Fridays Done, But Are You Done Too?

27 March 2026

It’s all very well to say about JMA’s, but what is the point of them anyway?

Genesis 6:3: “And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years”.

We are not made to live forever, but that verse from Genesis 6:3 isn’t widely interpreted to mean we are capped at 120 years. Its context was that Noah had 120 years to build his Ark before the Flood came, and there is Biblical record of men living over that age well after that time. Noah for example, is said to have lived over 900 years. How so can that be? It is speculated that in the time of Creation, genetics were purer with sickness almost unheard of. There was no prohibition on marrying ones sister, for example (which was hard to avoid when there are only a handful of people to choose from) – and it is held that subsequent corruption of our genetics is the reason we don’t do that now. Sure there will have been accidents, but they didn’t have motorbikes back then.

Hey ya’ll its another week done, and finally we have some cooler weather arrive! About time I say, and its these middle seasons which I like most. So what have we going on in the Council space lately, at least with your Elected Members? Not a lot it has to be said, just some Long Term Plan (LTP) thingamies which wrapped up, an update with Turangi buses, and also an interesting little episode worth mentioning just because it illuminates how this Council can operate sometimes.

Lets start with the LTP. On Tuesday we wrapped up the preliminary workshop sessions which staff are using to set the general direction we want to head, and you can watch that session HERE. But for me the greatest elephant in the room for all of this is that we haven’t set any decisive rate targets to work backwards from, and it appears we might just be going through the motions to superficially justify the carrying on of business as usual – just like we have done every single year I have been on Council. However, even though there is no sign of any sort of comprehensive review of staff numbers and salaries (which comprise the significant portion of operational expenditure), there is at least a few encouraging signs that some staff are taking to heart the community have had enough. Like the idea of selling off Council assets to pay down debt and/or offset rates (otherwise known as ‘rationalising Council assets‘), and perhaps we will start to get serious about things like some sort of bed tax on non-commercial accommodation providers (Rotorua and Queenstown rating models may get a look at). But I don’t see these as significantly meaty to make such a big difference, so we will just have to see how it pans out. As I have stated many times before, and the maths is incontrovertible – unless we fix rates to consumer levels of inflation, then those on fixed incomes will inevitably be crippled.

I do have an update on Turangi buses – Waikato Regional Council (WRC) have told us that if Taupo District Council (or anybody really) can come up with a $170K injection, they will put on a five-day a week 33 seat bus service between Taupo and Turangi with timetable of our choice. We are still to ascertain a few extra details such as if this means any number of trips per day or just a few, but the overwhelming public responses received thus far from Turangi Councillor Sandra Greenslade’s community conversations (including social media) are speaking quite loudly that there will be no problem filling seats. With the price of fuel as sky high it is right now, I reckon this is the least we can be doing to help Turangi out and my money is on it will be popular after the Middle East war is over too. Canterbury Regional Council is also doing their bit to push public transport in these trying times, I reckon we should be doing the same. But we only have a week to decide, so keep your fingers crossed this idea gets past the line. Otherwise the Turangiites may start coming for us, and $170K seems a pretty cheap way of avoiding that.

And then there was this on Tuesday as well: Raukawa Settlement Trust and Taupō District Council Co-Governance Committee hui. What is that all about you may ask, and what has it got to do with me? Some of you will have to please forgive my ignorance, but I only just learned that Raukawa is an Iwi and not a river, and that they have been working a Joint Management Agreement (JMA) with Taupo District Council since 2013. What’s that you say, a JMA? Isn’t that what all the fuss is being made about lately? Well yes, and no. This is a different JMA and only concerns the Raukawa sections of the Waikato river (which bits I am not exactly sure, because I thought they are the same bits covered in the new JMA). But irrespective of all that, I figured this would be worth tuning into just to see how these JMA’s can play out and what good they can do. Because if we are going to do something bigger and supposedly better, that’s a thing to do right? Here is where things start to get interesting…

This Raukawa committee meeting is an annual affair and open to the public, and yet was never advertised (except for a secluded item in the Council website HERE), and as at the time of writing the meeting agenda has still not been made available to anybody else but committee members. A few days prior, I recognised the relevance of this meeting to the JMA we are negotiating now, and requested to our Chief Executive that it be audio-visual recorded for public record. The response I received was that the idea of recording would only be tabled at the meeting and subject to committee member approval. Long story short – the recording started happening a minute or so after that item was voted and approved around 20 minutes into the meeting, so you can watch the remaining two hour proceedings HERE. Fact of the matter though, is that there was virtually no public notification, and that recording might not have happened at all. I had to request from one of the committee members to send me a copy of the agenda which you can read HERE.

Okay Duncan, so apart from that yet another example of closed door opacity from this Council, what else is there to be made of all this? Well you probably have to watch for yourself and truth be told I put it on 1.75 times play speed to get through it, but my take is that this committee has all the hallmarks of a friendly hui without much doey. There was an early suggestion to change the title from ‘Co-governance‘ to ‘Co-management‘ (for political reasons I am fairly sure), and a few interesting things got raised by Mangakino Councillor Hope Woodward with questions to Council staff about experienced river water quality problems (watch from HERE), and there is a recent Waikato Times article emphasising that point. But as far as I could tell this committee made absolutely no decisions at all, and anything that does eventuate only happens in the background as implemented by Council staff. But I suppose that is inevitable for a committee which meets only once every 12 months, and if this is an example of how a JMA can work in practice then the public should at least be concerned about such lightweight governance – and for that reason alone, was perhaps why it went unadvertised. But I do hear that the subsequent afternoon tea went down very well.

And on that note, I caught a recent social media commentary regarding the proposed JMA for Taupo waters:

“I want to offer a word of warning to Council about an element of the Act that gives me grave concern. As background, before retiring I was a Commercial Manager who was involved in the development and negotiation of many commercial contracts and I would never enter into a contract that could not be terminated once established which I understand is what the Act anticipates in the JMA. Contracts are put in place to formalise conditions that the parties would like to operate under as things are known today, but no one is able to foresee what will happen in the future that could make the contract unworkable. Therefore the Council should not enter into any agreement that cannot be terminated. This is just good contractual/commercial practice! The Council has no control or power over what another contracted party, such as the Tuwharetoa Māori Trust Board, may evolve into over time. Hypothetically just to emphasise this point only, what if the TMTB were to be taken over by a foreign political or ideological movement as an extreme example? Would we still want obligations to that evolved party? My suggestion is for Council to advise government that it cannot enter into good faith contracts on a “no termination” basis and advise them you will not progress until this is removed as a requirement of the Act!”

And after I commented that it was spurious to believe Tuwharetoa Maori Trust Board (TMTB) can possibly represent the best interests of all Maori, I received this response:

“You act like the Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board is an unregulated entity. Of course they are accountable. They operate under the Māori Trust Boards Act 1955, which sets out governance, financial reporting, and accountability requirements, just like any other entity. They’re required to produce annual reports, have audited accounts etc. It’s no wonder you are getting hammered with accusations of racism, your comments are so out of touch. Do better”.

So I decided to do better and ask Chatgpt this question: “What can you tell me please about the legislated ‘transparency and accountability’ of Maori Trust Boards to the public and their own members, relative to the requirements of local government? I have been pointed to the Maori Trust Boards Act 1955 (which was apparently superceded in 2011)”. You can read the full ChatGPT response HERE but here are a few snippets below:

And for a supplementary question about the transparency and accountability of specifically Tuwharetoa Maori Trust Board to its own beneficiaries:

So until I receive evidence to the contrary, I remain undeterred in saying that the public has every right to be concerned with any partnership deals and whatever they are called. Down south Federated Farmers are up in arms about impending Nga Puhi undue influences to their way of life (will they be doing the same here?), and Hobsons Pledge are putting out some alarm bells about Taupo as well.

So what else is new?

O Delegations, Delegations, Wherefore Art Thou Delegations? Following the release a few weeks ago of my presentation on Financial Delegations which you can watch HERE, I had one of the elected members follow up with a couple of questions:“Why would staff need to work the weekends if they do value for money projects”, and “Isn’t doing the cheapest job more expensive in the long run?” My responses are shown below:

“Throwing a big pile of money at a single project is virtually always less time consuming for project managers than trying to handle multiple projects, and I have certainly experienced this first hand. Especially if that work gets handed to contractors or consultants to undertake as usually happens with almost all Councils nowadays. Yes there are lazy Council workers who take the easy path as at any other workplace, but with their performance is often not measured by results on the ground but by accountants who look at balanced books and budgets spent on time. It is also my experience in the public sector, that people are more likely to be elevated past their level of competence.

On your second point, I will defer to the Dunedin cheapy roundabout example. They may seem more expedient than the ideal, but the cost of doing nothing has to be weighed up also. Intersections are the flashpoints and bottlenecks of any transport network, and waiting to do the rolls royce option every time is simply not tenable when we have crashes and driver delays happening every day. These are costs to society which is the role of a Road Controlling Authority to duly address, and I was greatly surprised to find after moving here that instead of No.8 wire solutions which I would have expected of an overstretched provincial place, I see the rolls royce happening (and a few road safety disasters as well). That was entirely my original motivation to stand for Council”.

Dog attack in Turangi: Last weekend a roaming dog attack left a woman unconscious in Turangi when she tried to protect her toddler. I am not sure if it has been properly reported to Council yet or even if it is widely known about in the Turangi area, but this coincides with a recent government announcement to try and tackle this issue more seriously. In the meantime though, I see that the only measures for the average person are: (1) Public need to report in detail about any incidents including dog identification, because action cannot be taken without this happening. Taupo District Council’s Antenno App is easy to use, and allows for anonymous reporting if you really wish; (2) Carry a big stick. I used to be a bicycle postie back in the day, and have figured out that unless a dog is on their own property some aggression on your behalf can often go a long way to defusing the situation.

Aussis get serious, so why aren’t we? Over the ditch it seems they aren’t very keen on E-bikes being used in an anti-social way, and that includes seizing and crushing any which go faster than their imposed 25 km/hr speed limit. As somebody who is great fan of personal mobility other than large boxed motor vehicles, I think they are taking things way too seriously – but I am sure there will be many Taupoite lake path users who will disagree.

Give money for more sculptures: If you liked Boom Boom the dinosaur or even if you don’t, the Taupo Sculpture Trust has a new website where you can keep informed with the latest developments and also give them some of your hard earned money towards the new. I am pretty sure that back in the day of Michelangelo it was only through individual sponsorship that the great classical sculptures ever happened at all, so here is a chance to be a part of it.

Balloons over Waikato : Last weekend I happened to be in Hamilton for this annual event, along with I estimate around 10,000 people who had a great time in the early morning seeing them all off. The Nightglow experience that evening with music set to earth-bound balloons – less exhilarating, and by all accounts the public transport after was absolute chaos as reported here.

