Here’s another harbour nightmare

BY PAT BOOTH

OPINION: Must be something in the water.

Every time, in living memory, people who run Auckland get an idea involving the Waitemata Harbour, they go right off their heads. Or off the deep end, just as you wish.

Latest diagnosis involves the mad-hatter proposal with the government to somehow do a sow’s ear into a silk purse job on Queens Wharf.

It would have laid some magic wand on a clapped-out, desolate site and produced a multi-use gateway and playground which set breathless civic leaders talking excitedly about matching the mystique of Sydney’s opera house.

This was the second of a game of two halves following on the Mallard madness which would have set up a rugby test ground on stilts on the city’s harbour edge.

These two very rushed pieces of planning lunacy had something in common. They were both the product of overheated minds working at full steam in the build-up of world cup fever.

History shows how they followed a line of half-bake proposals for the harbour and gulf, simple-minded solutions for one of Auckland’s greatest assets.

In my time, that heritage has come under threat from two other pieces of metro madness, both more than 50 years ago.

Interestingly, political careers were badly skewed in both. Both were deservedly scrapped as, fortunately, the Mallard Memorial Arena was and the John Key Partying Palace seems likely to be.

The most notorious threat in the 1950s was a long-running plan to pipe the city’s sewage out and pump it off Browns Island.

Short-sighted advocates ignored history in their support. The island (Motukorea) was the first home of Auckland’s father, Sir John Logan Campbell.

Another much-later benefactor, Sir Ernest Davis, acquired it and handed it to the Auckland City Council to administer as a marine park in memory of his father, Moss Davis. (Mission Bay’s splendid Trevor Davis Memorial Fountain is another Davis family gift to the community.)

The sewage-to-the-gulf plan on a gift site was the downfall of one of Auckland’s most powerful mayors, Sir John Allum, who was also chairman of the drainage board. He lost both roles to an historic figure, early greater Auckland advocate Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, at the end of a fight to his electoral death.

Recent Auckland city sleight-of-hand pirating of strips of Albert Park is a reminder of the build-up to another harbour edge plan of the same era.

As Auckland University struggled to house itself on its Princes St site in the 50s, a wild proposal was floated to slice off a slab of Auckland’s city lung, wonderful Albert Park, to give it some elbow room across the road. Aucklanders rebelled.

That put another treasure under threat. Sir James Fletcher was intent on importing a giant dredge for his company and finding spectacular work for it.

His proposal was yet another attack on the Waitemata edge. No doubt fired by earlier pioneering reclamation which had driven the harbour back from its original Maori canoe parking area on what is now Beach Rd, he urged that he use his new toy to fill in Hobson Bay, as well, for a potential uni site. That died a death too. Instead, the university developed a new campus at what historian Dr G W A Bush has described as “the wilds of Tamaki”.

Now, with that history of high-level and hasty expediency, can you understand why I get edgy when the Mallards, and the odd supercity candidate of our political world, target the Waitemata?

And the suspect march to an Auckland from Wellsford to the Waikato gets into stride.

*****

In the mailbag:

“What do you think about Metrowater’s latest Prompt Payment Discount – 7.5 percent discount for prompt payment of accounts and a further 2.5 percent discount for making payments electronically instead of the previous 10 percent discount for simply paying accounts on time?

“Isn’t this a bit of a strange way of rewarding longstanding and no doubt ageing non-computerised clients?

“Wouldn’t you have thought that retaining the original 10 percent discount and offering a further smaller discount for electronic payments would have been fairer?

“They claim that by using electronic banking it will in the long run benefit them and us. So we all win – or have they worked out a way to scam 2.5 percent from loyal and unaware customers?” – Derek Cookson, St Heliers

- What do I think of it? Not much. It sounds like another of those clever accounting formulas like those power board rorts when they save on their running expenses by only reading your meter every two months, and estimate your bill for the months between, using some strange formula which, no doubt, is to their advantage.

Then they read and – surprise, surprise – find their estimate was too much and alter the reading total accordingly, giving you back the money they’ve had for weeks for no reason.

How much of users’ cash does that put into the powerco funds to earn short term interest on in an average year?

*****

“Kia ora. What about the families falsely accused of child abuse and made to feel guilty before their own innocence is established?

“My family is caught up in such a thing and where is the justice in that?

“I agree that there are many cases of child abuse, but where is the support and justice when a family is fighting their innocence only to be judged by the statistics and not on a case-by-case basis?

“Our government and its agencies only work by the statistics they see in front of them and not on a case-by-case basis. If you are a Maori or Pacific Island family you are doomed by society as child abusers. Statistics prove the many hundreds of cases out there but do not prove that all Maori and Pacific Island families are abusers but are deemed as so.

“Take a closer look at how CYFS treat families with suspected abused children and you will be disgusted in how things are handled. They are not there to help the families or even educate about abuse. They are socially and culturally insensitive and have no idea of the emotional effects on both family and child throughout the whole process.

“This is simply because they have had a lot of bad media publicity over the years so feel the need to make examples of everyone even remotely suspected of abuse guilty before proving their innocence.

“I do feel for the children who are abused coming from a home where the only thing known was abuse, but remember the ones being falsely accused and how hard the system makes it for them to walk away with dignity knowing that they have done nothing wrong.

“The system needs an overhaul at how families are actually treated. They need to go back and work on a case by case basis and not look at statistics. Support and education is the key for all involved.” – Name withheld

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