Our chauffeur-driven Cabinet Ministers will be House-bound if we don’t shift the capital

Your hard-working MP has always sensed there were good reasons for shifting the country’s capital from Wellington. Now he is certain about it and is ready to promote Eketahuna as a possibility.

But wherever it finishes up, it should no longer be Wellington.

Not now that Wellington has re-elected its pedal-pushing mayor, Celia Wade-Brown, and fortified her greenie agenda by electing other Greens to the council.

Some large reptiles would make the planet a better place if they suddenly became extinct

Yes, there are red ones … and some of them are much bigger than this.

The Mayor of Wellington has unreasonable expectations of her citizens.

She is asking them (see here) to look out for lizards in the capital.

The city’s lizard population has declined due to loss of habitat and predation by introduced mammals, prompting Mayor Celia Wade-Brown to ask eco-sleuths to help with a survey about the distribution of species.

But the last time Alf looked at a lizard, it was a somewhat smallish creature and fairly well camouflaged.

Co-governance is tricky: the right tone must be struck and all iwi kept on side

A source of disharmony.

Mrs Grumble has drawn your hard-working MP’s attention to a fuss in the capital that he overlooked during his news monitoring yesterday.

It’s a useful – and ominous – pointer to what Alf foresees happening under the Treaty-based co-governance arrangements now being spawned around the country.

It shows the need to strike the right tone when you take up a few niggling issues with your co-governance partner.

Otherwise the other party might spit the dummy and become uncooperative.

Moreover if you are an iwi leader, you must not piss off other Maori or things become awfully complicated.

Oh look – $12.5m spent on a boat shed, but one of the boats is too bloody big

The farce of Welllington’s Maori boat shed gets more hilarious by the day.

It’s the shed Wellington ratepayers overwhelmingly did not want to fund.

The council’s spending – remember? – disregarded a poll that showed 84 per cent of respondents opposed the expenditure and said it was “outrageous.”

Oh, and it’s the shed that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars, too.

And it’s the shed that was opened with lots of Maori ceremony, but with ceremonial waka shipped in from somewhere elsewhere in the country because one bunch of Wellington Maori wouldn’t surrender the local ceremonial waka to another bunch of Wellington Maori on the other side of the harbour.

As if that wasn’t farce enough, it’s a shed designed to house two waka but (as we learn today) it is not big enough to house one of them.

The public have stumped up millions for a boat shed – but the boat is already housed in Lower Hutt

Now let's find a boat to store here.

Things are looking up for the country’s tax and rate payers, who coughed up a few million bucks for an opulent canoe kennel in the capital.

The new structure has a good chance of actually housing the canoe as its planners intended. Hooray.

There had been some doubt about this, because one bunch of Maori reckon the canoe’s rightful place is in its posh new shed on the Wellington waterfront, but another bunch has been keeping it safe and sound in a museum out in Lower Hutt, and looked likely to ensure it stayed there.

It doesn’t much matter which bunch of Maori happen to be right with their claims and counter claims.

The fact is that when it came to the grand opening, the canoe that was supposed to be there wasn’t there.

You should study Rodney’s cha-cha before recommending ballroom dancing for boosting brain power

It’s just what Alf would expect from a Greenie Mayor. A heap of bilge.

Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown – he learns today from Radio NZ – is encouraging city councillors to pick up activities such as ballroom dancing to help improve their thinking skills.

Ms Wade-Brown has been criticised by some councillors for sending an email encouraging them to sharpen their minds by taking up pastimes such as a new language or dancing.

She told Summer Report she has been reading neuroscientific research which shows physical exercise and learning new skills helps lift brain levels.

Ms Wade-Brown says Wellington is facing some complex issues and some of the discussions held around the table show other councillors aren’t very fast at reading documents.

She obviously forgets that ballroom dancing did bugger all to lift the brain levels of Rodney Hide.

The straight answer is no, Alf does not want to go to work as an MP in the Queen City

Alf heads for a sitting of Parliament in the world's coolest little capital.

Alf had been dubious, when he read about the Lonely Planet travel guide rating Wellington “the coolest little capital in the world”.

The buggers who wrote that must be daffy, he thought (although he did not express his opinions while in Wellington).

His doubts about their sanity have been fortified by the news that the same travel guide is suggesting that Auckland should be New Zealand’s capital city.

Auckland?

The capital?

Wellington has its shortcomings, but any place that is happy to be described as the Queen City cries out to be avoided by any red-blooded male, into which category Alf most assuredly puts his good self.