And on that note, it just has to be said…

Fridays undisputed best balloon song of all time:

Fridays Feeble Foldback

20 March 2026

“I seek a place that can never be destroyed, one that is pure, and that fadeth not away, and it is laid up in heaven, and safe there, to be given, at the time appointed, to them that seek it with all their heart. Read it so, if you will, in my book” (John Bunyan)

Pilgrims Progress – Written by layman preacher John Bunyan whilst in prison, it is one of the most printed English books of all time, second only to the Bible in terms of copies sold and has remained continuously in print since its publication in 1678 with an estimated 250 million copies worldwide. I have read it more than once and if you are interested in poetic prose and a Protestant Christian message in simple relatable terms – I can think of no better book for thee.

As I see it, this game of local government and politics is full of subjective opinions which masquerade as facts, and not only staff but Elected Members can use it to push their own agendas. That doesn’t necessarily exclude me, but I at least try to transparently separate the fact from the fiction. So what have we got this past week to subjectively opinionate on? We had some more Long Term Plan (LTP) discussions of which there are a couple of things of interest, and another one of the Joint Management Plan (JMP) workshops which included a few reveals, and it is getting attention from the likes of the organisation Democracy Action.

I also finally got around to putting out my talk of Delegations which has been floating around since before Christmas. Mayor Funnell hasn’t quite come around to the idea of letting Elected Members speak freely in Council Chambers, but I suspect where that attitude is really coming from. In any case, that bottleneck only pushed me to greater lengths and already some good feedback has been received – so I may do more in this format. The gist of my talk is that financial delegations at Taupo District Council fall woefully short of responsible governance oversight, and I reckon we need a new Financial Committee to make it start happening. You can watch it below:

On that note of letting elected members speak their piece, I have tabled a Notice of Motion for the next Council meeting on 31 March to address that very point and is shown below. I believe such a thing is quite fundamental to basic democracy in Council Chambers, and I won’t deny that a part of me resents having to expend energy trying to get it to happen. Call me black or white if you will, but as I see it any Elected Members who vote against it are the enemies of your democracy.

Okay lets start with the JMA workshop on Thursday which I really do recommend you watch HERE because a few things came out. We first kicked off with a statement from Mayor Funnell which is shown below, which was partly in response to some statements I made the last workshop about Tuwharetoa Maori Trust Board (TMTB) questioning if they are an organisation which properly represents the interests of this district or its own members (at least I think that was the gripe, because it was never explicitly stated). This is based on my own previous assessment of these Maori Trust Boards including TMTB which you can read HERE, and I am still of that view. However, Mayor Funnell felt the need to apologise on behalf of everybody else at the beginning of the meeting as per below:

Maori ward Councillor Wahine Murch also weighed in with some invective near the end of the meeting when I raised a question about it (watch from HERE), and also put out a social media post about it where she asserted that I had been: “…attacking motives, spreading misinformation or undermining people and institutions”. My response to Wahine is that I have been doing my homework thank you very much, and that I am entitled to my view. TMTB is not a public institution governed by the same motivations and restraints as local government, so entering into any partnership deals with them should be done very warily. I also say that claiming they represent the best interests of all Maori in the district is spurious at best.

Apart from that, I asked for any success story examples from the JMA’s which Council are already involved in (and there are a few since 2009 which you can read about HERE). Because it just stands to reason doesn’t it, that if we are now talking about another JMA with an expanded scope over and above just the obligatory, that we should be looking for evidence of the benefits? And it is all about looking after the waters and environment, right? In any case, I was not able to elicit too much of a response on that question.

Why can’t we just sign up to the Mandatory Matters now? I get asked this quite a bit, and I have asked in Chambers too. The answer seems to be that, yes we could have signed up long ago, but TMTB aren’t satisfied with just that. There seems to be an underlying threat that the government could get involved, and either party has a right to complain because we are well behind the original schedule. But somehow I don’t think it would help TMTB’s case when they are the ones wanting all the extras.

Down south there are warnings being floated about by Federated Farmers with respect to various Council agreements with Ngai Tahu, I don’t know about the veracity of these claims, but I don’t think many people here want the same for Taupo. The bottom line for most constituents is what is this JMA really going to cost them?, and recall that last week I forwarded some challenging assertions about just that to our Chief Executive which you can read HERE and HERE. I haven’t received any answers yet except to say that they will be addressed later, but I am now requesting a response well prior to any subsequent workshops.

And what about the Long Term Plan (LTP)? We had another session in the series in Thursday which you can watch HERE and HERE if you have several hours to spare. We talked about such exiting things as Renewals, Depreciation, and Levels of Service, and also delved into some of the issues like transport, cemeteries, emergency management, dog control, policy planning and consents – all for staff to be better able to appreciate the direction that Elected Members want to head. I am once again encouraged by the impetus of a rates cap which is appearing to motivate the prospects of some tangible action, and it just goes to show that we have been way too slack for way too long.

On the subject of Level of Service, I did point out that although these are starting to be quite strictly applied by the government in the waters space, that doesn’t apply to transport. Nobody forced the people of Auckland to build their motorways – they chose to do it. We currently have a $70M line item in the LTP for a second road bridge across the Waikato just north of Taupo Township, but there hasn’t been a single debate in Council Chambers to decide if we really want to do it, or even a full assessment saying that we absolutely need it. I want those things to happen sooner rather than later, and you can read my previous views on that topic HERE.

Apart from that, I made a few observations and comments including: that perhaps it isn’t wise to be programming road maintenance projects that involve large volumes of asphalt during an oil crisis; my request that future kids playgrounds have more emphasis on playability and less on cultural aesthetics; a suggestion to emulate Selwyn District Council for fast growing Rolleston and consider issuing building consents prior to land titles (developers take note, if you want that thing to happen better start petitioning your Elected Members now); and finally my observation that erosion control measures could be more effective and expedient if the lake bed owner would be so good to allow off-shore engineering measures to be constructed.

And there’s really just a few other bits and pieces:

We have it good here: Friday I attended the first workshop at Waikato Regional Council towards a 10-year transport plan for the region, and it was highlighted to me how good we really have it here in Taupo. We are not city Hamilton with all its congestion and public transport demands, and we are not a Thames-Coromandel with scores of single-lane bridges and 10km traffic queues, and coastal roads falling into the sea every time they have a big storm. Taupo has pretty good roads, we don’t have many people, and we are that far inland to not get all the severe weather. But we are still working on those bus timetables including for Turangi, and hope to come to a resolution on that soon.

Run for my money: I must say that Mangakino Councillor Hope Woodward is giving me a run for my money with her expanding community social media updates like the one shown right, and her activism on behalf of her community is also to to be commended. Keep it up Hope!

Jonsie awards 2026: If you haven’t ever watched these then its high time you did. These are the annual Taxpayer Union awards to government and local government wasteful spending. The top awards this year for local government went to Tauranga Mayor Mahe Drysdale for spending $470K on coffee machines and beans – which on the face of it doesn’t so outrageous to people who adore coffee – so couldn’t anybody think up a better nominee on behalf of Taupo? You can watch the entire award ceremony HERE. But the top award of all went to Chris Hipkins leader of the Labour Party, his was a Lifetime Achievement of Waste award for blowing $35B during the Covid pandemic or $17K every NZ household. I got to admit, that is a once in a generation if not the century achievement and will be hard to ever topple – but I do really feel that previous Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern could have taken some of the glory.

Now its legal to drink alcohol at the Hairdressers! I never thought it was illegal anyhow, but now the government has stepped in to fix that dreadful shortcoming as well as a few of the other antiquidated alcohol laws.

Fridays Fabulous Feature: “Perverted by Language” is the album title by Mark E Smith of band The Fall, with the number below “Eat Y’self Fitter“. You mightn’t love the beats, but what an absolute poet!

Fridays Fussed Up Beyond All Recognition

13 March 2025

Question of the day: HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO PREVENT HOW MANY PEOPLE GETTING SICK?

Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth””.

Some people don’t like that phrase about man having dominion over all the living creatures, and I say fair enough – but the only problem is that it happens to be true. Anybody from the past who was transported to the 20th or 21st centuries will be presented with overwhelming evidence to that effect – some positive, but the negative will stand out loud. If there were any doubts in centuries past they should be well assuaged by now, and the enormous powers of mans destruction are all around us without me even having to go into them. So whether you agree or not that man should have dominion, the inescapable fact is that because man has the power to destroy then that makes it so.

We had an Ironman on Saturday, although I figure once you’ve seen one Ironman you’ve seen them all and it was a bit too stinking hot of a day for me to envy anybody running or biking. But it can be a wonderful party day for Taupo town well into the night, and a nice time to walk or meander around on a bicycle on closed roads just like those funky Covid holidays we got back in 2020.

On Monday I attended the Waikato Regional Council building in Hamilton to talk about transport and public transport stuff, and did quite well on your behalf if I may be so humble to say so – I will talk about that more below, and it really has more to do with Turangi than anything else. We had another workshop yesterday for the Long Term Plan (LTP) where we talked about such exciting things as selling off Council assets on your behalf, swimming pools, and housing for the elderly. And we also yesterday had the inaugural meeting of the newly formed Water Services Committee, a not very auspicious start in my opinion but you can read about that below.

And by the way if anybody is interested in tuning into these LTP workshops (as they assert expenditure for the next ten years 2027-37 they are not unimportant), below is the schedule of topics discussed:

Okay let’s start then:

Long Term Plan thingies: We had the third LTP yesterday which you can watch HERE but at over two hours long you will need a bit of spare time. The most exciting thing discussed in terms of potential to smash your rates bill is the rationalisation of Council Strategic Assets which places like New South Wales have successfully actioned in their rates capping regime. Staff financial officer Sarah Matthews went over to New South Wales last year on a self funded trip to suss out how they do things, and tells us that similar sized Councils to us operate with around 90% less debt than here. That is a pretty big number folks, although there are a bunch of other factors than just selling the family silver to make that happen. But it would be a good start for a district like Taupo with oodles of surplus public land in its holdings, and elderly housing got passing mention in that too. Councils are not eligible for the governments elderly housing subsidies (even though they really should be), and even handing them to a private provider would be better that how we run the 57 elderly housing units which are 60% subsided by you. And if you are wondering what public reserves might be surplus and worth selling, try and think of say, a prime lake front location which hardly gets used – I can already think of one, can’t you? Anybody on neighbouring streets needn’t panic quite yet though, because it will take quite a bit of paperwork and public consultation before anything like that can happen. But something has to give if we are going to have any chance of seriously tackling the rates emergency we find ourselves in, so sometimes the few have to lose something for the betterment of all. And as I have been saying for quite some time now, the good thing about rates capping is that it can force some thinking outside of the square to help make ends meet. I do believe that is happening here, so its a well done to the Council staff from me.

Apart from the above we did discuss swimming pools and waste management, with Turangi Cr Greenslade and myself plugging once again for free entry for under 16’s at the Turangi pools, and also a brief discussion about the expensive incineration option which a few people consistently ask about (watch from HERE).

