its faith in property developers with a deregulatory measure reminiscent of the 1980s and 90s. If, as councillor Matthews claims, many of the areas rezoned “will remain largely as they are” why is she promoting the change? One thing is for sure, the rental properties demolished in Mt Vic by developers won’t be replaced by “affordable housing”.
Ross Wilson, Mt Victoria
Funding vs spending
Since our councils aren’t expected to, and nor should they, provide costly services like state housing, police, education or hospitals, it’s surely unremarkable that Wellington receives proportionally less central government funding than Vienna, Copenhagen or Melbourne (How we can
save our struggling cities, March 18). Our local governments are effectively agents of central government, but until 2003 their legislative mandate was infrastructurefocused and over-prescriptive.
Yet things have swung too far. Environmental well-being is vital, but councils now also have broader social, economic and cultural well-being objectives along with consonant powers. Thus, some councillors, clearly rehearsing for future parliamentary careers, favour “nice-to-haves” (eg, free streamed entertainment videos for library users) at the expense of unglamorous basics (eg, water reticulation and sewage treatment).
It’s the local government spending
– not funding – model that’s broken. If central government wants to delegate a function to local government it should be subject to a fully-funded, performancebased contract. Otherwise, full cost recovery should guide council charging practices unless price concessions make financial sense.
Longer electoral terms, and councillors elected only at-large (to reduce parochialism and pork-barrelling), would be great.
Richard Featherstone, Woodridge
Water ways
I think a useful way of recording the extent of water leaks in the Wellington (area) would be to ask Wellingtonians to report leaks on a given day. A public holiday would be ideal (eg, Anzac Day or King’s Birthday).
The citizens would be asked to give the location of the leak, the severity of the leak, and whether it has been reported to the council.
The severity rating should be in three parts:
1. Minor dribble. 2. Flowing water (eg, the flow outside the Fine Arts Gallery on the waterfront). 3. Gushing water (eg, the gushers reported in Aro St).
A dedicated email address would be needed to record the information, possibly using a simple form. If any encouragement is needed perhaps the council could have a lottery with prizes such as a free pass to the zoo or entry to exhibitions like the Rembrandt one.
If necessary, students could be employed to tally the results.
Les Collins, Wadestown
Freedom of expression
David Kember has a cramped and inaccurate view of freedom of expression as only a right of employers and not workers or academics (Letters, March 18). We do not surrender our civil liberties when we enter a workplace. He, however, has powerful allies in David Seymour and Todd Stephenson in the coalition Government. They demanded the dismissal of Joanna Kidman arguing, in Stephenson’s case, that she had the “right to spew deranged garbage” in private but could not express critical views of ACT policies as an academic. Who is he to decide her right to speak?
Fortunately, academics have a legal right to act as “critic and conscience of society” with no qualifying reference to “expertise”. Ernest Rutherford, who aided Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein, to escape from Germany, understood that principle. He sat nearby when Einstein called for resisting “the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom”. Later Einstein defended academic freedom in the anti-communist purge of the 1950s. Unlike Kember, Winston Peters or the Minister of Justice, who claims that some New Zealanders aren’t entitled to freedom of expression, Einstein and Rutherford knew its importance. They also knew that Nazis did not believe in co-governance. Dolores Janiewski, Highbury
Media Council
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