Walk­ing my daugh­ter to school on Tues­day morn­ing, I was handed a fly­er on Lamb­ton Quay – “Keep Kate!”.

As kind of a fan of the Kate Shep­pard traffic lights, I took the fly­er – and saw that they “were under threat of remov­al” with a link to a peti­tion. I’d sign that!

But turn­ing it over, the fly­er was an advert­ise­ment for Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil­lor Nic­ola Young.  My first thought: smart polit­ics, Nic­ola, align­ing your­self with such a simple, pop­u­lar, lib­er­al cause.

My second thought: she just wants our names and email addresses for her may­or­al cam­paign mail­ing list. Eww. Cyn­ic­al use of an issue for a clearly polit­ic­al pur­pose, I thought.

So, des­pite not being legit twit­ter­ati – in fact I’m a bit of a new­bie and sel­dom tweet – I pos­ted

https://twitter.com/RebeccaJEmm/status/643897007816335360

“In my view, not kosh­er for @nmjyoung to use Kate Shep­pard to build her may­or­al cam­paign con­tact list”

It seemed strange to me, being well-con­nec­ted in Wel­ling­ton campaign‑y circles, that if the lights were under threat that none of the loc­al or Wel­ling­ton women’s groups were fight­ing for their reten­tion.

So my third thoughts were: are these lights actu­ally under threat of remov­al?

I got on the phone to NZTA and rang media spokes­per­son Andy Knackstedt, ask­ing him what was the story behind the Kate Shep­pard lights. He actu­ally laughed at the sug­ges­tion that they were under threat – said that this was not the case, and extend­ing the ini­tial tri­al was basic­ally just a com­pli­ance issue, a mat­ter of paper­work between Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil and NZTA.

I tweeted again:

“Just rang Andy Knackstedt from NZTA. Kate Shep­pard lights are not under threat and nev­er have been @nmjyoung”

Friends of mine and Twit­ter and Face­book then got act­ive dis­cour­aging people from sign­ing the peti­tion  – that it was a ruse, that the lights were nev­er at risk, and our data was being mined by Nic­ola Young for no real pur­pose. Nicola’s responses were mainly through a “Keep­Kate” twit­ter account, and used vaguer and vaguer lan­guage about wheth­er the lights were actu­ally at risk. Now, we were appar­ently just demon­strat­ing to NZTA how pop­u­lar they are!

NZTA then con­firmed on Twit­ter  that they had no plans to remove the lights and that they were work­ing with WCC on approvals. So I tweeted this image to show how Nic­ola Young was mis­lead­ing Wel­ling­ton with her sham peti­tion

https://twitter.com/RebeccaJEmm/status/643949601079193600

 

I know lots of people who try to be act­ive and engaged in our com­munity in Wel­ling­ton city. I’m one of them. We place a level of trust in the organ­isa­tions and indi­vidu­als who soli­cit our sup­port when we sign peti­tions or take oth­er action for change.

Nic­ola Young, as an elec­ted offi­cial, abused this trust by lying to Wel­ling­to­ni­ans with her fly­er and peti­tion. We didn’t need to do a thing to keep Kate – she was stay­ing any­way. Nic­ola Young just wanted to build her pro­file as a coun­cil­lor and get our details for her cam­paign­ing mail­ing list.

She wasn’t fight­ing for our interest. She under­es­tim­ated Wel­ling­to­ni­ans – that we wouldn’t check the basic facts of her sup­posed cam­paign. I hope she’s learned not to do that again.

Guest post by Rebecca Mat­thews