Water Services Committee but what is it really? I have to say after yesterday’s inaugural meeting (which you can watch HERE) under the newly appointed independent chairperson Brian Hannah former Mayor of Waitomo and a few other credentials including farming, I really am wondering. Brian gives a rundown of his background at the very beginning of the meeting, and was selected after a lengthy interview process with many able applicants. But this isn’t the Infrastructure Committee which it was first mooted which could have offered oversight to things not just about water, and our chair doesn’t appear to be much interested in challenging any status quos. We had an online presentation from Tim Cadogan of the governments Water Service Authority Taumata Arowai, after which I raised the question about the Water Drinking Standards being too costly for our own good (watch from HERE). My take is that as your elected officials our role is to both ensure we are getting best value for constituents to keep rates affordable, but also that the Council provided drinking water is safe to drink. That means we don’t go spending money that we don’t really have to, and we certainly shouldn’t be putting stuff in the water that makes people sick. On that last point I raised the question of Fluoride (watch from HERE), because as a few of you may recall I am quite a sceptic of its value and an advocate for its removal. But our chair seems to think that the issue of spiralling infrastructure costs and fluoride are outside the remit of this Water Services Committee, and that water regulations are sacrosanct to be beyond reproach. I heavily disagree with this point of view, and because money doesn’t grow on trees the role of the elected is to oversee that budgets are being spent wisely and to always weigh up the benefits versus costs of any project we do. For drinking water projects, this means the question should always be:

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO PREVENT HOW MANY PEOPLE GETTING SICK?

But that question doesn’t ever seem to get asked, and so we just keep on spending. So I laid out my challenge to the chairperson near the end about the purpose of this committee (watch from HERE), and Brian’s answer seemed to imply that we are here to just oversee more stuff getting built and not be asking too many probing questions. So for me, this Water Service Committee is already looking tiresome, and it is a real crying shame that the governments new rate capping regime won’t be including water services. Because if it did there would need to be a lot more critical and bottom-line thinking, and I cannot help but think of an analogy with the road cone nightmare which we are only now trying to pull back on.

Yes to Public Transport but not like that please: Okay Turangiites, I stuck up for you on Monday to push back on the Waikato Regional Council (WRC) proposed bus timetable changes to be implemented in May of this year – and I won. You can watch HERE and read the agenda item 6.3 HERE. If you weren’t aware, the Connect2Taupo bus services have been running around six years now (still described by WRC as a ‘trial’), and WRC staff came up with some proposed changes to present at the WRC Public Transport Sub-committee to which I am your representative. This is a result of public surveys that include changes to Mangakino, Tokoroa, Acacia Bay, Wairakei and Kinloch, but it was the Turangi changes which although well intentioned stuck out as decidedly dodgy. The 12-seat buses which operate two days a week to and from Turangi can get quite oversubscribed at times, and there is no on-line booking so people have on occasion been stranded.

The WRC idea was to introduce a new 33 seat bus service and for an additional day besides, but the catch was that people coming to Taupo for the day would get a reduced window of just two hours before the next bus home, reduced from the current three hours. So that would mean two hours to do all your stuff like get to the bank, shop, hospital or whatever for an equivalent duration of travel. Turangi Councillor Sandra Greenslade was instrumental in educating me about the implications, and I also took a bus trip to Turangi for the first time to have a try for myself and talk to some real users (by the way it was excellent value at just $7 each way, much better than driving that challenging road and some good conversations too). To cut a long story short, my commentary at the meeting was first about the absence of communication to Taupo District Council or bus users about the proposed changes before they were tabled on Monday for approval, and secondly to try and hash out some kind of solution because we could end up with a 33 seat bus driving around with even less passengers than before. We weren’t able to do that, so the decision (greatly assisted by chairperson WRC Councillor Liz Stolwyk) has been to defer the changes until we work with WRC staff behind the scenes. One of the bottlenecks as always is money, and an opportunity was mentioned for Taupo District Council to inject some more into it to help make things happen (remember that Regional Council rates pay for buses) – and this will need to be discussed very soon. So watch this space, and by all means try a trip on the bus to Turangi because it is great value – but please don’t push the regulars off as there are only limited seats.

Total Mobility is also part of the above committees remit, and is going to be reviewed in coming months including the capped individual trip rates for each region (Taupo’s cap is only $18.75 as opposed to the $75 used in Waikato District, for example).

Other Regional Transport highlights: On Monday I also attended the WRC Regional Transport Committee which meets quarterly, and I did learn a few things that I didn’t know before. If you want to watch all three and a half hours of the meeting you can watch HERE and HERE. This committee is going to soon be workshopping the next ten-year transport plan for the Waikato, so now is the time to get the rest of the region thinking about things like say, an alternative inland route for SH1 between Taupo and Turangi. There was some disgruntled murmurs from Councillor Mike Keir of Waikato District Council about operational inflexibility and the excessive cost of infrastructure (Mike is a civil engineer like me and we hit it off quite well), and also from the Mayor of Thames-Coromandel District Council Peter Revell who expounded that the Bailey Bridges being used in the recent emergency response work going on up there could be multiplied all around the Coromandel as a cheap operational fix to solve so many problems.

My own contribution on this theme was to emphasise that because we are in such a rates constrained environment, our first priority as elected representatives is to keep rates affordable and that means that No.8 wire solutions instead of Rolls Royce need to start happening a lot more. I gave NZTA’s $6M installation of 5km of wire rope barrier on SH1 between Taupo Airport and SH5 as a classic example of wastage given that it only increases the cost of maintenance with virtually no safety benefits (there haven’t been any serious or fatal crashes on that stretch of road since its opening in 2012). I say that we need to get Back to Basics, and that means thinking hard about why we are doing things and not just pick out the cookie cutter solutions to try and fix all.

I also learned that Stratford District Council in 2022 introduced a targeted rate for forestry plantation owners to help pay for damaged roads around the district. I bet that was controversial at the time because truckies can rightly argue that is exactly why they pay Road User Charges (RUC’s) for, but I haven’t heard of this type of rating before so it should be something we can keep up our sleeves for a rainy day.

And on the topic of an inland Taupo-Turangi route, wouldn’t it just be so nice for it to happen one day? For the current lake route to turn into a tourist route only for people with time to kill one rain or sunny day, our very own Route 66 to be driven for pleasures sake and not necessity. Interestingly some representatives from the trucking industry were also presenting at the meeting, and I asked them about the challenges of the existing lakeside road and possibility of a toll road alternative. The response was that it presents no greater hazards than many drivers are used to in other parts of the country (including one-way sections for trucks as at Tauranga-Taupo), and that a toll of $5-8 would be quite acceptable. I believe it is not just a pipe dream, and just like the ETA SH1 Taupo Bypass done in 2012 that perhaps this Council needs to start making its own waves to make it happen. I don’t mean just bleating and pleading to Wellington, I am talking about negotiating with landowners and drafting up some plans and costings. That is apparently how the ETA came about as a proposal the government couldn’t ignore, so if we did it once then we can do it again. Lets get on with it.

And in other news we have:

Hot off the press a NEW National Code of Conduct for Elected Members!!! Yes you read that right, we now have a nationwide Code of Conduct (CoC) that is to be adopted by every Council around the country in the very near future. It’s actually a surprisingly readable document and contains a few provisions that could affect how councillors speak publicly about council decisions. You can read the final version HERE

Last September I made a submission on a number of points including conflicts of interest, confidentiality, Treaty of Waitangi, and the laying of official CoC complaints (the draft version was for opening it up to members of the public – just imagine that!). My concerns were only partially addressed, and we are still left in the situation whereby information can unaccountably be classified as confidential with no measurable threshold, and there is little headway on the methodical and objective identifying and addressing of real and perceived conflicts of interest. Not only that, but staff are now able to lodge CoC complaints about Elected Members where they weren’t before (good luck on that!). I also fed into ChatGPT the new CoC to compare with the old TDC one, and here is what it came up with:

Despite the fanfare, the new Code doesn’t actually give councils much more power over elected members than they already had. The main penalties remain things like requiring an apology, suspending a councillor from committees, or restricting contact with staff. Importantly, a Code of Conduct cannot remove an elected member from office – that decision ultimately rests with voters at election time. What has changed is the process. Complaints will now be screened by an independent assessor and, if necessary, investigated by an independent investigator before the council itself becomes involved. The idea is to filter out trivial, vexatious, or politically motivated complaints before they escalate.

Interestingly, the Code explicitly states that it must not restrict robust political debate or freedom of expression. In other words, councillors are still entitled to publicly disagree with council decisions and with each other – which is an important part of a healthy democracy.There are a few subtleties councillors will need to watch. Investigators can consider patterns of behaviour over time, not just single incidents, and the Code warns against misrepresenting the statements or actions of others. That means anyone speaking publicly about council matters needs to ensure their commentary is grounded in verifiable facts.

Overall, the new national Code seems less about increasing punishments and more about standardising procedures across the country. As always, its real impact will depend on how it is applied in practice.

So for my part as Councillor Duncan, I will continue to advocate for transparency, open debate, and accountability. After all, we are elected to represent the public – not to sit petrified in the corner when difficult issues arise.

Mango makes the headlines: Mangakino Councillor Hope Woodward is keeping up the pressure to clean up the Waikato River lakes in her neck of the woods, and made page one of this weeks edition of the Waikato Times with an article you can read HERE

There may be hope after all: Because our Foreign Minister Winston Peters is getting friendly with the world shaking President of Argentina Javier Milei.

Why can’t we do it like that here? I have noticed that Invercargill and Queenstown have some independent media which are quite interested in what their Councils get up to, to the point that they reported in detail about Elected Member conduct during what looked to be a fairly trivial debate around a historic clock tower. I know we have a couple of independent local outlets like LakeFM, but there just isn’t the same level of interest I see happening in those places. Have a look for yourself at Crux media and Whatsoninvers to see what I mean, and I greatly encourage any would-be journalists to get your act together and make something like that happen here too.

At least we’re not Wellington: This is an interesting read from NZCPR of how Wellington politicians in 2021 chose nice-to-haves over necessaries and prioritised cycleways over water and wastewater infrastructure with now dire effects.

Timber Museum good: Anyone who hasn’t visited the Timber Museum in Puraruru simply should. I did on Tuesday and was blown away by how interesting it all is and what an icon it must be for the district. As a former timber mill the land and buildings were gifted(?) in the early 1970’s and it seems to have become a place to put all the local historic buildings. Its on the way to most places north, so I really do recommend a stop in and it has a good coffee shop too.

Fridays Future Forecast: Another poignant hit from Canadian singer, poet and sage Leonard Cohen, and the Oliver Stone movie Natural Born Killers it was used as a soundtrack is not too shabby either:

Friday Cuts Which Matter

6 March 2026

To live is to grieve, to die is to not. Whoever has never grieved has never lived – they are only dead.

