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 […]