I see Len Brown wants to limit the spend on each candidate for the Auckland Mayoralty to $150,000. This is quite amusing, considering he has spend around that amount already. The man certainly has chutzpah… The actual amount spent by candidates on an election is not relevant. Despite Labour’s longtime gripe over election spending limits [...]

Sometimes I wonder if we are all missing Helen Clark. Rodney Hide has now joined the legions of people who seem to think that John Key is doing nothing. This list seems to include everyone from the left and the right, except for the right-wing centrists. Which should tell us something – namely that, whatever [...]

I have been silent on the whole Auckland “Supercity” debate up until now. Frankly, I am somewhat puzzled as to what the fuss is all about. Having six councils for a city of 1.4 million people seems completely insane to me and always has done. To my mind, this structure is almost the entire reason [...]

Homepaddock has recently blogged about the fact that Wakatipu Health Trust is negotiating to take over ownership and management of Queenstown hospital from Southern DHB. It has taken an absurdly long time to get to this stage. I was deeply involved with the preliminary approaches by Southern Health to broach the idea of starting a [...]

I confess to being a bit puzzled by the announcement that 16 more schools are going to get 40kph zones. And only by the end of June. I don’t have a problem with this – all the evidence suggests that 40kph zones will reduce both injuries and fatalities in significant amounts. I use the word [...]

Auckland City Council appears to be considering various forms of privatisation of non-key assets, according to papers obtained by the Herald. Bizarrely, these discussion papers intimate that services such as city parking may go up in price. The Herald happily prints this without questioning this premise, even though it is highly likely to be drivel. [...]