Genesis 1: 1-3: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light”.

Evolutionists who believe the Earth is billions of years old and that we came from monkeys have much greater faith than I, because as an engineer I know that good design doesn’t just happen by accident and no matter how long. Genesis 1 is about the beginning of the world, and I believe it happened that way. According to the chronology of Biblical characters and following its timeline through to Jesus, the world is roughly 5000 years old only. Here we have the world being created in just six days, and there is just one thing about all of this which I still find intriguing: The definition of a day is that it is one revolution of the earth – 24 hours of our time – right? But until the sun was created on the Fourth day, then that means there can’t have been any revolutions, so what exactly did one day represent on Days One to Three? But I am not stuck on it, and it doesn’t matter much to me.

This week in Council we Elected Members started to have a crack at the Long Term Plan (LTP), or rather the staff presented to us a bunch of material to start educating us just what it is all about (remember, some of us are only new to this). If you really want to, you can watch all three and a half hours of the workshop proceedings HERE (yawn).

These 10-year LTP’s are done every three years, in between which we just have the regular Annual Plans (AP’s). The last one was 2024-34, and we are already making a start on the one for 2037-37. It is really quite important actually, because now is the time we set the financial targets which matter for the next three years after. However I have come to realise that in the real world a 10 year plan is fairly spurious to guarantee anything at all really, and anyway we also have elections in between. A brief look below at the three previous LTP forecasts will make that abundantly clear, where you can see that every three years we are promised just a couple of years rates spike before things settle down -but they never actually do.

Perhaps I am just a simpleton, but I believe a good starting point for this process would have been to decide a rates target tagged to the consumer inflation which constituents experience – and just reverse engineer it from there. Just like any responsible householder or private business, and if that is motivation to think smarter and build smaller then that’s just what we need to do. Because the maths isn’t very complicated – people on fixed incomes simply won’t be able to afford to live in their own homes if we don’t act soon. A few of the other Elected Members seem to think this is impossible, but I just see it as a fact of life that we better get used to.

Reasons given by those sceptical that things can be reigned in can pretty much be summed up as: Because the government tells us to. I instead say that we are elected to work for the best interests our constituents, and Wellington is quite a long way away. And by the way, whatever happened to the good old Kiwi No.8 wire mentality to get a job done?

Anyway I did also make a little suggestion with regard to libraries, and that is that I would like to see them open on Sunday’s and one weekday evening just like a lot of other places and where I grew up. Because working people are usually busy Monday through Friday, and Saturdays can get pretty busy too. I think we should be able to manage it without increasing costs if we consider closing a weekday in lieu, and we also have an annual budget of $300K for new library books that may be able to be tapped into. Perhaps I am biased because I love books, but I reckon libraries are one of the few Council run places which give wildly great value for money. And here is something I only found out recently: $300K seems a lot for new books, and somebody has to decide which ones to buy – so why not make a request for a book you want? It may very well end up in the collection for others to enjoy.

Okay so what else?

Joint Management Agreement (JMA) saga continues: This week I had quite a pleasant surprise to be anonymously forwarded by a very smart constituent these two documents HERE and HERE, which make a number of assertions about its true cost to the average person and Council at large. Like say, an additional $3-6K and 3-5 weeks delay for every non-notified consent application, or $45-95K and 5-9 months delay if you want a notified Plan change. The person who put all of this together is no simpleton, and even if some of the figures turn out to be spurious then it is up to Council staff to push back. Next week I am going to ask them to exactly do that.

Conflict of Interest But Only if You Declare It: I have worked out that a loophole in this game of local body politics is that conflicts of interest are left almost at the complete discretion of individual elected members to proclaim. As I see it at present, the only thing that really matters is the court of public opinion, and things greatly need to be tightened up. This topic came up of late with this social media post regarding a speculated conflict of interest involving Taupo Ward Councillor Yvonne Westerman and her associated Bayleys real estate business doing sales for Council properties on Crown Road. The current limit of local financial interest for elected members is a paltry $25K per annum, which is probably just a fraction of the commission on just one of these land sales. I have had ludicrous conflict of interest accusations hurled my way before, but this is not one of those. I am hoping that the current governments attempts to clean up local government will address this large gap, but am not prepared to wager on it.

Turangi bus commuters could lose an hour: Okay recall a few weeks ago that I mentioned about Waikato Regional Council (WRC) having a relook at our public transport? Well it seems they have come up with a cunning plan to make things better for Turangi bus commuters by adding another days scheduled service to the current Mondays and Thursdays – but is it really? Somebody travelling to Taupo for the day currently gets around three hours to do their business before the return trip beckons, but the draft regime now being proposed is reducing this envelope to two hours only. Even with the proposed 33 seat bus for the Turangi service (the current bus seats only 12), a few people I have talked to including Turangi Councillor Sandra Greenslade and a handful of passengers as I took a trip for the first time yesterday (it was much more enjoyable than driving that windy route, and very cheap at just $7) think it could turn out to be quite a white elephant, because fewer people – not more – would probably subscribe to this lesser value service. Anyway I am heading off to Hamilton on Monday to try and talk some sense into them before it happens, and if it does happen is scheduled to happen in May with the draft timetable shown below:

And by the way, it has been inferred that a reason we don’t have an online booking system to guarantee a bus seat (like they do in Taumaranui, and by the way Turangi bound passengers have occasionally been stranded in Taupo before because too few seats) – is because it is felt that some older people in our district can’t handle digital transactions.

Anyway, I think if WRC had a bit more vision for the future, we would be looking at something more like this:

Cash no good and its staying that way: Following last week’s Public Forum presentation by Tristan Baynham regarding his disquiet and cash payments being disallowed at the Taupo Landfill from last August, Elected Members had a round table chat about it on Tuesday. Long story short – there is about a zero chance that decision will be reversed. But interestingly, there were two more reasons mentioned that actually seem to make sense. Balancing the books can apparently be a more than trifling hassle with cash, and there is a big thing around cash handling by staff with the presented temptation for them to make off with it. I am sure that Councillor Christine Rankin knows all about that with her recent Hospice experience which made the news. So for a few reasons there seems to be a strong case against the use of cash, and a few of them probably haven’t been mentioned up until now for sensitivity reasons. But I am not so sensitive to withhold it from you.

Sophie’s at it again: Local investigator/reporter Sophie M Smith put out a very interesting piece just yesterday, well I am very interested anyway. It is entitled “Part 1 – The Council Building Question: Starting at the Beginning“. Hooray, because I have been reckoning for ages that this would be a great subject to tackle for Elected Members to actually learn something from past mistakes instead of being continually placated and moving on to the next thing. You can read Sophies Facebook post HERE, and her main article HERE. Part 1 is just the introduction and I very much look forward to reading more. Good on ya Sophie, this has to be one of the biggest blunders this Council made the past few decades and it needs a light shone on it to ensure mistakes like it don’t happen again.

Get stuffed Wellington: Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown says no to Minister for Housing Chris Bishops information request. Its a fairly bland article, but I think the most interesting part of this story is that the Deputy Mayor is publicly disagreeing with Wayne and that Chris Bishop is not insisting on getting his piece of meat. Taupo is not as big and brutish as Auckland, but we should start sticking up for ourselves more to not get pushed around

Fridays why everyone is leaving New Zealand: I think this is a pretty good summary, and the solution seems pretty obvious to me:

Fridays Thereabout

27 February 2026

In Thessalonians 5:16 Apostle Paul says:

“Rejoice always, without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you”.

Joy in all circumstances, yes it really says that – and that means both in times of pleasure and play, but also death and desertion. How can such a thing be possible? You need to know that its greatly about gratitude – for what you have and the people around you, even when they seem pretty miserable.

I was next going to try and say that some of the happiest people live in the materially poorest places on earth, but the below Gallop poll map seems to undermine that argument somewhat. It turns out that material prosperity does make a difference after all.

Perhaps I haven’t expressed it much before, but I do recognise the privilege being a Councillor for Taupo District Council. How on earth I managed to get elected being quite an outsider with relatively few connections in this provincial town still gets me (we migrated here from West Auckland in 2016).

BUT, and it is a big BUT – what is the point of having elections if staff effectively run the place anyway? Which would be fine if staff were perfect and always make the right decisions – BUT we all know that they don’t. Our new Mayor Funnell got elected on a platform of change, BUT I haven’t seen too much of that happening yet. Transparency and accountability are nice bywords, BUT to mean something they need to be followed up by actions. There is at least some of that starting to happen for the Waikato Rivers Joint Management Agreement (JMA), but in some other areas like freedom of expression for Elected members we seem to be going backwards.

The below illustration based on Lord of The Rings was forwarded to me by a constituent that seems to illustrate the situation. Anybody have a wizards staff handy?

This week we did have some Council happenings, notably a lengthy full Council meeting on Tuesday where a few items of interest popped up and which you can watch Part one HEREand Part two HERE, with minutes and agendas available HERE. Like a broken record I took opportunity to again challenge the Mayor about political messaging in Council agendas (watch HERE) and also the absence of free expression for Elected Members (watch HERE and HERE). I am advocating to re-introduce the slot for general items which was deleted two years ago by the previous and nefarious Mayor David Trewavas to shut down opportunities for dissent, and to which I have previously written to Mayor John about on 2 February.

On that last note I have at times been accused of grandstanding for the purpose of self-elevation, which I find a ridiculous claim. Council Chambers is supposed to be a place where Elected Members can express alternative views in a public setting – because what on earth is the point of having elections if members of the public get a greater say like they do now? I should be allowed to talk about the state of the Nation for a few minutes if I want to, or even the state of Council catered lunches. You elected us as politicians, and there are times we need to be able to say political things.

However, on the matter of political messaging I can announce a small win. My concern was about the agenda messaging inaccurately reflecting statutory obligations with regard to Maori Engagement. The Mayor gratefully undertook a review, and the wording will now be amended to more closely align with legislation and clarify Council’s position. I appreciate that response, and respect that governance is often about incremental improvement rather than dramatic gestures.

The current wording (introduced in 2021 as far as I can tell):

“Taupō District Council is committed to meeting its statutory Tiriti o Waitangi obligations and acknowledges partnership as the basis of Te Tiriti. This requires both parties to treat and work with each other in good faith and show good will to reflect the partnership relationship. We acknowledge these responsibilities are distinct from the Crown’s Treaty obligations and lie within a Taupō District Council context”.

The proposed revised wording, not exactly what I was asking for but an improvement nonetheless, to clarify about partnership and that Council is not a Treaty partner:

“Taupō District Council is committed to meeting its statutory obligations including in relation to Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi principles, consideration of Māori interests and meaningful engagement with Māori. In meeting its statutory obligations, Council is committed to acting reasonably and in good faith and consistently with a partnership-based approach. Te Tiriti/Treaty principles include but are not limited to active protection of Māori interests, informed decision-making and enabling effective Māori participation in Council processes”.

