New faction will challenge ideologues, political class elites, on behalf of ratepayers
Wellington City Council is accused of using the “perilously unrealistic“ promise of extensive cycling lanes and cycle access routes as a “symbolic” appeal in order to attract at the local body elections later this year what a new electoral lobby describes as “ideologically- inclined” voters.
According to the newly formed Wellington First electoral lobby the council fixation on cycling will see swept away 600 CBD carparks in order to establish cycling only lanes.
This loss is in addition to the “at least” 900 CBD car parking building slots already lost due to earthquakes or the threat of them.
Wellington First also insists that the Wellington City Council intends to drive an already sanctioned official cycleway in the city’s relatively flat southern suburbs all the way through to the central city.
As a result of this the lobby claims that inner city peak time traffic already routinely stalled for “30 minutes” will be held up for even longer.
The lobby claims that activists have already “sabotaged” any prospect of speeding up access between the CBD and the southern suburbs by causing to be abandoned various major works at the Basin Reserve/Mt Victoria tunnel bottleneck.
The lobby says it intends to field a council slate at the local body elections in October
Contrary to what it describes as the climatist vote-courting “propaganda” put out by the council, cycling as commuter transport, is in fact only used by what it described as a “determined minority,” simply because of the capital’s hostile hilly layout, and trademark strong winds.
Wellington First reserved its harshest criticism for what it describes as the Wellington City Council’s blatant “cultural misappropriation.”
In hi-jacking this virtue-signalling code term, Wellington First explains that the council has “deliberately and misleadingly” sought to put Wellington in the same cycling framework as Copenhagen (pictured top).
In contrast to flat Copenhagen, New Zealand’s capital Wellington (pictured at bottom) adheres to a hill-girt bay and features narrow, twisting two-way streets that present extreme danger to cyclists.
Additionally, Wellington's average wind speed is 22 kph, while Copenhagen, is only half that at 12.9kph
Wellington First describes itself as a party and its mainstays are Bryan Weyburne and Digby Paape, both long term civic commercial figures.
Mr Paape is described as chairman of the action group.
Mr Weyburne is a former two term Wellington City Councillor who was responsible for founding the Rates Reform electorate faction which came to power in Wellington and its neighbouring territorial local authority, Lower Hutt City.
Wellington First appears to be a single issue group dedicated to countering what it describes as the move led by the City Council’s governing bloc to “covertly” pander to “ elitist ideological” voters and at the expense of ratepayers.
Messrs Weyburne and Paape of Wellington First, say that they will name their full council ticket soon.
They declined to divulge names at this stage.
Their immediate purpose they claim is to intercept and expose Wellington City Council’s underpinning and unstated electoral strategy.
They say that the council’s scheme is a subtle one.
It is to take advantage of a pervasive fear among citizens of being viewed as being unsympathetic to Green-leaning assertions, however “impractical or even dangerous” these claims might in the event be.
Wellington First has no connection with the New Zealand First Party which is in a Parliamentary governing coalition with the Green Party and the Labour Party.
New Zealand a pioneer in Big Data surveillance technology
A Royal Commission of Inquiry will be convened in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosques atrocity.
In the short term also there will be departmental inquiries to evaluate who knew what and when?
Among the issues, the questions, in the longer term inquiry, the Royal Commission and also in the more immediate departmental inquiries are:-
- Was the suspect identified as a consistent user of extremist social media sites, and if so, when?
- Was the suspect’s application for gun license approval and his subsequent acquisition of the approved weaponry at any time matched with any extremist site visits?
- Was the suspect’s visit to North Korea, a nation with which New Zealand is still technically at war, and attested by the photo posting, registered by surveillance agencies in connection with the granting of the gun license approval?
- Was the suspect’s peripatetic lifestyle and absence of visible means of support and over a long period of time in terms of not having a job, permanent or otherwise, registered prior to the granting of the gun approval?
- Were the suspect’s finances investigated at any time and in relation to the weaponry acquisitions in terms of money transfers and deposits and especially the source of these?
In the background of all this is the question of the security agencies and the degree to which they were, and are, confined and hobbled in their operations by legislated privacy restrictions – and in the more abstract sense, human rights ideals.
Information technology and its application naturally follows on the heels of this.
Big data refers to the method in which information from every conceivable electronic source including social media is run through an analytic sieve in order to pin point departures, exceptions, from a pre-defined norm.
Under this approach the suspect’s gun licence application procedure might have exposed:-
- Visitations to certain social media sites
- Absence of visible means of support i.e. a job
- That he was in fact a loner i.e. absence of postings showing the suspect with other people in the conventional context of a male in their late 20s.
Using this example and if the above had rung bells this same approach might have run the suspect’s financial transactions though this same sieve in order to discover where his money was coming from?
Similarly, the issue will be raised at some stage during all these deliberations to the effect: was it known if the suspect sought treatment at any stage from medical clinicians, and if so why?
These last two points will be intensively relevant to the various ensuing inquiries.
New Zealand was a pioneer in what is now described as big data and data mining.
