Local body voting starts

Voting papers for the local body elections are starting to be delivered today and so it’s perhaps a good reminder to not only make sure you vote but that you carefully consider who you vote for. From what I have seen so far it appears that perhaps the key issue this election will be the Unitary Plan and debates about intensification. The plan doesn’t get formally notified for another 10 days but even then it is unlikely that many people (in the overall scheme of things) will actually bother to look at it. One of the big concerns I have is that large amounts of scaremongering and misinformation will occur.

In some ways we are already seeing that happen. Mayoral candidate John Palino has been very busy recently claiming to anyone who will listen that Len Brown is trying to keep the plan secret until it is too late.

He said many voters would have returned their voting papers before getting a chance to see the materialisation of Mayor Len Brown’s agenda for Auckland. “This is truly outrageous. Residents must at the very least be given the opportunity to see these plans before they vote.

“How can the people of Howick and Pakuranga not be allowed access to this information before unaware voters are sent electoral papers this weekend? What other suburbs in Auckland have suffered the same fate?” he said.

Of course this is despite the fact the draft plan has been out in the public since March and a large proportion of the key changes to it have already been signalled.

Elsewhere in what many are considering to be one of the main contests of this time around, C&R candidate Denise Krum has been complaining about building heights for some time.

In her latest of three election pamphlets, in which she labels her rival a “career politician” of more than 25 years’ standing, the 42-year-old businesswoman and mother of two also blasts the council’s Unitary Plan intensification blueprint with its proposed allowances of six-storey housing around the centres of Onehunga, Royal Oak and Panmure, and eight storeys in Glen Innes, as too intense.

What is interesting about the centres mentioned is that only Glen Innes has been unchanged since the original draft. Panmure and Royal Oak have both seen the maximum height reduced while in Onehunga the height limit has been increased but has retained specific restrictions around Onehunga Mall and volcanic cone view shafts. These changes would have been made due to the feedback to the local board and the fact Onehunga saw an increase is good evidence that not everyone is opposed to height. Denise has also put out this graph suggesting that even two storeys is too much.

Transport is also going to be a key discussion point in these elections – although perhaps not quite as much as it would have otherwise been had the government not reluctantly agreed to support the CRL (on a delayed timeframe). Positively it appears that not too many people are campaigning on against much needed projects like the CRL. This perhaps represents that much improved public transport is now becoming an issue that simply can’t be ignored in Auckland local body politics.

One problem that exists is that just reading the short blurb that each candidate writes in the booklet that comes with voting papers often doesn’t give a true indication to the candidate’s thoughts. It is very easy for them to say they want to improve public transport or that they want more affordable housing and less sprawl but it is how they would actually go about doing that that is perhaps more important.

To help people make their decisions and provide more information our good friends at Generation Zero have been working hard to interview every single candidate standing for either mayor or a council seat to get more information on their views about these topics (doing local boards would have been too much work sorry). The results aren’t quite ready yet but they will be available from Wednesday next week so we will let you know the results then.

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