Best of the week: May 11–18 2024

A new week­ly fea­ture! Here’s what was good! Hope­ful­ly future edi­tions will include bests from oth­er Welling­ton­ista mem­bers too. And don’t for­get, if you want to con­tribute to the site, please email us! Best deliv­ered food of the week The grilled lemon­grass chick­en sal­ad from Rock Yard (pic­tured here with slow cooked pork in roti […]

If you’re a food business, enter the Good Food Boost

When the world seems so gut-wrench­ing­­ly awful and deter­mined to crush the most vul­ner­a­ble even fur­ther into the ground it’s kind of hard to write about events and launch­es and deli­cious food (yes, tru­ly we are the ones suf­fer­ing, etc. Not). So if we can spot­light peo­ple doing good work, like Epuni School’s Uni­ty Gar­den I […]

Acting Local

Not that long ago, we thought we’d have to keep a care­ful eye out for the slow, creep­ing rise of fas­cism in Amer­i­ca; now it’s com­ing on as a rapid, ter­ri­fy­ing avalanche. The mas­sive, spon­ta­neous air­port protests against Trump’s lat­est vile Exec­u­tive Order give some hope for the rise of resis­tance in the US itself, but some­times […]

We hear from some of the 2016 candidates in the local body election

So, we asked some ques­tions. And we hoped that can­di­dates would get in touch with us. In pre­vi­ous years, we’d obtained a spread­sheet of every sin­gle can­di­date and emailed them, and frankly, work­ing as a group, it was a bloody lot of work get­ting their answers back, try­ing to hunt them down, try­ing to make […]

Candidates 2016: Justin Lester for Mayor

1. What should the council’s role be in cre­at­ing afford­able hous­ing? WCC is the coun­try’s sec­ond largest land­lord. We’ve got decades of expe­ri­ence in pro­vid­ing afford­able hous­ing. I firm­ly believe there’s a role for WCC to… 2. What one project for Welling­ton have you been most active on so far? Over the past 6 years […]

Candidates 2016: Diane Calvert for Onslow-Western Ward

1. What should the council’s role be in cre­at­ing afford­able hous­ing? Stream­line con­sent­ing process. Open up new land with avail­able pub­lic trans­port links. Sup­port public/private part­ner­ships for new devel­op­ment. Sup­port social hous­ing 2. What one project for Welling­ton have you been most active on so far? I brought my local com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er in 2015 so […]

Candidates 2016: Troy Mihaka for Lambton Ward

We asked the ques­tions, they answered. 1. What should the council’s role be in cre­at­ing afford­able hous­ing? Welling­ton City Coun­cil needs to work with devel­op­ers to cre­ate more through a com­bi­na­tion of inten­si­fi­ca­tion in our inner-city and open­ing land for devel­op­ment. 2. What one project for Welling­ton have you been most active on so far? […]

Candidates, we want to hear from you — Election 2016

Hey, did y’all know there’s an elec­tion com­ing up? Yes, there is! And once again, we want to pro­vide you with some decent cov­er­age of the issues we care about. Local body pol­i­tics is IMPORTANT. Once again, we’re ask­ing can­di­dates to con­tact us with the answers to the ques­tions below. We’re doing things a lit­tle […]

Beggars belief

You may have seen yes­ter­day’s Dom­Post sto­ry on beg­ging, which trum­pet­ed that the Coun­cil was “con­sid­er­ing ban­ning beg­ging or fin­ing good samar­i­tans.” This gen­er­at­ed much jus­ti­fied out­rage, even though deep­er into the arti­cle it became clear­er that this was just one extreme option among a wide range of mea­sures that had been con­sid­ered after com­plaints from the pub­lic, […]

Save Kate – from who?

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 […]