Keep Auckland Guessing

Keep Auckland Moving website and the group's report is online.

Mayor Len Brown, the ideological clown, has sided again with the business lobby and the upper and middle classes against his working class supporters - just as he did when he backed the management over the unions at the Ports of Auckland lockout - this time he's bought the roading lobby's spin and is backing the pernicious cocktail of tolls and road charges to fund Auckland's transport needs.

 NZ Herald:
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Aucklanders face heftier transport costs under either funding option put forward by an advisory group to Mayor Len Brown, but road charges are picked to provide better payback.
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The 17-member mayoral group - on which business and union leaders have joined transport campaigners and the Automobile Association - is trying to build a consensus among Aucklanders while asking them which option they would "prefer" before it makes a final recommendation to city councillors in July.Mr Brown is not saying whether he will call a referendum on the issue, which centre-right councillor Cameron Brewer insisted yesterday should be held during the local body elections in October.
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He should call his bluff. But the wording of the options and what it envisages is crucial. Probably too dangerous to contemplate though, that's why Brewer is having a poke. I heard the Mayor saying he was now in favour of charging people for using the existing roads. It must have been on radio because I can't find the statement online, just an official release about the report.

Len Brown says:
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"I would encourage Aucklanders to look at the report and have their say as part of the consultation process. We all have a stake in Auckland's future, and our ability to move freely and easily around the city is clearly an issue that touches the lives of all Aucklanders."
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No-one will be able to "move freely" if there are tolls and charges set up across the city. They will move expensively.

To the better off - especially the company car mob that would have all the deductable and GST-refundable tolling bills picked up by the firm anyway - the term freely means something different than it does to the plebs who are planned into what will be a bus-dependent future (see Auckland Transport Blog on the disingenious bus proponents). No more shit heaps clogging up the road - or at least the roads they use - that's how they see the solution to congestion. It is basically unfair and I would hope people reject the concept.

What I see and hear is more evidence that Len will line up with the big knobs instead of taking on Wellington where most of the problems lie.

On the issue of Auckland public transport I say again for the quazillionth time:

The problem is the transport funding is aggregated to a quasi-political group (Auckland Transport) so that the most difficult, costly and longest timeline to build (ie. rail) will always be sacrificed for shorter-term, easier and cheaper options (that will only be marginal improvements but never the best option). Until there is a separate statute establishing a rail authority for Auckland specifically mandated to build and operate the rail system over 50-100 years and mandated to strike its own rate based on the capital costs of the system (and limited to a 1.0 rate for properties within 1km and maybe a 0.5 rate for properties 1-2km from a rail station) then rail will always come last on the list.

Dooming the city to run on bloody buses forever is not an option - it just adds to the road congestion. Only a sustainable and independently funded agency for rail will have the focus and long-term planning ability to complete the task and operate the system. What a shame no-one in a position to do something has ever promoted that idea.

NZ Herald:
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First Union secretary Robert Reid, representing unions on the mayoral group, said the Government's refusal to join the panel had made the exercise more difficult and turned it into a case of "what Aucklanders can do by themselves to get the changes and transport project which the Auckland Plan calls for".But the Government would sooner or later "have to come to the party".

Two roads
Recommendations for raising $400 million more a year on top of extra Government funding and limited public transport fare rises.

Option 1
* Rates rises: $90m
* Fuel tax rises (including a possible regional levy): $250m
* Tolls on new roads: $60m
* Average extra daily transport cost per household: 70c to 75c
* Daily travel time saving per household: 50c

Option 2
* Road tolls and charges (existing roads)*: $250m
* Extra revenue rates and fuel tax rises, and tolls on new roads: $150m.
* Average extra daily transport cost per household: 80c-110c
* Daily travel time saving per household: 95c.
* Motorway tolls or charges to pass through cordons on existing arterial routes).
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And the context to all this congestion is not just the under-investment and mal-investment by successive governments and Auckland authorities either, the reason mega billions have to be found is because the city's population is planned to rise by some astounding figure - a million additional people over the next 30 years.

The fudges the officials are trying to sell the public revolve around deliberately underestimating the impact of immigrant flows. The unique aspect of the ethnicity figure in the Auckland Plan, for example, was it was the shortest projection by far in the whole 300+ page document at only 9 years, when everything else was 20, 30 or 40 years. They are trying to hide something that is as plain as the people in the street. And what a crowded street it will become.

