Pigeon crap isn’t Wellington’s biggest problem – but go for a gun, if residents want eradication

Some namby-pamby tossers in the capital city want to waste a lot of public money on a chemical solution to the pigeon problem.

Problem, at least, if you don’t much like pigeons.

Alf would prefer them to the drunks and dope fiends who make bits of the Wellington city centre a no-go zone for civilized persons.

Bird crap does not make the same disgusting mess as a vomiting inebriate or junkie.

But there are people who reckon Wellington’s pigeon population is out of control.

And some of them say it’s time to look at contraception or feeding bans.

If we oldies can get to bed at a respectable hour, there’s no need for pubs to stay open until dawn

Alf observes with some fascination the goings-on about boozing hours in Wellington.

The rejection of Wellington City Council plans for bar hours has implications for councils in other parts of the country. Hence it may affect the Tararua District Council’s thinking on what is allowable in its patch, and this in turn would affect Alf’s lifestyle.

This means that councils across the county (according to Radio NZ) may struggle to enforce any policies allowing bars to stay open beyond 4am.

Alf can advise his constituents (who are well aware of his habits, anyway) that his lifestyle certainly would not be affected by any requirement for pubs to shut by 4am, because at that hour he has long ago gone home to snuggle down with Mrs Grumble or (sometimes) be put to bed in the spare room.

 

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.

It looked like a chance to lock up every progress-frustrating taniwha in one place – until you read further

Can you see the taniwha? No? Then you aren't looking hard enough.

A press statement from the Wellington City Councilsays dragons and taniwha, as well as bears and sharks, “are moving into Opera House Lane”.

Oh joy.

Until he was disabused by subsequent information in the statement, Alf saw this as a great opportunity to round up every bloody taniwha in the country and have them corralled in one place, well out of the way of modern developments they otherwise would frustrate.

But nah, no such luck.

In this case, we are dealing with arty-farty stuff.

At least 20 young people are right now buffing, undercoating and preparing the lane before they take to the fresh canvas with their stencils and paints over the weekend.

Led by the Boys and Girls Institute (BGI), this is the start of a number of projects Wellington City Council wants to undertake in Opera House Lane to improve people’s sense of safety.

Improve our sense of safety?

Ratepayers beware – investing in the waka business can leave you short-changed

Paid for by Wellington ratepayers but housed in Lower Hutt.

It’s not going to attract Alf, if it happens.

But Auckland Mayor Len Brown wants waka racing included in the annual Auckland Anniversary regatta on Waitemata harbour.

As we are reminded by Radio NZ National, the day marks the arrival in Tamaki Makaurau in 1840 of Governor William Hobson.

In the city’s early days, Mr Brown said it included waka and whale boat races.

He told Waatea News that a return of those events would be ”brilliant”.

Alf can’t see what’s stopping anyone wanting to race their waka from going right ahead and racing.

Mind you, festooning the Waitemata Harbour with enough waka to crowd out the yachts would bring that “City of Sails” stuff into question.

The “City of Paddlers” doesn’t have the same ring.

Taxpayers will avoid a capital farce by putting ownership of a plastic waka directly into Maori hands

If they built a waka similar to this, which end would be the bow?

The Herald today is headlining a story about another handout to hapu.

The opening paragraph of the report says the Government’s gift of almost $2 million to the hapu to build a plastic waka for the Rugby World Cup has drawn outrage from some MPs.

But outrage, or any response of a critical nature, is bound to be the stuff of sour-grapes politicking from pissed off Opposition MPs who wish they had thought of it first.

The money being extracted from your pockets and mine, dear constituent, is going to a good cause.

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.

More koha please, folks – the costs of this bloody boat shed are starting to climb

And if you take out the waka, we can get more party-goers in...

Alf has a sneaking admiration, of sorts, for the gall of the Wellington City Council and its great capacity for screwing its ratepayers despite their howls of protest.

A few weeks ago it was announcing proposals to extend the liquor ban it has imposed in public places in the inner city.

But on the other hand, it is planning to use public money for Rugby World Cup festivities in a posh Maori boat shed that it is helping to build.

Liquor-free festivities? Yeah, right.

The festivities might be so huge, according to one caustic account at Scoop, that the bloody waka might have to be moved out.

A licence to pollute

The Greater Wellington Regional Council is sure to haul a dairy farmer or pig farmer into court, if they polluted nearby waterways. But it won’t lift a finger against the Wellington City Council, even though raw sewage is being spilled into Wellington Harbour from the city’s stormwater system.

The harbour is also being polluted with animal faeces, heavy metals, cigarette butts and oil products that are commonly washed into the stormwater system.

Officials admit they are unsure how polluted the harbour has become and plan to step up monitoring.