Okay what about some other stuff?

JMA saga continues: In the second of the Waikato River Joint Management Agreement (JMA) workshops of a number to come, on Tuesday we had one titled: “Outline of Mandatory Matters” (you can watch it HERE), which went smoothly enough except for some minor disquiet caused by a few comments of my own that I will restate below. However, we did at least get presented with this helpful map to demonstrate the area this JMA is obliged to cover (noting that it doesn’t include Lake Taupo):

My first point was that we needn’t be here at all and could probably have been sorted out well over 12 months ago, if elected members from the last term had simply just decided to keep things simple and stick to the mandatory requirements. Instead there was a vote by slim majority in September 2024 to include the bone of contention extras, with Cr Kevin Taylor & Cr Yvonne Westerman being the two still present who voted for the extras but declined my request for a public explanation.

I also said that corporate Tuwharetoa Maori Trust Board (TMTB) is an entity that Council should only be warily entering into any significant partnership deal beyond that which is absolutely necessary. At least Councils have the Local Government Act which forces a minimum level of transparency and accountability, but these trust boards do not have the same guard rails to ensure they will act in the best interests of our district or even its own members. And if we are looking at examples of good governance, I don’t think the management of Five Mile Bay Recreational Reserve which has now been under occupation for over 5 years is a very shining example of why we should be entangling with outside entities like this any more than strictly necessary.

In a wider context and after my experience of the past three years, I say that a tragedy of the current Council process is that workshops like these are staff presentations only and with usually quite limited opportunity for questions. Once it comes to a full Council meeting for the decision making to actually happen, any serious debate is often quenched on the basis that it has already been worked through. I do hope that Mayor John Funnell will not let that happen this time round, and that he will push for background submitted questions by both Elected Members and the public to be properly responded to – which often enough in the past has not always happened.

Community engagement, or just stage management? On Tuesday we also had an item which has caused something of a furore in the Turangi and Mangakino sides of town (what is it about these small close-knit communities?) which managed to retain their current committee structures instead of the promoted less formal format – many people out that way are even asking: what was the problem in the first place? I personally won’t miss the stuffiness of the former Kinloch committee which saw boatloads of staff hauling out there for an afternoon every two months or so (they will soon be getting a less formal format), but Taupo Ward will be getting some new meet-up sessions which they haven’t had before or seemed to even want (what is it with these larger more disconnected communities?).

However in my mind at least, this whole exercise has been something of a red herring. Because the issue isn’t so much about public engagement – although that is still important – it is whether or not Council chooses to listen to what the public have to say and bend their will to it. I think there have been plenty of major decisions in the past where the public have been excluded (including the Taupo Town Transformation Project), but also where the public have been included but patently ignored. The Pukenamu Roundabout Project I hold up as a classic example of that, where the community engagement was actually very good and even perhaps a little over the top. But the almost universal request of Pukenamu Road residents to remain unconnected to the proposed new roundabout was rejected, seemingly on the very dubious basis that Council is not acting illegally. Why don’t we let the lawyers run Council and see how that ends up, eh? Anyway, there is still time to change our minds about that particular decision because it hasn’t been built yet.

Reporting back or not at all? At the end of Tuesdays meeting (watch HERE) I raised the issue of Elected Members attending outside conferences or events but not being formally required to report back. In my experience in the private sector this is virtually unheard of, and one outfit I worked it was mandatory to be presenting one of the conference papers to even be allowed to attend. Last term I put a Notice of Motion for mandatory 250 word summaries (preferably also for public consumption), not only for information dissemination but also to justify the attendance and expense. Unfortunately there was not any more appetite for such transparency and accountability this time round either.

Waikato Waters continue to suffer: Councillor Hope Woodward is still banging on about the dire water quality of Waikato headwater lakes including Lakes Whakemaru and Maraetai, and she was motivated enough to recently undertake her own public survey and submit it to all sorts of agencies like Waikato Regional Council, Mercury Power Company and a host of others. You can read the survey results here, and it seems a lot of people are not very happy at all. The contents of Cr Woodwards letter is shown below:

Kia Ora Koutou, please find attached a report done in relation to a survey I initiated throughout relevant communities regarding the water quality in the upper Waikato region. I initiated this survey independently following advice from WRC that formal engagement would need to wait until the next fiscal year, funding dependent. The strength and consistency of the responses indicated that this issue warrants immediate action. This report is not intended to assign blame. It reflects community sentiment and lived experience. However, the scale of the responses makes it clear that residents and public expect coordinated leadership, transparent monitoring, and tangible action. I ask that this report is taken seriously and that agencies consider how proactive collaboration, communication and accountability can be strengthened going forward. Our lakes are central to the wellbeing and viability of our communities, particularly here in Mangakino and Whakamaru. Please confirm acknowledgement of this email and report. I look forward to further clarity regarding how this matter will be progressed. Ngā Mihi, Kaunihera/Councillor Hope Woodward Mangakino-Pouakani Ward

Maori Purpose Zones: Council is consulting on a couple of planning changes including this one which I did a brief item in August last year that you can read HERE which includes a link to the recorded staff presentation on the topic. The intention of these is to make it easier for communally owned Maori land to get developed, which is not a bad thing at all. The caption at right just reflect my thoughts at the time because I felt it was being foisted upon Elected Members without debate.

Anybody like Don Brash? Former leader of the National Party and a few years later, I think a reread of his at the time controversial Orewa speech of 2004 is a worthwhile exercise to see how very right he was on quite a few points. Hindsight can be a wonderful thing, but I wish more Kiwi’s were able to comprehend in real time.

Loyal but only to a point: On Sunday evening I attended a Loyal Party small gathering at Ploughman’s restaurant and met the forthright leader Kevin Alp along with his deputy John Alcock. I really like their idea of a universal 1% transaction tax and the abolition of all the other taxes (apparently the maths stacks up for it to work), but I am quite sceptical that enough New Zealander’s are so open-minded to put their vote Loyal’s way. I reckon it would just about take something like the French Revolution for that to happen very soon, and with the average Kiwi’s approach to life being roughly akin to our namesake bird – we will probably all go the way of the Dodo bird before that ever happens.

It can’t happen like that here: Napier Deputy Mayor gets the sack, but interestingly the Standing Orders at Taupo District Council are such that our Mayor is not able to unilaterally do that without majority support of the other elected members (snippet below). It needs majority support to get our own Deputy Mayor demoted and whether or not the Mayor agrees, and I don’t feel that enough of us are up for that quite yet.

Chaos reigns in South Waikato: Mayor Gary Petley of South Waikato District Council called time out on a full Council meeting yesterday because he didn’t want 73 yr old member of the public Bruce Simpson to video record the proceedings from the public gallery. Bruce runs his own youtube channel, and is insisting upon making his own recording because of confirmed incidents where segments of the Councils own recordings have been purposely deleted in the past (you can watch his 12 min explanation HERE). So the entire meeting was postponed for another time and with a full gallery of public present keen to listen in too. Ugh, what a drop-kick of a Mayor they have in South Waikato and no wonder there were catcalls of ‘chicken‘. Some politicians are such feeble people, why on earth do people vote for them?

Good on ya Bruce, and thank goodness Taupo District Council isn’t as seedy and untransparent as them. And by the way, there is nothing to stop members of the public making their own recordings in a TDC Council meeting – although technically you are supposed to first ask, and below is the relevant clause from our Standing Orders (I can only imagine that the circumstances to justify a directive to stop recording should be extraordinary – yet another unfortunate loophole that could potentially be pounced upon):

Cash may be king but not at Taupo Landfill: In Public Form on Tuesday constituent Tristan Baynham spoke out against the staff induced change of policy last year to mean that cash is no longer accepted at the Taupo Landfill for apparent Health and Safety reasons (watch HERE). Tristan put forth that this is a great inconvenience for some people and asked a fairly basic question that received no good answer – what was the problem in the first place? I am not sure if there will be serious consideration to reverting back, but I stuck my oar in for it.

Track made easier: To those lovers of nature like me and who also like a bit of a challenge, walking/climbing up Mt Tauhara just got a little easier. Somebody has dug deep, and constructed a new easy grade track for the first (and steepest) section to encourage those less inclined to mountain climbing and more just into the walking. So whoever you are, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude because now we will get even more people up this wonderful place for solitude, reflection, and strengthening of the body.

Fridays out there: I struggled to think up something to poignantly end this week, so how about this quality investigative piece on education in the modern age:

Fridays Fuming Foibles

20 February 2026

Ecclesiastes – a book of the Old Testament of the Bible still as relevant today as the rest, and one of my favourite books in the Bible. I highly recommend it as a good read for anybody trying to tackle this world on its own terms. Widely attributed authorship by King Solomon who was blessed with a Wisdom beyond any human comparison before or since, although even he was not infallible enough to avoid having several hundred wives (how wise is that?). But if you want to read about the difference between foolishness and wisdom and why it matters, this is the book for you. It is one of the only books in the Bible where God gets scant mention – and with good reason I think – and reason abounds in these writings of Ecclesiastes.

Which brings me to my main topic of today – doesn’t it stand to reason that one of the coldest regions in the country as we are here, should be making better use of the abundant heat beneath our very feet? Your elected members were yesterday hosted by local economic agency Amplify for a day tour of some geothermal sites around Taupo including GNS Science laboratories in Wairakei, Contact Energy’s Tauhara Geothermal Power Station, and in Rotokawa the Natures Flame wood pellet production facility and Te Ahi Eco Business Park commercial development. It was all quite impressive, though I must say the industrial atmosphere is one thing I never wanted to experience full time which is why I chose civil engineering as a trade rather than something which could end me up in places like these – and I was right. But if you want to live in a provincial place like Taupo and put into practice some very high qualifications like PhDs (and there are quite a few of them in this industry), this surely is the golden opportunity for this region at least. At the moment, the geothermal industry apparently employs around 1000 people in the Taupo district, second only to the dairy industry.

Contact Energy produces around 20% of the nations electricity, and over 90% of it is classed as ‘renewable’ with a significant portion contributed by geothermal, and in the Taupo region it operates some of the most productive wells in the world (note: figures I am quoting are anecdotal only but roughly accurate), and if you believe the spiel from the scientists – we are leading edge stuff here in little old Taupo and sitting on a goldmine of opportunity. But therein lies the catch – opportunity. Although the main thrust of geothermal exploration and activities go towards electricity production (and it still isn’t as cheap as coal, even with all the carbon subsidies and penalties), virtually untapped is the direct use of geothermal heated water for industrial and home heating. Sure we have AC Baths and a scattering of other individuals doing this, but nothing like Iceland and Northern Europe who do this on a grand scale. You see, at the moment in New Zealand geothermal is really all about tapping into the hot water under the ground (sometimes a few km’s deep) and piping it up to the surface to generate electricity with steam turbines to then re-inject it back a km or so distant (those are all the silver pipes you see around the place, and at around $10M per km they don’t come cheap). But it is fairly obvious to me anyway, that if a significant portion of that electricity is only to go towards heating of household airpumps as it must do in the chilly North Island Central Plateau during winter, then this must be very wasteful. And some of the GNS scientists agree.

