Council bullshit continues to grow

A discarded copy of The Press lay on a bench seat in a café in Hanmer Springs. The front page story leaped out at me, given my past career in Communications and PR.

‘Communications overload’ it announced and was referring to the number of communications staff at Christchurch City Council and Ecan. I’ve had first-hand experience with both organisations.

The article informed readers that Environment Canterbury has 56.6 full-time positions in its communications and engagement group. My jaw dropped. It went on to say that Christchurch City Council has 44 positions. I felt anger that so many such positions were being paid for by ratepayers and that the work they do is, as the article suggested, ‘smoke and mirrors’ rather than substance or a service to their ratepayers. They do not measure how successful they have been so they cannot be held accountable for lacklustre performance.

I once worked on a very short term contract for CCC. I was crushed by a toxic culture where initiative was punished, innovation was ignored or discouraged. It was all about image control yet they really had no idea how to make a positive difference in the communities they are supposed to serve. There are some good individuals working at each of these organisations but they can’t make a difference because the system will not allow it. Inertia is boss. On the other hand, you don’t need so much image control if you are actually doing good stuff honestly. Everything is naturally in alignment and many ratepayers become supportive if they can smell ‘authenticity’.

The article by journalist Keiller MacDuff pointed out that a great way of measuring effectiveness is the degree of voter turnout, which, at just 36%, is appalling. In 2018 CCC asked me for a copy of my innovative and effective Waitakere City Council communications campaign to increase voter turnout in 2007. My campaign was a mixture of tried and true activities but 60% of my campaign focussed on fresh, innovative ways to engage with voters and to help new residents to engage in the election process. I increased voter turnout slightly.  Other, smaller district councils such as Rotorua and Kapiti asked me if they could use some of my ideas. Everywhere else turnouts went down. The Minister for Ethnic Affairs wrote a letter to me congratulating me on my methods and results. The Public Relations Institute conferred on my campaign and evaluation of it a status of finalist in the annual PR awards. WCC wanted to use my expertise again with an increased budget but, sadly, that never happened as WCC and other Auckland councils were destroyed in the creation of the monstrous Supercity.

What did CCC do with the copy of my campaign (my and WCC’s intellectual property) that I generously (with permission from Auckland Council) gave them? Nothing, clearly!

 I was actively dissuaded by a supervisor from attending joint meetings with Ecan on a joint partnership project even though I had originally been told to participate as a CC reresentative? Ecan representatives were more than happy with my contributions so what was the problem. Was I becoming too 'friendly', effective perhaps? It seemed to me CCC had no intention of cooperating even if it was a legitimate partnership.

Let’s put this communications bloat and accountability in perspective - at Waitakere (a major West Auckland Council before it was dissolved) we had ten (yes 10 including management) staff on our communications and engagement team. We had an open and innovative mindset and we were in sync with environmental principles. New ideas were welcomed. Our ratepayers were often proud of our efforts and enjoyed getting involved in our projects. How many councils can you say that about these days. We were NZ’s first and only EcoCity.

I was, among other things, responsible for encouraging ratepayers to use a lot less drinking water by changing their behaviour. Reduce water demand by 25% by 2025 despite an increasing population. That’s a big call but we knew we would not need to spend heaps of money on new water infrastructure or drown parts of our environment just to create another dam if folks could understand and change their water behaviours. We supported residents’ efforts in many practical ways such as rebates for raintanks and solar waterheating. We did not dissuade people from doing the right sustainable things. And it was working. By the end of 2010 we were on track to meet our goal. And then all that measurable good work was murdered and Watercare took over everything.

I shook my head in dismay and anger to see an article revealing such ridiculous staff numbers employed to do stuff-all but make all the negative stuff and lack of advancement invisible. The journalist was right.

These bloated teams are apparently necessary to provide information on council services and events, elections and emergency responses. I call BULLSHIT!! We at WCC did it all more effectively with 10 staff.

I am a Three Waters specialist in communications. I have taught at tertiary level how to put together effective environment campaigns involving water and energy, to students completing Water Technology degrees at the Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France. 