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The problem [transport] is going to get much worse. One new Aucklander is being added to our city every 20 minutes, giving us a predicted population of between 2.2 and 2.5 million by 2041
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They are trying to assert that most of this million people will be births and people within NZ migrating to Auckland. This is so obviously false. With the natural increase being so low there is no way internal migration will make up the numbers they claim. - it is spurious. The vast majority of the million will be immigrants - most of whom will be from Asia, mainly China and India - that's the sort of facts they aren't keen to publicise. They seem keen enough on the raw numbers though - as if it were a triumph and uncontroversially a positive thing - as if they were actively aiming for a million rather than having it imposed by Wellington as a fait accompli.

Congestion is the symptom, mass immigration is actually the problem. We add more people than we can cope with and that is unsustainable. We are in a permanent infrastructural deficit. One of the more obvious answers in this situation is to stem the demand for the scarce transport resources, ie. less immigration. Cutting our meagre cloth for a whole lot of other people who are about to march in is not the best way to make a suit that fits.

Auckland plans

To what extent are the Auckland Council's plans really their own when the larger decision on population has been made by central government already? A million people - almost all of whom will be immigrants - are expected to fit into Auckland in the next 20 or so years. Aucklanders seemingly have no say in this - all they can do is try to respond to the influx with the new unitary planning system.

No-one in Auckland has yet thought to tell Wellington that their plan to put a million extra people into Auckland is impractical, costly on many levels and probably unsustainable. Auckland's fate is being decided by Wellington bureaucrats, not Aucklanders. Wellington would never plan to turn itself into an Asian city of course, but does not blanche when advocating it for the 'Northern Gotham' of Auckland.

The NZ Herald editorial:
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Auckland's newly promulgated unitary plan has entered a rocky stretch of water called local-body election year. Members of the council and local boards are going to public meetings where they are hearing predictable opposition to the building heights and residential density envisaged for the neighbourhood. A number of the council, mainly on the right, have taken fright. They have put their names to a letter to the Prime Minister asking the Government to slow the plan's progress.
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They need to harden up. The people they are hearing at public meetings are probably not a cross-section of their community. They are likely to be older, established residents who dislike change.
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One year would surely be ample time for objections and appeals to be heard and decisions made. Developers, builders and - most importantly - home-seekers, should not have to wait three years to know the permitted height, density and design standards for different parts of the city.
We hear constantly from the Government and the council that Auckland has to accommodate another million people within the planning period and that the rate of new house construction is falling well short of the growth in demand. An arid argument of whether that growth should be on the periphery or within existing limits matters less than the need for a decision.
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It would be most likely that if the Auckland Council refused to plan for an extra million people and told Wellington to put them somewhere else (and came up with a plan to only take say half or less than a million) that the government - at least a Tory government - would sack the Council and replace them with their own commissioners in the same way they did to the Canterbury Regional Council when they refused to allocate all the water to their farmer constituents. I don't believe Auckland, or any other city for that matter, has any effective control over its own destiny when mass migration is enforced from outside. It would be a task of coping and mitigating rather than planning under the type of scenario the officials envisage.

Auckland's crust

Tumeke blogger emeritus, @CitizenBomber, reported a severe earthquake yesterday afternoon in central Auckland. 2 quakes (3.1 and 3.9): the sway had a weird anti-gravity effect in high rises. Auckland is only very rarely struck by earthquakes, the last ones were off Waiheke Island in about 2007. Those were only 8km deep. Sunday's was 3km. The quakes in this area are volcanic related. Rangitoto is the last active cone and sits at the north west edge of the volcanic field. For those reasons I believe the next volcano will be between Motutapu and Waiheke.

The NZ government scientists seem to be divided into separate seismology and volcanology disciplines and they seem to attribute actions accordingly. Thus the NZ Herald reports a Geonet seismologist saying no evidence of a link when common sense and intuition says otherwise:

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''... at the moment nothing indicates that this is leading to any volcanic eruptions.''
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It would indicate potential activity in the area mentioned above. The shallowness and location indicates it is volcanic and not from a plate movement. That's what it indicates to me.