So what then is the holdup? Apparently and not unsurprisingly, and the scientists and practitioners all fairly agree – it is a combination of bureaucracy and widespread ignorance. That is not to say direct geothermal heating is not going on – because that is exactly what the fairly unique He Ahi development in Rotokawa is basing itself on, and in conjunction with Contact Energy have a setup allowing convenient direct connections to tenants wanting this facility. But things like that are all too rare in a place with such abundant heat beneath our feet -and I have yet to figure out if the bureaucrats are mostly in Wellington – but certainly more can be done, and Taupo District Council could be leading the way on this if it so chooses. Because apart from a few spots up in Northland and down south, we are sitting in the epicentre of this countries geothermal activity and therefore opportunity. The question is – are we in the Taupo region going to take advantage or it? Shane Jones Minister of Resources wants to double geothermal energy production by 2040 – which is fine – but he is probably only thinking in terms of electricity generation. We can do more than just that.

As an aside, I do think if this country had simply invested in nuclear energy a long time ago then we wouldn’t be in the pickle we are now (if only former prime minister Robert Muldoon could have Thinked Bigger). As a clean green option it just can’t be beat, and if just a portion of the $70B this country spent on the Covid response had been put towards a few nuclear reactors (they come at around $10 – 20 B each) we would be sitting very pretty indeed. And the last governments ban on oil and gas exploration has crippled us for a very long time. But at least we are being pushed towards exploring other avenues, and becoming a world leader in geothermal electricity production can’t be an entirely bad thing.

Okay so what about other stuff?

JMA saga continues: In the next exciting chapter of this political hot potatoe that scurried our last Mayor to the dustbin of history, we will just have to see how it fares this time round. This Tuesday 24 February 11am we have the second public-invited workshop on the Joint Management Agreement (JMA) which tackles the question of: What exactly are the mandatory matters? A very basic question, and one that has been so shrouded in a fog of misinformation which I say Taupo District Council has done much to contribute. For one thing, how did Lake Taupo slip into a ‘Waikato Waters’ JMA? For a clearer picture of what areas of waterways are included, I suggest reference to the map below (and referenced here) which was provided not by Council, but a member of the public.

And how about the idea of doing a deal with Tuwharetoa Maori Trust Board (TMTB) anyway? They haven’t exactly demonstrated responsible guardianship of Five Mile Bay Public Reserves, and I am far from convinced that their governance is anything like as accountable to its members as even this Council which at least has the Local Government Act to force some level of transparency (I have previously written a small piece on TMTB here).

The Chief Executive has also promised in advance of this workshop a point-by-point response from (I say biased) Council engaged Treaty lawyer Paul Beverley to these assertions about mandatory matters which were forwarded by the Taupo Ratepayer Group (TRG) before Christmas. It contains 20 assertions which seem to make good sense to me, and it is fairly crucial that we properly set our starting point here and now. Apart from that, how much is all of this going to cost the ratepayer?

As an aside, here is a snippet from my JMA for Dummies article of July 2025 that gives a clue as to why we ended up in the totally preventable place we are now:

To put it plainly: This JMA agreement could have been signed, sealed and delivered back in July of 2025 perhaps even earlier, if only your elected members of the time had decided to keep things simple instead of including all the optional extras to only end up compromising the whole thing. Your current sitting Councillors Kevin Taylor and Yvonne Westerman were among those who voted for the extra items to be included, so part of the blame must squarely sit with them.

On that note: Legal Council Franks Ogilvie have been offering free 30 minute consultations to elected members around the country, these are the guys which provided advice to Kaipara District Council (KDC) regarding Local Government Obligations to Māori (which are quite lesser than widely proclaimed). Of course they are only seeking to expand their business, but one of these days I may be giving them a call. Franks Ogilvie lawyer Stephen Franks gives his brief take on Council Treaty obligations in this Platform interview here.

And further on that note: I sent this letter to Mayor Funnell today to formally request that the Council templates be changed to contain neutral and statutory obligations only, and not political statements like below:

I’m not challenging Treaty obligations, I’m challenging the inclusion of a contested political interpretation as neutral agenda framing. This is about template neutrality and statutory accuracy, not ideology. If we had been including ACT Party slogans, I think this would have been picked up long before now. So let’s see what happens.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take your job: I have been using Chatgpt for nearly a year and now find it an almost essential tool for all sorts of things, with a notable exception (thus far) being in my own profession. I quite quickly did recognise its limitations though, especially for the written word. It is great for dealing with bureaucratese and legalese, but quite hopeless for stuff you want to make a personal impact and I never use it to write these Friday updates. But AI is certainly making an impact to some industries and career paths as this article well illustrates. If you are already enrolled in a course for graphic design for example, it may be worth switching now.

Those damned electric wheeled thingies: Did you know that a lot of those electric thingies zipping around on our roads and footpaths are actually illegal? Yes, really. In New Zealand, if an electric scooter is <300W power output then it gets classed just like a bicycle and doesn’t need to be registered as a motor vehicle, but unlike a bicycle is permitted to ride on a footpath. The laws in New Zealand around this topic are currently pretty convoluted and were not drafted with electric personal mobility in mind at all, but I can tell you that there are a lot of >300W electric mobility devices which are not registered as motor vehicles as they are supposed to be, and riding on footpaths too. Some other countries like the United Kingdom are cracking down on them a lot more (including confiscation and disposal like here) and Singapore where jail time is on offer for those who ride E-scooters on the footpath. But as a transport professional I like the idea of E-mobility, and am glad we live in a more liberal place than those.

While we are on about Transport…Recall that last week I mentioned about a submission to Waikato Regional Council regarding Public Transport and Total Mobility? Well read here for my submission sent on behalf of Taupo District Council in advance of the next meeting of the Waikato Regional Council Public Transport sub-committee on 9 March. Some of the things being requested would cost money to implement, so that means ratepayers would have to foot the bill. By how much is really the question, and on 9 March I hope to be making some headway to getting some answers.

Elections area coming sooner than you think: These guys are in town Sunday evening if anybody wants to catch up. I have once met John Alcock the Deputy leader of Loyal party and he is an interesting character who also ran for the Auckland mayoralty. If you want to talk alternative ideas like say, no income tax or GST, then I might see you at Ploughmans restaurant this Sunday 22nd Feb 5pm.

Northland takes dog control seriously: Sometimes it takes a fatality to bring about change, and that seems to be no exception up in Northland of late. I have heard anecdotal stories around here of dog misdemeanors going unpunished, more so in the likes of Turangi. But nothing like I experienced on a recent trip up Whakatane way where a bunch of angry dogs chased our car for several hundred metres down the street – we were really off the beaten path.

Turns out the covid vaccines probably weren’t a good idea: as this article by Dr Raphael Lataster in Daily Sceptic outlines. I didn’t do it myself, but know of a few people close to me no longer with us whom I attribute this to their early departure. I just hope they made it to a better place.

What about that tree in Turangi: Just beautiful ain’t it?

Fridays Free Advice for the Filthy: This is something an engineer colleague and myself wrote up a couple of years ago. I think it helps to have a cynical nature to be an engineer, don’t you?

Fridays Black Who’s for the Sack?

13 February 2026

Pride – the worst and the essence of all sins. It is also the hardest of all sins to detect in oneself, and I count myself as no exception. As Proverbs 16:18 puts it: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (New King James Version). I think it is more than just a strange coincidence that a movement is so bold to label themselves after it, but perhaps they are only being the most transparent. This country called New Zealand is rife with it, and it will be our downfall – correction – it is our downfall.

But there is also a thing called dignity, and this week in Chambers I think it was demonstrated there is not enough of that going round. Recall last week that I was refused a Public Forum showing on the topic of financial delegations? (for the record, here is my complaint to the Ombudsman about that episode) Getting Elected Members to take more direct responsibility for major decisions is something I reckon could shave $M each year, and I know the Mayor and many of the other elected members do want to hear about it – but virtually none of them wish for my 10 min presentation to be audio-video recorded and on public record. The given reasons: it would set a new precedent for an Elected Member to be given such a platform, and could be seen as official endorsement of viewpoints which are mine alone. Another reason not mentioned but I strongly suspect: a few of the old-hand Elected Members don’t wish for it to be highlighted that in November 2021 they recklessly handed over all fiscal responsibility to the Chief Executive when they really shouldn’t have.

I am refusing to bow down to such intransigence and hypocrisy, because I believe that transparency is not just a word and it actually does mean something. So I will instead be putting together a video release for public consumption which the other Elected Members can view just like anybody else. It is a shame that their responses will not be collected for public record, but that is on them. If nothing at all else, this little episode should highlight to you all just who actually runs the shop of Council, and even though they could be it certainly ain’t this current batch of Elected Members. And for goodness sakes, why on earth do the opinions of Council staff get held up as so much more authoritive and objective than anybody else?

But honestly in the bigger picture and for all the ill feeling this has caused between myself and the Mayor who can by executive decree make it happen, wouldn’t it have been so much easier to just give me my damned five minutes last week?

One other cause of angst between myself and most of the other Elected Members: my once again refusal to adhere with proposed one-hour code of silence sessions on our regular Tuesday catchups. This has come up before and I thought we had dealt with it, but the Mayor once again went around the room to get virtually everybody else’s support in order to pressure me into acceding. I tell you people, this role has hardened me and I am no longer the nice guy I once was. Three years ago I probably would have folded, or if I didn’t would have been sweating it big time. This time round though, its like water off a ducks back for me and I know they can’t do a damned thing about it. I will not put up with any more small town small-mindedness, because Taupo is too pretty for that.