I was good at what I did but these days in NZ I am unemployable by any organisation because I get good things done and help ratepayers feel good about Council and themselves in fresh 'unthinkable' ways. I have international experience in sustainability and Three Waters but I am not welcome here. But hey, let’s employ heaps of people with less passion, experience, honesty, creativity to pour out spin, on their average salaries of $98,000 - $119,000. I earned half that.

Wouldn’t YOU be pissed?

Photos: a fraction of the extensive workspace for the communications team at CCC, Choice, the spokesperson for my elections campaign, Splash, my spokesperson for Three Waters, Eco Day via WCC stand.

Relearning a Maori lost art

How did Maori find their way to New Zealand? Theories abound: blown off course? Bunny-hopping from one known island to another island? Relying on ocean currents? Celestial navigation?

Whatever the means, the knowledge became lost because Maori had no written language. When knowledge is passed on like Chinese Whispers it loses precision and interest wanes. How could Maori relearn the navigation arts that they had lost? They went to Mau Piailug. 

 The Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug (1932-2010) was originally from the Carolinian islands. He learned the traditional navigation techniques, which had been preserved after other traditional techniques had been forgotten (due partly to the remoteness of the Carolinian Islands). In the 1970s, Mau shared his knowledge with members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. This led to a revival of the practices of traditional Polynesian navigation techniques, and provided anthropologists with a greater understanding of the history of the Polynesian and Micronesian peoples.

The Pacific was the last great region to be explored. It is estimated that migration took place between 3000 BC to 1000 AD. New Zealand may have been the last landfall. Explorers used multi-hulled boats guided by experts in celestial navigation. Those techniques were verbally passed on through the generations. Everything had to be memorised. Among the 'tools' memorised was the star compass.

Through constant observation, navigators were able to detect changes in the speed of their canoes, their heading, and the time of day or night. Polynesian navigators employed a wide range of techniques including the use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, even the patterns of bioluminescence that indicated the direction in which islands were located, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather. There is currently no evidence of historic Polynesian navigators using navigational devices on board vessels, such as some Vikings used in the northern hemisphere.

To see a Star Compass example in New Zealand today you need to visit Napier. There are 32 pou each 3.5m high in a 30 metre circle. They show the rising and setting points of the Sun and Moon, planets and stars as memorised. While daylight with a bright sunny day could help navigators, it was the night sky that gave the most accurate directions. The Compass has a central stone with elaborately carved pou indicating East, North, South and West.

It's a peaceful spot looking out to sea. For more information on Polynesian navigation go to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation 

 

 

 

My Grandmother's Hands

I looked at her hands with curiosity and dismay as she crocheted a tea cosy. They seemed so old and mortal.

"Gran, how did your hands get like that?"

"Like what?" she replied.

"Well, I can see right through them, all the veins and stuff. They are not like mine, all smooth and opaque. They look… old and a bit scary."

"Well there's nothing wrong with them and you should mind your own business," she snapped. "Just a bit of arthritis, that's all."

I really did want to know how hands like mine became hands like hers. Was it too much dishwashing, or cleaning, or getting sick, or living past fifty? When did the process start? Was it fast or slow? I wanted to know what could I do to avoid looking like that but clearly this adolescent was not going to be able to ask her.

Those hands had so much skill, patience, effort, persistence. If hands could see they'd have seen the change from horses to motor cars, washing coppers to washing machines, a Singer treadle sewing machine surpassed by Chinese imported clothing, an old valve radio to a colour television, a draper's to a clothing store. And those hands had helped me grow up.

They were never hands that patted me on the back, or hugged me. Instead their kindnesses were demonstrated in showing me how to cook, embroider, sew and knit and crochet. Gran's scones were miraculous. I never discovered the real secret to getting scones that light, that right, every time. She said she'd switched from butter and milk to using cream but when I tried that I ended up with rocks that didn't go well with jam.

Those hands knew how to boil mutton and make a parsley sauce so good even the French might have enjoyed it. Those festive Christmas puddings were assembled with pride and boiled to perfection with sixpences hidden inside for us to find. Chocolate instant pudding from a packet was whisked up and then smothered in whipped cream sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. We never worried about cholesterol or calories back then. The handmade jams and pickles and preserves were proudly displayed and used or given away.

