Lambton should be a thriving and vibrant heart for Wellington. It should be an exciting place to live while still being clean and safe. It should be the kind of place where it is inconceivable that an asset like the Cuba Street Carnival could be lost. This is a wonderful city. I've lived in Brisbane, Perth and Auckland but I keep coming home to Wellington. I love this city - it's my home. But I worry that there is a sense of drift around the city.
I am also conscious that many of us in Wellington feel that while our council (usually) ticks all the legislative boxes it has to on consultation, it doesn’t seem to be good at taking residents with it or building a shared vision of the kind of city we want to live in.
As part of a strong Labour team on council I would work to make community consultation more genuine. Technology might be part of the answer to this. But we can also put too much faith in technology - there are other ways of making consultation less bureaucratic.
There are important local issues that need to be addressed in the Lambton ward. The council needs to have some vision around urban design. At the moment development in inner-Wellington seems to lack any sort of vision.
The Lambton Ward has problems with rubbish and recycling. It’s a lifestyle problem for residents, it detracts from tourism and doesn’t meet modern environmental standards. Solving our rubbish issues might not be visionary – but it’s important and we need the council to give this some focus.
Any serious contender for Council will have a range of issues to put before voters. Over the course of the campaign, I will set out a full platform. These are the five themes I will focus my campaign around.
Bringing back the buzz
Wellington is a great city to live in and Lambton is the vibrant heart of the city. In the last four or five years the sense of excitement around Wellington has started to wane. The most obvious example of this is the loss of the Cuba Street Carnival. The Carnival was not only a fantastic asset in itself, it was an embodiment of the excitement, fun and diversity of Wellington. It is almost unbelievable that the Council could allow the Carnival to jeopardised. We must bring it back. We also need to make sure that the other fairs and festivals around the city are supported. But the Carnival should not be set against these fairs and festivals. It's not either or. We need all of them. Let's have a council that sees a sense of excitement as an community asset and key part of our brand and strives to protect it. Supporting our Carnival along with the other fairs and festivals needs to be given higher priority than sister city visits and some of the other low quality spend we’ve seen in recent years. If elected I'll make sure this happens.
Protecting the community assets we have and building the ones we need
The assets owned by the council belong to the Wellington community. I will oppose sale of our assets and privatisation of our water. But it's not enough just to stop the sale of assets. We need to build more community assets to make sure the needs of Wellington's diverse communities are met. Our inner city lacks good facilities for young families – especially mothers and young children. We also need to look seriously at more all weather pitches for kids to play soccer and rugby in our wet winters. This is not just a council responsibility – we need the codes to partner with us. But the council should show leadership. The Brooklyn and Wadestown (used by Thorndon residents) Libraries need to be protected. The move to designate them “Resource Centres” puts their future at risk. Libraries are important community centres. I will fight to protect our libraries.
Promoting walking and cycling
Those of us who live and work in Lambton should be able to walk around our city safe from cars and, as much as possible sheltered from the elements. We need more covered walking zones on the major walking routes. In the lead up to the Rugby World Cup next year we need a safe and dry walking route from Courtney place to the stadium. On Council I would push for walking to be seen as a major part of the transport portfolio. I also find it amazing that as more and more Wellingtonians cycle, both for transport and for recreation, the Council seem to have done little to make cycling safer, for cyclists and motorists, in the Lambton ward.
Openness and Transparency
We need to bring more openess and transparency in our council. It's not enough just to make information available to those who request it. Information about council operations should be accessible for all Wellingtonians. We should take advantage of changes in technology. Meetings of council and committees should be webcast live and archived so Wellingtonians can see what is happening and how decisions are made. There are wonderful examples of open local governments internationally. We need to catch up with them. We also need to be more transparent about Councillor attendance and total Councillor remuneration for all their Council activities. This information should be readily available to all. Another aspect of openness that the Council needs to consider is use of opensource software. We have some great opensource developers our city. We should look at how we can save costs and support our own businesses.
Sweating the small stuff
We need a Council with a vision, but it also needs to sweat the small stuff. We need to improve our rubbish and recycling systems. Our beautiful city, especially the inner city, is too often marred by rubbish. The recycling system doesn't work for those in the inner city. We need a better approach. We need to recognise that it rains in our city and make sure that our storm water systems are up to scratch. Our footpaths need to be walkable. It’s great to have a strong vision, but it’s the small stuff that we notice day to day and I want to be part of a Council that does sweat the small stuff.
On launching my campaign I highlighted the importance of greater openness and transparency in our Council. I made this one of my top five issues.
Openness and transparency need to be more than just buzzwords that are used during an election campaign and then ignored. I am committed to increasing openness and transparency. My Openness and Transparency platform is made up of two parts: policy positions which I will push for on council, and personal pledges about how I will behave if elected.
Policy positions
Information must be accessible not just available.
For a government of any type, central or local, to be truly democratically accountable to the people who elect it, information about what the government is doing must be readily available. Its actions must be transparent and open to scrutiny.
New Zealand’s Official Information regime as represented by the Official Information Act 1982 and the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 is based on the principle of availability. Information is (or should be) available to those who request it, unless there are good grounds for withholding.