As a sidenote to the above unsavoury conversation and at my prompting for past examples of confidential information being unduly shared, Deputy Mayor Kevin Taylor recycled up an incident from 2023 where I apparently did breach the Code of Conduct. Some of you may recall the John Hall building consent fraud case which I won’t bother you with all the details, but will show my quite firm rebuttal at the time:

29 June 2023

Dear Mayor, CEO et al,

As elected Councillor I reject the allegation of breach of code of conduct with respect to sharing of confidential information as stated at a closed councillor meeting on the morning of 27 June 2023, on the following grounds:

As an elected official I have a fiduciary duty to the people of Taupo District, and by that I have an obligation to seek independent sources of information, and not just from the CEO and council staff.
I am a Chartered Engineer and did seek advice from both Engineering NZ and fellow Chartered Engineer Mr John Scarry. The intentions of my questions were mainly around potential council liability with regard to the situation of Producer Statement fraud, but also to get a better understanding of the Producer Statement process. I did not divulge the name of any individuals involved or any financial or commercial sensitivities, and to the best of my knowledge there is no possibility of any personal gain to myself from these enquiries. Izaac Sugrue of Engineering NZ informed me that they were already well aware of the issue through previous discussions with Taupo District Council.
Mr Scarry is a structural engineer with extensive experience in the industry who has informed me that he has no prior knowledge of this fraud case in the Central North Island. What we talked about was strictly within the bounds of one professional engineer seeking advice, in confidence, from another professional engineering colleague, regarding engineering matters of very great importance to the public. I believe it would actually have been unethical for myself as a professional engineer, not to have sought such a discussion. Mr Scarry gave me helpful background information on the various types of Producer Statements and their standing in relation to the Building Act, Building Code and the building consent process, and from this I was indirectly able to gain some impressions of potential council liability and responsibilities.
The identity of the accused fraudster appears to be quite well known amongst the building industry in Taupo, and indeed in the past five or six weeks I have heard the case mentioned by several people in passing well before we had our meeting in confidence about it last week. It would be a strange situation indeed if elected representatives are unable to exercise due diligence when any other member of the public is able to, and especially at this point in time with an apparently similar availability of local information.

I therefore would appreciate a redaction of the alleged breach of code of conduct please.

Thankyou,

Duncan Campbell ME (Hns) CPEng IntPE(NZ)

To the above I never did receive any reply, except that the Chief Executive subsequently contracted an expensive lawyer from Hamilton for an hour or so training session to help me understand that ‘this is not how we do things around here’, and from then on because I was still unrepentant did sense a labelling as somebody who cannot really be trusted. As to my original concerns about the above building consent fraud case, I never did get satisfactory answers to affirm that Council staff had not been sloppy in their vetting of consent applications or even that the process has since been improved – this is also on my list of things to bring up in the nearish future.

Alright enough of all my people problem bleating – and politics is all about people problems – what about some of the other stuff going on?

We have all f….ed up: Mangakino ward Councilor Hope Woodward gets herself in the mainstream news with a tirade about the condition of her part of the Waikato River and wants something done before “it turns into something from the third world”. Waikato Regional Council get most of the blast but Taupo District Council does not get completely unscathed, and Mercury’s use of the chemical diquot to kill hornwort further upstream is said to be adding to the problem. It has apparently gotten so bad that some residents are selling up and summertime visitors are deciding to holiday elsewhere. However, I do think it is ironic that a labelled baddy the chief operating officer of Mercury goes by the same namesake as our esteemed Deputy Mayor Kevin Taylor. So watch this space.

Cemetery update – Some of you may recall that from a Facebook post by a member of the public before Christmas I said that I would look into this Council’s policy around cemetery decorations. Well from brief tours of Taupo & Turangi cemeteries I have identified that there certainly are some questions with respect to even-handedness. So I still have unanswered questions about how the policy on lawn cemeteries is put into practice, and also how a change in policy was slipped past us in Chambers when it was revised just a couple of years ago – and I do say that with a degree of conviction because although I don’t always pay attention to every detail, I am fairly sure that if that change had been pointed out I would have had something to say. Anyway, I have been told that we are going to be looking at Cemetery Management Plans in the next 12 months and that will be an opportunity to revisit. The issue is really all about cost-effective grounds maintenance, but I think there should be opportunity for people who want to decorate atop the grave in designated areas if they wish to pay a little more. Pasifika people in particular know how to turn a place of the dead into a place of joy, and if Auckland allows for it then why can’t we?

Growth assumptions or stabbing in the dark? Yesterday we had a workshop where Council number crunchers shared their predictions of population increase for the district, along with the currently designated and anticipated areas where residential housing will happen. You can watch the one hour presentation here. I am not 100% convinced that these people have got it all right, but we have to start somewhere otherwise bad things can happen. We need to plan for future water and wastewater infrastructure, and absence of that will throttle development. Likewise, if we overestimate growth and build bigger infrastructure than actually needed it could bankrupt the district if the expected increase in residential rates intake doesn’t eventuate. I have heard anecdotal stories of just that happening to a smaller Council in 2006 which so overstretched themselves they were forced to amalgamate with a bigger entity just to stay afloat – so these things do matter. Of note it was also pointed out the rapid increase in Kinloch residential housing in the past 10 years compared to other areas, but I am already hearing some rumblings from the Kinloch quarter that Council is getting it completely wrong by saying it will flatten. Says one member of the public observer of this workshop:

“In that entire room, there seems to be a lack of understanding of where growth comes from. Its like they think it ‘just happens’ all by itself. Because of this lack of understanding there is a feeble effort to promote and attract growth. Growth is nearly always created by the private sector. I realise this is political, because a lot of people don’t want growth, they want it to stay the nice little Taupo that ( in their minds) it used to be. But they do want better shops, better hospitals, better schools, and more jobs that any growth brings”.

Just tell us how much: We also had a staff presented workshop on Tuesday where Elected Members were asked the burning question: How much do we want rates to increase for their Long Term Plan (LTP) calculations? The next LTP is due out in about 17 months time, and given the government intentions of rates capping to inflation to kick in 2029 they were seeking some direction. I can tell you that no such firm direction was given, and I see scant chance that your 2026/27 rates bill will be anything less than the 6.7% increase already set out in the 2024/34 LTP. My own commentary included that rate capping to inflation is not to be relied upon as a government imposition because future governments could scrap it altogether, and I would much prefer that rates-capping to inflation become not only a voter expectation but an outright demand. You can watch the one hour workshop here. I also foresee that a new rate capping regime will force the hand of not only Councils but organisations like Ironman NZ and Supercars to seek alternative funding than just the hapless ratepayer, and which seems to become a competition amongst Councils – and that won’t be such a bad thing at all.

Zoran the Zorro of Selwyn: On that note, I think this submission by Zoran Rakovic during the Public Forum of a Selwyn District Council meeting in December is well worth a listen. Zoran didn’t manage to get elected himself, but he is very engaged with the way his Council operates and even went so far to prepare a Notice of Motion for Councillors to use if they so wish, in order to demonstrate their public commitment to keeping rate rises at bay. I reckon that such a Motion would go a long way to letting Council staff know just what is expected of them, something currently missing at Taupo District Council. I wonder if they would have let Zoran speak so openly and in a Public Forum if he were a Councillor?

Shopping elsewhere next time please: Here is a copy of my complaint to the Minister of Local Government about our contracted electoral provider Electionz.com, who I felt was unnecessarily intransigent in their response to my questions about the data collected. I was only doing my due diligence to try and affirm that no election fraud might have been happening in this district similar to what happened in Manukau, and their employee Warwick Lampp steadfastly refused to respond. I also tried to find out how much we paid for their services, but that request was turned down by Council staff on the grounds of commercial sensitivity. Wow, whatever we did pay I say it was an absolute ripoff.

Buses and disabled take note: As your representative member of the Waikato Regional Transport Committee, I have until 20 February to make a submission around what we would like Public Transport and Total Mobility to look like in the future for our region. So I am coming to you for ideas. Public transport is handled by Waikato Regional Council (i.e. NOT Taupo District Council) and a portion of your Regional rates gets put toward this. By Total Mobility we are talking about: “Assisting eligible people with long-term impairments to access appropriate transport to meet their daily needs and enhance their community participation. This assistance is provided in the form of subsidised door to door transport services wherever scheme transport providers operate” (for a fuller description see the NZTA website here). I also posted this request for public feedback on Facebook a few days ago and some of the responses are already quite informative, so feel free to put any comments there.

Zero rates rise for Northland so why can’t we? Northland Regional Council chairman Pita Tipene believes a 0% increase in rates take is achievable for the upcoming financial year, I wonder how they can manage but we can’t?

Lake Okareka locals take gold clams seriously so why can’t we? Isn’t it interesting that some people are taking the gold clam threat a lot more seriously than here in Taupo, like say Lake Okareka locals including Te Arawa Lakes Trust who are imposing all kinds of restrictions like warranted officers and community volunteers manning boat ramps to check those entering have followed the “Clean, Check, Dry” procedures. Food for thought there, and I don’t mean gold clam soup.

Almost free entry for youth: Hastings District Council has just introduced a scheme whereby youth get $1 entry into Hastings District Council-public pools and Hastings Sports Centre has been launched in a bid to encourage young people to be more active. Available to all young people living in Heretaunga Hastings aged 12 to 24, and interesting that with all their challenges from last year’s big storm it is reckoned as affordable. I say if youth don’t keep themselves occupied they can only cause more trouble for the rest of us, so I would like to know why we can’t do such a thing here too.

Like this guys style? This guy Geoff Upson is a sitting member on Rodney Community Board up in Auckland, and he is already casting himself as the Opposition! I have thought of myself the same way for quite some time now, but never thought of actually labeling myself that. Perhaps I need to start talking more straightforwardly like Geoff.

Fridays Freak’in Fantastic: Amazing photo taken up Mount Tauhara on early Christmas morning of 2025, and believe it or not the silhouette in the middle of the rainbow is me. Rain or shine, that wonderful place is always stimulating.

Friday Summers Heating Up

5 December 2025

Councillor Duncan again with my view of things this Friday, and I must say that things are starting to get a little warmer and not just the weather. That old chestnut of controversy called ‘the JMA’ is now rearing its head, and a few other things like the Turangi Wastewater scheme and the Taupo Landfill were also recently discussed in Council Chambers that are stirring up thoughts in my own mind at least, of a few clues for this governments intent to smash up the Regional Councils. Whichever side of the fence you are on, there is no doubt that influences to some major infrastructure decisions are happening which have little to do with environmental science and everything to do with cultural preferences – and they don’t come for free. By the way these sessions were closed to public and not minuted either, so you will just have to get my version.

In the lighter side of things, it can at times feel like I am trying to defy gravity (again) with some of the stuff being presented in Chambers as the new Council takes shape. Like a little thing called ‘confidentiality’ for example, and I find myself explaining that we were not elected to be employees of Taupo District Council Inc, and so that means that floated ideas of weekly code of silence sessions are just not cricket. And the remuneration talks (still ongoing) remind that none of us are here for the money (around $40K for a Taupo District Council Councillor, unless you are the Deputy Mayor or chair one of the more important committees) – not unless you just want to be a tickboxing seat-warmer anyway.

And of course there was the governments announcement that rates caps of 2-4% (excluding water services) will soon be applied with a transition period until 2029 when the full model would be in place. I don’t exactly know what they were thinking to leave out the water services aspect, because although many Councils are behind their game and could do with catching up, places like Auckland can legitimately claim the same for transport (and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is already squealing).