When I was at Intermediate School I finally got the opportunity to teach Gran something. I couldn't believe it when she started making my pineapple-apple sausage meat rollup I'd learned in cooking class. She didn't say it was good. She simply asked me how it was made, wrote down the recipe and started making it. Silent praise indeed.

Gran's hands never stroked me when I was sick but they did bring me cups of tea of a taste I have never found anywhere since. They also played knuckle bones with me, over and over and over again, sitting on the carpet in front of the fireplace in the lounge. Those were the happiest times for me; away from the threats and sourness of my parents; it was a refuge of strict yet safe moments during holidays or sometimes Friday nights. When it wasn't knucklebones we were playing it was cards: Snap or Happy families or sometimes we used a real deck of cards to play Twenty-One. No-one to yell at me, manipulate me, hit me or demand I clean something. Just me and my Gran who shared time and conversation.

The carpet in front of the fire was also the place her hands taught me how to make crepe paper roses. I needed garlands of pink roses with green leaves linked with pink satin ribbon as decoration on my Les Sylphides-style ballet gown for a recital. We rolled the edges of the leaves and petals on the diagonal with one of her knitting needles. After some preliminary tries I was allowed to complete each rose so that Gran could sew them onto the pretty pink ribbon. It looked great.

It was Gran who cycled with me to my dance classes and shared the chocolate biscuits she'd wrapped up for us for the return ride at night. It was Gran who made up spelling and other word games to pass the time together and encourage my interest in English. Her school lunches were always devoured to the last crumb, especially her tomato sandwiches and fruit biscuits.

As the decades passed her hands stopped busying themselves with her handcrafts. She was going blind but never told me. Whenever I cycled from high school to her place I'd find her sitting in silence staring out the lounge window at the view down the street; looking for any visitors, watching cars go by. Her hands now fussed over each other as if they were twins seeking company, solace. For years she did this even though she couldn't see more than a hazy blur. She seemed a forlorn and tragic figure sitting alone for hours like that, especially after my Grandfather died. She could barely see her only great-granddaughter Laura whom I'd bring on a rare visit to see her, from the faraway city where I now lived. I treasure the two photos I have of the both of them: greatgrandmother and greatgranddaughter.

One day I found her gripping the doorway, obviously in great pain. Her hands could no longer keep pretending there was nothing wrong. They could no longer hide an illness that made her grab a handkerchief to retch in every time she tried to eat something. She cried out. I was startled and very worried, but Gran hated anyone to pass comment on her, to fuss. She was of a generation that never wanted to lose face or dignity.

As I walked to the front door I turned to hug her to say goodbye. She clung to me. She clung like she had never clung before. Her hands were insistent and needy. She was giving me a hug or was it me hugging her? There seemed a long, strange, wordless exchange going on as I reminded her to have her regular medical check-ups and look after herself. After I got back to my accommodation I phoned my mother to tell her to check in on Gran and get help but she took no action for a good 24 hours. In the meantime, I flew home and settled back into my daily life feeling I should have been more assertive on Gran's behalf. A week later I learned that I would never see or feel those hands again.

I felt many regrets for not postponing my flight back to my little daughter and instead sorting things out for Gran myself but she had close family living in the same city who could have helped. She'd hidden her multiple cancers so well from those around her. Even her doctor hadn't realised the true nature of her suffering.

She's the best of my childhood and one of the most precious parts of my past. I think I gave her a link to the modern world she never seemed quite at ease with. Gran was always interested in my news. In return she gave me a link to an older world I wished I'd known. In a family where females were less regarded than males she gave me a haven where I could learn to be me in safety (so long as I didn't have my own opinions) and have one on one attention from someone who wanted to make that effort for no reason other than interest in me. What a gift. I still miss her.

And now my elderly hands are like her hands; transparent, veiny with age spots and with wrinkled arthritic bones. I doubt there will be a grandchild who will ask me how my hands got like that but I do know the answer.