In recent years there has been a major shift in emphasis among advocates for Open Government. While a legislative framework that requires most government information to be released on request is necessary, it is not sufficient. The current state of debate focuses on making government information freely available and accessible on the internet for citizens to access without needing to make a request.
The new American Administration is at the forefront of this movement. On his first day in Office, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. The Obama Administration has also made information on how the US Federal Government spends tax payer money available on the internet. On December 8 2009, the White House issued the Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to take immediate, specific steps to achieve key milestones in transparency, participation, and collaboration.
Open Government is good for the economy and business: The council holds a range of information that is valuable for business in making decisions and growing their businesses. We need our businesses to be successful for our city to grow and deliver the standard of living Wellingtonians expect. Making more council held information available to business and reduce the costs to business of accessing this
information, could assist business growth.
Also greater openness can remove any perception of ‘insider advantage’. New Zealand has a good reputation for transparent and ‘clean’ government at all levels. However, this could be at risk if a
perception was allowed to develop that ‘insiders’ or those with access to consultants and lobbyists can get access to information by ‘knowing the game’ that their competitors cannot access. This does not require malfeasance, simply that where some can use legitimate techniques such as well designed information requests to find information earlier than their competitors they may derive an advantage that would not exist in a system where council information is made available to all, not just those who know how to ask.
The Wellington City Council does make a lot of information available on its website http://www.wellington.govt.nz.
However, information is not all readily accessible. Too often information is buried in PDF documents. PDF is great for printing and for distributing large documents that need to be printed. But PDF documents are not good for reading online, they are harder to search and to interact with.
Also aggregated data that ratepayers can rightfully expect is absent. Three areas where this is obvious is attendance, voting and remuneration of councillors. All of this can be found if people are willing to wade through PDFs and aggregate the data, but it should be available readily in one place.
Greater transparency about Councillor remuneration
Wellington City Councillors receive remuneration from their role as a councillor (with additional council responsibilities leading to higher remuneration), directors’ fees for representing the council on companies that the council owns or has a stake in and for serving as commissioners on resource consent hearings.
The total remuneration that councillors receive from all council related activities can only be ascertained by the most diligent. Compare this to the situation with MPs remuneration. The Parliament website has a page dedicated to MP pay and entitlements. The same information should be readily available for councillors.
Greater transparency about Councillor attendance and voting
Information on councillor attendance is helpfully collated in the council’s annual report (open the PDF and go to the last page). It shows a very positive picture. The average councillor attends 93% of meetings and even the councillor with the lowest attendance record still attended 54 out of 64 meetings. This information need not be buried in a PDF. It should be readily available on the website and updated weekly.
Information on voting is not collated. Minutes of meetings are produced that provide full details of each vote in the order it occurs in proceedings. However, if a ratepayer wants to know how their councillor voted on a particular issue, they must find the minutes of the relevant meeting and find the vote. This kind of information is central to the accountability of the council. An issues based voting database would make it much easier for residents to know how their representatives are voting.
Greater use of open source software in council operations
Commitments to openness need to apply to the tools being used. Currently most of the technologies used by the city council are proprietary. The council pays over $3 million per annum in software licensing fees. Some of this is inevitable, but much of it is not. Wellington has a thriving open source development community. Rather than sending money offshore, we should be supporting our local open source development industry. The council should adopt the New Zealand Open Source Society’s Public Sector Remix Policy. I would go further and advocate for the council to adopt a Free-software-first approach.
Personal pledges
If elected I will be one voice on Council. I hope to be part of a strong Labour team. But I cannot guarantee that I will be able to get majority support for the policies I've outline above. What I can guarantee is that I will behave in a manner that promotes openness and transparency.
To ensure this I will use this website to:
- Disclose my full remuneration from Council. This will include not just my salary from the Council but any fees received as a director and any fees received for serving as a Resource Consent Commissioner.
- Provide a record of my attendance at Council and Committee meetings. Currently if you want to know whether your councillors have attended meetings you need to wade through minutes or wait for the annual report. I will be open and transparent about my attendance at meetings.
- Provide a record to you of how I vote. Only the most dedicated researchers can find out how Councillors have voted across the term. I will list my votes on every issue on my website.
- Use open source software wherever possible. As I noted above commitments to openness need to apply to the tools being used . This website is maintained in Drupal, an open source content management platform. Wherever possible I use an open source operating system.
I am running as part of a strong Labour-endorsed team, looking to be voice for Labour values in Wellington's local and regional governance. The other Labour-endorsed candidates in these elections are:
Onslow-Western Ward
Southern Ward
Eastern Ward
Wellington Regional Council
Wellington City Council uses the STV (Single Transferable Vote) system to elect our local representatives. Each voter has one vote which is cast by ranking candidates in order of numerical preference. eg 1,2,3,4
In the Lambton ward, the three most popular candidates are elected to council. If a person gets more than a quarter of the number one votes, then they are elected straight away. It is very unusual for three candidates to each get this level of initial support, and if fewer than three candidates get initially elected then the votes of other candidates are redistributed to their second, third, and sometimes subsequent preferences until exactly three candidates achieve broad support.
If you want your vote to count towards electing someone it’s better to rank as many candidates as possible.
Your 1st preference vote is the most important. That is the person who is initially getting your vote, not the 2nd, 3rd preferences on your list.
For more information, please visit the following sites -