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 […]

Commemoration vs Celebration

Over the last week, Wellington has been the focus of an Anzac Day like no other. The long-awaited Pukeahu National War Memorial Park opened with a “spectacular” light show, and on Friday the city stopped to cheer a “spectacular” Anzac parade (paging Guy Debord!). This was followed by a huge turnout for the dawn service on […]