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