The National Law Enforcement Database in Wanganui was opened in 1976.
It featured a modus operandi routine which allowed investigators to sort through suspects and persons of interest based on the suspects’ known preferred criminal techniques and instruments.
Coincidentally, the world’s major security/surveillance technology supplier now is Palantir which is controlled by New Zealand part-time resident Peter Thiel.
New Zealand’s own entry into this growth market was the launch on the NZX of Wynyard Group which owed its roots to the same programme-generation technology that had proved so successful in the Anglo-New Zealand crime fighting networking installed at Wanganui.
Wynyard in a reprise of New Zealand being either too early or too late in electronics, dismayingly rapidly faded from the NZX, and the security enforcement market.
Royal Commissions and the promise of them have the immediate effect of drawing the sting, acting as a symbolic salve, in instances when the public is considered to have cause to believe that it has been ill-served by the institutions that are supposed to be acting on their behalf, in this instance, watching over them.
Even so the immediate run of departmental investigations will render practical information in the shorter and therefore much more useful term.
Covert surveillance in New Zealand hampered by layers of privacy ethics compliance
New Zealand security agencies have long been vigilant in following up insurgency and from any source or ethnic category.
This had become evident during the 1990s when the agencies had been notably vigilant on any indication of entering New Zealand anyone in the supremacist category, claimed National Press Club president Peter Isaac talking to Greytown Lions.
In this the New Zealand agencies followed the lead of their United States homeland security counterparts which had become preoccupied by the emergence during the 1990s of the survivalism threat most notably in the form of the Unabomber and also the one from the alienated supremacists of which the most horrific outcome was the Oklahoma federal building bombing.
This focus on alienation and survivalism had obscured the developing series of events which led to 911 and the destruction of the World Trade Centre.
When the first attack on this structure was launched in 1993 the trail was insufficiently followed just because at this time the focus was on disaffected whites.
This same diversified focus came to light only much later here following events surrounding Kim Dotcom.
Kim was, and still is, wanted by the United States on copyright infringement grounds
Yet he had sustained a military style assault on his Auckland home and it was proved that he had been investigated by the government’s eavesdropping agency, the GCSB.
The Kim Dotcom affair can be viewed now as causing security agencies to become enmeshed in a web of ethical restraints in regard to the surveillance of locals and those from overseas residing in New Zealand.
The episode with its continuing consent consequences had though demonstrated the willingness of New Zealand’s counter insurgency agencies to work with their foreign counterparts.
Even so this advantage was neutralised in regard to the Christchurch mosque shootings simply because the suspect had no previous brushes anywhere with law enforcement authorities beyond road traffic notices.
This close cross-surveillance had yielded no clues on the mosque suspect Brenton Tarrant just because he had no police record anywhere in terms of violence or threatened violence.
The only tangible footprint was the photo Tarrant had posted of himself in North Korea with what appeared to be his official guides (see above).
Only this rendered him as a person of interest.
Isaac noted that investigators will follow Tarrant’s money trail conundrum centred on how someone from a self-admitted everyday background and without any job had been able to criss-cross the world at will and in some comfort and been able to pay for things like rent and cars and computers and also weaponry and club memberships.
He cautioned the medley of media commentators on dwelling upon any imagined security agency failings.
The Security Intelligence Service and Government Communications Security Bureau could in fact have already intercepted and foiled insurgency attacks from any quarter, but be prevented from crowing about it in order to protect their channels.
Isaac advised the media gallery and associated “commentariat” to pull back from encouraging let alone “stoking” any notion at all that the vast and genuine outpouring of grief somehow exempted the nation as a whole from a perception of involvement with the mosque atrocities here, and thus collective involvement.
Isaac concurred though with the media concensus to the effect that the nation’s lax regulations on guns of all description needed to be drastically tightened up.
But he pointed out that gun regulation was often regarded by the gun owner population which is considered to be around the quarter million mark as a single-issue electoral matter.
Knowing this, politicians trod gingerly around imposing draconian restrictions, a delicacy also engendered by the sporting popularity of firearms.
He disagreed on grounds of unenforceability with imposing restrictions on social media a category that in the aftermath of the mosque atrocity has found itself sharing the same obloquy as automatic rifles.
Social media could not be “squeezed back into the bottle,” he said. As a consumer technology it could only be replaced by “something else.”
Social media he noted followed the path of all new technologies of following a 40 year development time trajectory from initial acceptance to a pervasive presence.
This had been the case with electricity, telephones and cars among others and was replicated by social media which had begun in the United States as DARPANET, a military networking research project and which underpinned the file sharing that enabled social media.
.Isaac, who compiled an early computing text book, “Computing in New Zealand,” noted his own amazement at the righteous indignation of “otherwise perfectly sensible people” when they discovered that their “proudly posted” travel details, shopping outings, restaurant meals, pet photos, school sports days and office outings had all been subsequently acquired in the service of market research.
Isaac had been due to talk to the Lions club about pioneering Greytown newspaperman Richard Wakelin now acknowledged as New Zealand’s first professional journalist in that he had no political or pamphleteering axe to grind.