Immigration numbers

The NZ Herald's editorial this morning, 'There's no need to fear more Asians settling in Auckland', is an articulation of the standard position of the business class, the government and the local Council's official line. They are pushing the same line because their interests are served by increasing immigration. The NZ Herald itself is an immigrant founded paper making money out of the population increase, so it is not surprising they advocate for the mass immigration policy and they run editorials as short of information as the official plans. It is a propaganda exercise when they leave information out as much as it is when they try to tell people what people think.

The premise the NZ Herald starts with is that a lack of comment on the Auckland Plan means everything is fine and there is no objection to what is being projected and what is being planned. This is not the case. Wading through a report of almost 400 pages and then relying on data that is 9 years instead of the usual 30 or 50 years is why people don't object - they aren't being told the full facts or even half. The NZ Herald continues the ruse in the editorial. They blithely tell their readers :
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''Population trends mean, in effect, that Auckland's three main ethnic groups of Europeans, Asians and people of Maori and Pacific heritage will soon be of roughly equal size.''
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They already are, what about after that, after 9 year? Where's that in the 30-50 years of the Plan? It isn't in the Plan and the editorial carefully avoids that crucial point too. Why? Because the trends mean the Asian group will be bigger than a third, they will be the majority and it wil be an 'Asian' city by the end of this century. That is the official plan. If you object to it you are a racist - that's the official line.

Granny Herald's assertion that Asian immigrants have created ''no significant problems'' and therefore, ''why should further increase be the subject of fear?'' could best be resolved by the Granny's own record. They promoted immigration, confiscation and exploitation from the first decade they published (1860s) and Maori went from majority to a minority in that time and lost almost everything in the process to a new order of foreigners (with the Herald making on it at every turn). That is what history has to say. And we all know how that turned out for Maori. Pakeha are being told to lie back and think of NZ as the same process happens to them. We've already witnessed Beijing orchestrated political parties, rallies, newspapers, and the PRC's cultural arm, the Confucious Institute, funding Chinese language books etc. in libraries - this is the social and political reality of large numbers from China (in particular). In present numbers, from a society 30 times as old as NZ with 250 times the population, there will be problems with integratio, and the outside power whose citizens are set to be a permanent force i(and potentially a majority eventually) in what is a fresh colony (a mere 170 years old) will act to advance their interests and their people - not ours.

But what we are dealing with now is more resentment than fear. The Pakeha profiteers from immigration sit securely in their workplaces, live in their suburbs, taking their kids to their schools, and go about their social activities amongst other Pakeha without mixing with or being effected by Asian immigrnts. These Pakeha who constitute the media, business, management and government are surrounded by Pakeha and white immigrants they can relate to and communicate with rather than the increasingly typical Pakeha (and Maori) working class experience of workplaces, neighbourhoods and situations in which they are amongst Asian immigrants and subject to their influence. That experience is very different to the elite. The elite determines NZ Immigration policy and it is about making the rich richer and the immigrant richer - not about enriching everyone. The Treasury focusses on GDP and so every warm body through customs is considered a good thing in the received ideology regardless of the net effect.

In conclusion, people just aren't told the truth by their officials or by their leaders, data is fudged (the Plan conflates European and Other to get a bare majority figure for 2021) and the mantra of 'NZ needs more people' (as the immigrant leader in another article in today's paper chanted on cue) is essentially the peddling of a narrow self-interest.

Immigration swamp

It's a simple story: Grey Power represents old racist white people and any curb on immigration is racism from those who don't accept multiculturalism and diversity as the present and future of New Zealand. So far so easy.
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NZ Herald: Racism claim splits Grey Power.

'Shand: (Grey Power)''seems to have become a group of embittered old white people''
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When weren't they a group of embittered old white people? That's why so many of them voted NZ First and Conservative over the years, that's why they join advocacy groups, to register protest. They are complaining the secure, predictable NZ they knew is eroding to forces of globalisation and a materialistic and wanton younger generation they cannot control, and they want to do something about it. So I expect they would object to immigration policy and in particularly the plans for Auckland.

Just because the senior citizens lobby usually speaks through a pointy white pillowcase on their head and listens through a hearing aid receiving ZB talkhate radio, doesn't mean they can't challenge the mass migration policy of the NZ government in a forum, and it shouldn't mean they are instantly, automatically labelled racist for having done so. Shand is an Auckland Labour local body politician (I believe), so he has other interests in this than GP . Is he just defending Len Brown's and the Council's policies as a partisan? Let's focus on the plan.

