Kapiti council took a hard line against old folk but is keen to okay a cycling club’s tree-lopping

Some mad bastards are running freely around the country after threatening to poison infant formula. But the  news media have been just as enthralled by the antics of some tossers with a powerful urge to protect  trees.

Alf is not sure what has happened today but overnight – as you can see here – the owners of the Titirangi sites where a kauri and a rimu were scheduled for removal have released an open letter saying the kauri  can stay.

This sounds like discrimination against rimu, but Alf – to be candid – couldn’t care less.

Accordingly he thinks Environment Minister Nick Smith is looking dangerously like a greenie for saying he hoped the kauri would be saved.

“I expressed to the [Auckland] mayor [Len Brown] a preference for the 200-year-old kauri to be spared, if at all possible, but that the Government respected the fact that it was a decision for the Auckland Council.”

This fuss led Alf to recall the appalling way an elderly couple in Kapiti were treated last year for doing the environment a favour and letting in more sun by lopping a few trees.

The bloody council fairly obviously knew it was being unreasonably bloody-minded by sending in the cops to help deal to the couple because it apologised while persisting with prosecuting them. 

Oh look – an altar-cation in Oamaru where the Environment Court seems to have lost its marbles

Alf has huge sympathy for a bunch of nuns who are being heavied by the boorish townsfolk of Oamaru.

The nuns want a 90-year-old marble altar shifted. The bloody townsfolk say it must stay in Oamaru.

If Alf were the nuns, he would tell the townsfolk to piss off, although he accepts that nuns maybe are trained to eschew bluntly expressed and easily comprehended commands of that sort.

More important, telling the townsfolk to piss off would not do the trick in this case because the boorish townsfolk have gone through a bit of legal howz-your-father aimed at obliging the nuns to get a resource consent to move the altar.

A bloody resource consent??? Really???

The complications of modern-day dam building – money must be put aside for measuring the mauri

Deep and meaningful negotiations are under way on the inevitable cultural impacts.

Just because it’s legal does not make it right.

Alf was never happy about legalising prostitution in this country, for example. Or permitting civil unions. Or letting teenagers into pubs.

Hence he is not impressed by the defence being advanced by the iwi that was given money by Meridian Energy, apparently to reverse its opposition to a West Coast hydro dam.

The iwi is saying the payment was a “legitimate” part of the resource consent process.

Of course it is. Perfectly legal.

It raises lots of questions in Alf’s mind, nevertheless.

The story is told at Stuff today –

Meridian last week revealed it had paid an unspecified sum to Te Runanga o Ngati Waewae for work it had done to assess the cultural impact of the company’s proposed Mokihinui River hydro project.

A blot on Mainstream’s record

You don’t come away with a clean sheet, when you spill ink. Nor should you, when the spilled ink turns Christchurch’s Heathcote River blue.

Alf accordingly wonders what Mainstream Forwarders thinks it’s up to, when it appeals an $18,000 fine for an ink spillage.

The company did plead guilty, after all.

Crop failure gives food for thought

Farm folk have been given something to muse on, as South African farmers suffer heavy losses after their corn crops failed.

As curiously expressed by Digital Journal, farmers have lost millions of dollars in lost income after 82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn “failed to produce hardly any seeds.”

The plants look lush and healthy from the outside.

Monsanto has offered compensation.

Monsanto blames the failure of the three varieties of corn planted on these farms, in three South African provinces, on alleged “underfertilisation processes in the laboratory”.

Some 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the three varieties of Monsanto corn this year, have reported extensive seedless corn problems.

The greenies, inevitably, are having a GM field day.

Into a legislative jungle

Here’s hoping the bloody Greens don’t latch on to this – but a long-winded British judge has defined a “tree”.

It took him 12,000 words.

If the Greens similarly get picky and pedantic about the language in the Bill to amend the Resource Management Act, it will take many hundreds of thousands of words in Supplementary Order Papers and what have you, and months of arguing the toss in Parliamentary debates, before the legislation is passed.