Wakelin’s successor running the Wairarapa Standard was William Nation, who founded Arbor Day in Greytown, and thus the Green movement.
Nation died in 1930.
Had he lived to practise half a century later, in 1980, Nation would still have been at home with the technology at that time and also with its also application, conjectured Isaac.
Isaac sheeted home the advent of the “pervasiveness” of social media to the epoch between 2004 and 2006 which saw the rapid fire appearance of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
This trio of “disruptive” technologies had conclusively ripped away from the hands of career journalists the last restraining gateways to mass access.
This technologies washed away the journalistic guarantor status held since Richard Wakelin’s era just because practitioners found torn out of their hands their traditional responsibility of quality control in the matter of verifying and calibrating degrees of truth.
China-Antarctic global authority chilled out of Women anniversary Pantheon
Off-message academic professor Anne-Marie Brady found herself out in the cold at the official celebrations centred on International Women's Day.
Professor Brady challenges and questions the policy of successive governments over China.
This China fixation the professor claims represents a posture that puts New Zealand in danger of following in the footsteps of Albania, the Balkan nation which remains impoverished in spite of long being under the economic aegis of China.
Professor Brady points out that China’s policy is to use its resident nationals to influence governments in seeing things from the Beijing point of view.
Internationally, and especially at the Woodrow Wilson Centre research base in Washington, she is acknowledged also for her work in Antarctic geopolitics.
Recent books include The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge) and China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
In a series of investigative treatises Professor Brady discarded the conventional tautology common to such published endeavours and in plain language revealed chapter and verse on Beijing’s tactics applied in New Zealand in order to secure favourable political influence.
Having staked its economic future on China this is a policy interpretation that the current New Zealand government wishes to distance itself from.
Professor Brady believes that as a consequence of her China activity revelations that her home and office have been burgled and her car sabotaged.
She has asked the New Zealand government to provide extra security for herself and her family.
She is a full professor and her status as a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Centre, part of the Smithsonian Institution, means that in her additional capacity as a linguist she is listened to where it matters.
Professor Brady remains a lightning rod for contrary views about economic reliance on China at a time when the New Zealand government must straddle the United States – China chill on Huawei’s presence as a telecoms supplier.
It must also keep the faith with Beijing over for example Chinese fresh water bottling operations in New Zealand at a time when water activists seek to close them down
Labour governments until now could rely on university academics for unquestioning and unreserved approbation in foreign policy..
Former NZ premier redux---back in The Conversation
The arrival of former New Zealand premier and United Nations topsider at the helm of her own foundation confirms the suspicion of many that she has been the hidden hand in a number of policy directions implemented by the governing Labour coalition led by her protégé Jacinda Ardern.
One of these is considered to be the declaration of the ban on oil & gas accreditation.
More recently still the releasing of the deliberations on a capital gains tax.
The capital gains debate, a perennial one in New Zealand political life, came at precisely the correct time to divert attention away from coalition over-promising notably in public housing.
The oil and gas ban had the effect of reinforcing the allegiance to the governing coalition of the parliamentary Green minority member.
These suspicions were still further reinforced when it became known that the priority of the Helen Clark Foundation is in the field of climate change.
Climate change is the over-arching article of adhesive faith in the Labour and Green coalition components of the government.
It is the centrepiece of a creed slate package that incorporates also such abstract objectives as diversity and multiculturalism along with the more tangible distrust of anglo saxon males as authority figures.
The Helen Clark Foundation has also indicated a preoccupation with “drug policy” which is code for the de-criminalisation of cannabis in various forms.
It was Helen Clark during her nine year stint as New Zealand prime minister who implemented and enforced a variety of smoking-in-public bans and who set the nation on its path to become utterly smoke-free.
Meanwhile New Zealand’s Taxpayers Union is fearful that the foundation will become a New Zealand version of the Clinton Foundation and will thus become the repository of public funds overt and covert.
The Taxpayers Union operates a mass email samizdat designed to by-pass the mainstream media’s enchantment with progressive policies and a corresponding reluctance to cast them in anything other than a rosy light
In outlining the role of their patron, Helen Clark, the foundation emphasises on its web site Miss Clark’s leadership in “inclusive and sustainable” development, “poverty eradication” along with the “full inclusion and empowerment of women in development.”
Helen Clark, the foundation site says “advocates for sexual and reproductive health rights, an end to violence against women and for LGBTI rights.”
The foundation points out that it is a broad church and its website invites the public at large to put their shoulder to its improving wheel.
The launching of the Helen Clark Foundation relatively early in the Labour–led coalition’s first term inevitably draws attention to the foundation’s stated determination to be politically independent, “non partisan.”
While it will be treated with kid gloves by the established media the acid-tongued and self-appointed public expenditure watchdog Taxpayers Union has put the funds-seeking foundation on notice.
The climatist priority agenda indicates a wanderlust, a jet-fuelled and publicly-funded one to faraway places, expensive ones, at which take place the international convocations which experience indicates are such an integral component to cutting back on carbon dioxide.