Photos show: Gran and me around 1957, Gran knitting in the Old French Cemetery on L'Aube Hill, Akaroa, Gran with me at my baptism in 1955, Gran and Grandad in retirement, Me in one of my ballet costumes, Gran and Laura - last photos of her 1994 just months before her death.

Art Deco Napier before Gabrielle

 I was curious to visit Napier because it is famed for its Art Deco architecture.

Several towns in New Zealand, including Napier and Hastings, were rebuilt in Art Deco style after the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake. It's an amazing snapshot in time.  Many of the buildings have been protected and restored. Napier has been nominated for UNESCO World Hritage Site status, the first cultural site in New Zealand to be nominated

Art Deco took its name, short for arts décoratifs, from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925. New materials and technologies, especially reinforced concrete,  were key to the development and appearance of Art Deco.

At its birth between 1910 and 1914, Art Deco was an explosion of colours, featuring bright and often clashing hues, frequently in floral designs, presented in furniture upholstery, carpets, screens, wallpaper and fabrics.

The art movement known as Cubism appeared in France between 1907 and 1912, influencing the development of Art Deco. The Cubists, themselves under the influence of Paul Cézanne, were interested in the simplification of forms to their geometric essentials: the cylinder, the sphere, the cone. In the 1920s, travel posters, made for steamship lines and airlines, became extremely popular. 

By the 1930s, the style had been somewhat simplified, but it was still extravagant.

American skyscrapers marked the summit of the Art Deco style; they became the tallest and most recognizable modern buildings in the world. New York City's skyline was radically changed by the Chrysler Building in Manhattan (completed in 1930). The Chrysler Building was soon surpassed in height by the Empire State Building (1931), in a slightly less lavish Deco style. These two buildings plus other Art Deco ones tofollow completely changed New York City's skyline.

After World War II the style largely vanished, except in industrial design, where it continued to be used in automobile styling and products such as jukeboxes and certain household items, reflecting a more modern feeling for luxury.

One of the best known and certainly the largest public Art Deco sculpture is the Christ the Redeemer, by the French sculptor Paul Landowski, completed between 1922 and 1931, located on a mountain top overlooking Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You probably didn't realise it is Art Deco. I didn't when I was there.

After the First World War, Art Deco buildings of steel and reinforced concrete began to appear in large cities across Europe and the United States. In the United States the style was most commonly used for office buildings, government buildings, cinemas, and railroad stations. Many of the best surviving examples of Art Deco are cinemas built in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1930s, a new variety of Art Deco architecture became common; it was called Streamline, or, in France, the Style Paquebot, or Ocean Liner style. Buildings in the style had rounded corners and long horizontal lines; they were built of reinforced concrete, and were almost always white; and they sometimes had nautical features, such as railings and portholes that resembled those on a ship. 

 

Most of these Art Deco elements can be seen in Napier's public buildings and residential homes of the period. Check out the horizontal stripes, arches, floral details. rounded corners, geometric details. 

The street signs are in the Broadway font to suggest Art Deco styling such as was used in concert posters.

 Note the amazing internal details and external details on the front door of the old Tobacco Company in Napier. 

 

 

 The detail on the doors is wonderfully botannical. It fits so well with the other deco elements. Who would have thought geometric designs and flowing florals could work so well together?

The residential areas of Napier also reveal their Art Deco elements, mostly stripes, geometric design and rounded corners, flattish roofs. In one entire street, most of the homes, now more than 90 years old, are built in this same style. The street also houses an impressive row of mature pohutukawa.

There are buildings, both residential, civic and industrial, scattered around New Zealand in this very distinctive style but nowhere but Napier and Hastings is there such a concentration that the cities are famous for this style of architecture. And the fame is well deserved.

 

 

Not all the homes are well maintained but most are.

 

The archways and other structures along the esplanade display a subtle use of Art Deco elements. Also evident in Napier is a particular style of Art Deco I had been unaware of and that's the 'Spanish' influence. Several buildings on the main streets reflect this. Check out the photos below and see how many elements of Art Deco style you can now identify.