School holiday time again, and the seaside village is full of grandparents and their wide-eyed little charges.
The coffee shop today was jammed with pink and purple fairies.
Lovely place to take your grandkids, this quaint little village. Will it still be that if it gets redeveloped? Actually, I reckon yes, depending on how things play out, but let's hold that for a proper look in a few days' time; I'm still busy checking the wet paint on my own renovation. Cheers to everyone who's had nice things to say about it, delighted it's pleasing you.
If you're saying wait, what? at this point, please let me point you in the direction of this explanation. Short answer: new home for the newsletter, same subscription you had before, but now with extra stuff, including a daily quiz. Have you had a try yet? And have you picked a player name? There are some cool ones already, cheers to you, Hal A. Pinot, in particular.
Who's in the quiz today? And might it aid your score to read this? It might.
David Seymour has implored Gisborne District Council to ease up on forestry companies, taking his deregulation gospel to the one region of New Zealand where the case for lighter-touch regulation lies buried under several hundred thousand cubic metres of pine slash. The council's reply, delivered by Mayor Rehette Stoltz, was about as pointed as local government diplomacy allows: it was only when company directors were made personally liable that any material difference was made to forestry behaviour on the East Coast.
No surprise here from Seymour. Presented with a choice between the little guys wrecked by forestry slash â the farmers whose fences and paddocks were smashed, the growers whose orchards were buried, the ratepayers and taxpayers funding a debris clean-up that has already consumed more than $80 million of government money and removed over half a million cubic metres of woody waste â and the big monied companies whose negligence produced all of it, the champion of enterprise has sided with the negligent. The economic harm here is not hypothetical and it is not borne by the foresters. It cascaded onto every other business in TairÄwhiti, onto a city that lost its water supply when slash took out the Waingake pipeline, and onto a public purse that keeps writing cheques for damage it did not cause.
Who else is in the quiz? Chris Bishop.
A 30-flat Napier block has sat empty for a year while 468 people wait for social housing locally (19,704 nationally). MHUD, negotiating a sale to a Community Housing Provider, won't let KÄinga Ora tenant it meantime for fear of complicating that sale. Bishop says he's frustrated; Labour's McAnulty says the fix is obvious â let KÄinga Ora house people now. A minister expressing frustration at his own ministry is not accountability; it is the admission that no one is actually in charge of the outcome. When the person responsible for housing can only report that he, too, finds the situation annoying, the machinery has arranged itself so that the buck stops nowhere. For some better ways of looking at this please see Houses should be homes, not poker chips and We have more than enough to make things free (the case for Universal Basic Services)
Also in the quiz, Trump.
Ready to ace the quiz? Click here.
And from the camera roll: here's a whitebait fritter I enjoyed in the sun last Friday, fished right here from the wharf. They're doing a weekly pop-up stall by the hardware store and it is already the highlight of my week. Golden and glorious.
Also, there's some beautiful Matariki art to see around Britomart.
And if the fairies get too much, you can park yourself by the water and watch it froth.