Having read the entire bloody thing, The Auckland Plan, all 380 pages plus separately but no less eloborately produced, Addendum, one thing stood out amid all the recycled generalisations and patronisingly intoned corporate wank-speak - by what wasn't there. Every part and component of the plan (consisting of targets, projections, benchmarks etc.) refer to 15, 20, 30 and 50 year points. At the least 15, at most 50 years or more for each item... except ethnicity.

The ethniciy projections for Aucland, unlike evry other item (including population totals!) only goes to 2021. A mere 9 years in a planning document the Mayor says is for 30 years. The question is: if they are meticulously detailing and aware of ethnicity in the plan (as they are) then why is that the only issue NOT taken to 30 years, and actually less than 10? Why do you think that would be?

They can confidently project for everything to do with the city - almost all based on populaion, but no ethnicity? They predict that Asian population category to be 27% and European/other (blurred in the publication as the only typo in the entire document I've seen) at 53% in 2021. AND THEN... Nothing. Because the white people will be in a minority after that, obviously And the 'Asians' are heading for the majority of Auckland's population, obviously. This is social and political dynamite and that is why the Auckland Council don't want to mention the obvious.

The officials and politicians would have us believe that the current (points'based 1987) mass immigration (30,000+pa) policy is somehow neutral as regards national origin and numbers. It isn't really, not in practice. It is the primary tool in the economy of colonisation: a settler mentality of buying cheap land, waiting for the immigrants to pile in, and then selling it off, repeat until rich. That was the situation just before 1840, which led to the creation of NZ, and has been so ever since. It is the mechanism whereby the political guarantee of the settlers land holding (and thus their wealth and lifestyle) is effected: so long as the settlers can keep the natives in a numerical minority (eg. Israel) they will retain the land and will claim their form of democracy legitimises this state of affairs.

What the proponents of the current system should recognise is that they are not just advocating for a white minority in Auckland in ten years, or a 20-30% Chinese component of Auckland in about 30-50 years (and maybe an eventual majority as what happened in Singapore), but they are depriving Maori of ever being a majority in their own land. That is the other projection they are obscuring in their select data. The Maori population goes up from 11 to 12% in the next 9 years, according to them, but that small growth in proportion will be reversed at the rates of immigration they use. As more people enter the country with the parallel policy of encouraging immigrants to live ives within their own communities and ease of reference back to their home nations then the chances of inter-marriage and cross-cultural encounters are being effectively discouraged. The oft-heard remark, like a brag, one hears from Maori, such as Ranginui Walker, about the brown people being a majority soon is irrelevant to Maori - they are confined to minority status with the added burden of now having to justify everything to the same white people in charge that they aren't just another (and smaller) minolrity.

Having a full discussion about immigration, race and culture (and land claims) without epithets and slogans however is almost impossible in this climate. The interests of the property-obsessed middle classes and the establishment combine with the reflexivity against racism of the lefty iiberal to create a void of public discourse. The matters are usually siloed off into the safety of specialist subject matter like real estate or economics or the Treaty rather than as a whole and Maori and their view not featuring at all in most regards. The hurdle most Pakeha find in thier mental path - and it explains their ambivalency - is the limited degree of national conciousness (compared with Maor). The Pakeha are aware of their position as the beneficiaries of the supression of Maori and that they are immigrants or the product of them, so it seems churlish and selfish and inconsistent to ever stop the sort of large scale immigration we've had since 1840. They are justifying continued colonisation based on former colonisatilon:

It is right to wonder what the population make up will be in 30, 50, 100 years - not just 9 years and wonder what might change as a result and what should stay the same. It might not be polite to mention in the leafy, white, static, Devonport, Herne Bay and the Eastern suburbs where they reap the unearned capital appreciation delivered by mass migration without having the whole face, vibe and composition of their own communities changed radically in the last 10-15 years like many working class neighbourhoods have, but it should be mentioned. Sacrificing so easily the hneritage of poorer areas whilst officialdom gets pedantic over each rung of an internal ballastrade in a nice suburb is the consequence of the policy as administered, It does all appear to be about money in the final analysis, we don't actually NEED so many extra people each year for any non-money, non-economic reason do we? There is no identified necessity on social grounds to import the tens of thousands of people NZ does year in, year out. I don't think the case for desirability was even attempted by those who have criticized this Grey Power outburst.

It wouldn't be New Zealand without massive immigration, and it won't be Aotearoa until it is stopped.