Anyway, lets get down to it:

Joint Management Agreement (JMA) number is coming up: Some of you may have heard by now that Council is having an open to the public workshop on 18 December in Council Chambers (open for the public to watch but not participate). This is the first in a series of workshops planned, and the idea is to do them in a way that avoids the accusations of back door dealings which happened in July. I don’t know why we aren’t leaving all of this until next year, but this first session is apparently intended as a basic introduction to just what these JMA’s are all about and how they came to be. I have heard some musings that given the current make-up of elected members, the Waikato Rivers JMA could be passed in its current form straight away and that all of this talk (let alone public consultation) is a waste of time. That may possibly be correct, but I think for newly elects to vote for something as substantial as this before being briefed would be highly irresponsible, and would likely tear apart any semblance of a constructive way forward not to mention lose credibility with the public. I did also come across the below mention of it in a recent Hobsons Pledge newsletter, so it seems that the eyes of the rest of the country are also upon us.

$20M better spent elsewhere? On Tuesday elected members had a workshop introduction to the proposed wastewater solution for Turangi, which has been subject to investigations and negotiations for at least 8 years (!). Some info is available on the Council website here, but I must say it hasn’t ever been portrayed as straightforwardly as it could be. The consent has been expired since 2017, and the aim is to get a new one signed off by the Regional Council to carry us through far into the future. But that application process has been put on hold until we can sort out ourselves to decide what we really want to happen, and therein lies the uncertainty.

There are undoubtedly some historical grievances from both the original land acquisition and the resulting outflow directly into Lake Taupo (and realise that without a wastewater plant, we couldn’t have the town of Turangi), but the plant has been developed to such a degree with the latest technology that its output is apparently not far off from being drinkable. With the existing wetlands and its proposed expansion scheduled to happen in a few years time, its environmental effects are arguably quite minimal in real and relative terms. For example, the diagram below demonstrates its Nitrogen effect as relative to other polluters (and Nitrogen is one of the key measures).

But the negotiations of Council staff continue – and there is no scheduled date for them to ever finish – to find a ‘long term’ land disposal option, and to date the only thing that has been holding up that happening seems to be the inability to find a willing landowner and for the right price. Just to be clear, this land disposal option is primarily being sought for cultural reasons, and would cost in the order of $20M for infrastructure alone (plus operating costs which may be in the $00,000’s annually). A glimpse of the amount of work that has gone into this is shown in the diagram below, which illustrates all the different options that have been investigated to date.

Now I don’t wish to offend the locals who have been so impacted by all of this over its history, but now is surely the time to step back and think about what is really trying to be achieved here and that we are all going to end up paying for it. I can think of a lot more productive ways to spend $20M, can’t you?

Taupos rubbish on trial : Yesterday we had a staff presented session on the Taupo landfill, which has also of late been a topic of discussion at a few local marae. The current consent expires in 2027 (when basically the hole will be full), and we need to get Stage 3 ticked off by the Regional Council to carry us through to 2058. As far as I can tell there are few if any environmental reasons the consent couldn’t get rolled over, and there are no disputes about land ownership as with the Turangi Wastewater plant because it was never subject to acquisition under the Public Works Act. But many local hapu are understandably not very happy about having a rubbish tip at the bottom of their precious Mount Tauhara, and that seems to be presenting a bit of a conundrum.

You see things seem to have been left a little too late in the piece to seriously consider other options like a different landfill location (and which is unlikely to be economically viable anyway) or alternative measures like incineration (which is very expensive). Apparently it can take up ten years to get a new site consented and up and running, so if it were truly ever a serious consideration then the ball on that should have got rolling long ago. The simple fact is that if this consent doesn’t get granted by 2027, we will need to start trucking household refuse to a place like Hampton Downs at an estimated additional annual cost of $270 per ratepayer. I don’t know how significantly the Regional Council takes cultural opposition in their consent calculations, but gather it will be diminished with the newly proposed government reforms – so to me, this whole exercise is seeming more about politics than anything else. In the meantime though, we will definitely be spending on a redevelopment of the existing site as shown below which will enable trucks to get their disgorged contents sorted instead of tipping straight into the hole as happens now – and is also a necessary if we need to start trucking it out.

Jonesie Awards coming up: Anybody not familiar with these, you can check them out here. Basically they are an annual awards ceremony headed by the Taxpayers Union to un-celebrate examples of wasteful spending by government agencies. Last years first place winner in the local government category was Hasting District Council which put a bunch of unelected teenagers in charge of Council for a time as a novel PR exercise. If anybody has some nominations for around here you are welcome to submit, I even have one in mind myself.

Chemtrails all hot air? This is not a topic I am very knowledgeable about at all, but I was sent this 97 minute documentary to enlighten and recommend it as worth a watch to bring yourself up to speed. I cannot confirm if any of it is true, but cloud seeding to influence the weather has been attempted since the 1940’s, and it is not very hard at all to imagine the same sort of thing being tried again to address global warming. However the question really is: Would those in authority really do this without our consent or even knowledge, as is being asserted here?

Only a few bad eggs, yeah right: It looks like the scandal involving the former top dogs of NZ Police Andrew Coster and Jevon McSkimming is already being subject to a thorough whitewashing, with the current Police Commissioner and Minister of Police trying to portray a black and white situation that it was only those two who ever did anything wrong, and Minister of Police Mark Mitchell ridiculously saying “If you’re asking me to condemn our 15,000 police officers – sworn and non-sworn staff – around the country, and judge them by the same standards of that previous police executive, I am not going to do that”. But I am hoping that the average New Zealander has a little more common sense than to swallow this nonsense, and that anyone should be able to see that if you get corrupt and calculating practices at the very top, then it is inevitable that the same behaviours could have been trickling down for quite some time.

What has this got to do with local government? Well I have said it before and I will say it again: New Zealand is not the bastion of un-corruption it claims to be. I am not saying that I know of any practices as blatant as that of convicted senior manager Murray Noone of Rodney District Council / Auckland Transport going on around here (whose renown was such that I hear every man and his dog contractor in North Auckland knew the only way to get contracts with Murray was through bribery), but I certainly perceive similar patterns of institutional self-protectionism as been exposed in the NZ Police, including the withholding of information on a need to know basis only. Clearly this is being illuminated as not being a very healthy approach for the NZ Police, and it should have no place in Councils either. But it certainly does happen.

Ever heard of UNDRIP? Otherwise known as United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If you want to come up to speed with one of the reasons this country has been headed the direction is has, this article by Dr Muriel Newman of NZPCR is quite informative. Whether you agree with the authors perspective or not, there is no doubt that when New Zealand was signed up to it in 2010 it happened in quite a surreptitious way. I had never been a great fan of former Prime Minister Helen Clark, but at least she saw what might be coming in a way that the fairly clueless succeeding Prime Minister John Key did not.

Beautiful roundabouts: I haven’t driven them more than a few times, but as a roundabout fan must acknowledge the new ones on Taharepa Road / A C Baths Ave and Taherepa Road / Crown Road. However, I do have a grumble about the cost required to make these happen, because in a small town like this we should be aiming for good-enough infrastructure and not the rolls-royce. We have a Chambers workshop coming up on December 18th to discuss Delegated Authorities, and it is exactly decisions like this I want to get in the hands of elected members and not just leave to the discretion of staff – because any engineer worth their salt will always prefer to build the rolls-royce.

Waterslide fun for summer: Anyone recall the waterslides we had several years ago in the Riverside Park (where the summer concert is held)? Well this year they are happening in Ngongotaha north of Rotorua, and I will be making enquiries with the operators if they might consider coming back to Taupo because I thought they were great fun.

Fridays fable to figure: I recently came across this extraordinary 13min short film entitled ‘Lost Face’ about the fate of a fur trader at the hands of a far northern American Indian tribe. Wouldn’t it be great if some New Zealand filmmakers could make something as gritty about our own colonial experiences?

Friday Whisperings of Change

28 November 2025

Hi folks its Councillor Duncan coming at you again for another Friday update, and you may have noticed I took a break last week. These Friday updates have become quite a habit since they started, and I have found that having a self-imposed editorial deadline is a great motivational tool to make them happen. But they can also be quite demanding if other things are going on (like working to feed the kids etc), and even at the best of times and even so rewarding, writing can at times be a painful act of creation (no AI used here). Now I don’t want to make any unkept promises, but I will commit to putting out these Council updates at least fortnightly until their usefulness fades or I really do get sick of them (except January when everything pretty much shuts down for New Zealand).

So starting with the biggest news of late – the governments proposed rejig of Regional Councils, and the possible future amalgamation of smaller ones like ours into larger Unitary Councils like happened in Auckland back in 2010. Minister of Local Government Chris Bishop says: “The government does not think local government is serving New Zealanders well and the time has come for reform”.

I have mixed views about this whole thing, because I have experienced the joys and the pains of local government in both this provincial small town and big city Auckland Unitary Council which is the direction this is definitely headed. Neither of them gets my first pick, and the old Waitakere City of which I used to be part or even the borough Councils before 1989 now seem a class above in terms of community representation and responsible spending. And despite repeated claims by the likes of Deputy Mayor Kevin Taylor that ‘the funding model for local government is broken’, I say it has rather just been mismanaged. Not only that, but I strongly suspect the corruption and collusion recently exposed at the very top of the New Zealand Police Force (and quite possibly endemic throughout the higher ranks) is happening in a lot of other public institutions in this country – local government not excluded. My grandaddy who was the first chairman of the Public Service Commission in 1946 is probably rolling in his grave.

To elaborate further, I expect that cronyism (definition: giving jobs to friends rather than to independent people who have the necessary skills and experience) is far less prevalent in larger organisations, although I have heard this country described as one big small town before so it will never be completely absent. And I reckon isolated Councils like ours are far more likely to become mini fiefdoms of the senior staff, simply because their employees have fewer job opportunities to escape without having to leave town. On the other hand, large unwieldly bureaucracies like Auckland Council can be impersonal and intimidating for the average person to thread their way through, and the theoretical efficiencies of scale may not come to pass because additional layers of management seem to always get added. So I am torn both ways – on one hand we have civilisation and due process but all the bureaucracy that comes with it, and on the other some more flexibility but all the small town crap.

So if you want my honest opinion based on my past three years experience, I think we may have been better off under a Waikato Super City. Certainly some of the dumber decisions of the past might have been avoided, like demolishing a perfectly good Council building and rejigging the streets of Taupo township without thinking where the traffic will go. So whilst I am usually a fan of smaller and nimbler and every small town Council will have its quirky differences depending on the latest election, this place has not given me the greatest confidence. At least with a larger bureaucracy everybody is in the same boat and gets the same thing – just like living in a place like Auckland, and just like at McDonalds.

Apart from that, this week we also have:

Council meeting 25 November: Watch it all here on youtube and you can find the minutes here, nothing too exciting except the setting up of committees for the new triennium. There are a few subtle differences from last term, and I took the opportunity (from 5min 17) to express my reservations that without these committees having the appropriate Delegated Authorities elected members will not have sufficient opportunity to try and rein in costs – or even be held accountable (noting that Delegated Authorities are yet to be decided). The deletion of an originally proposed Infrastructure Committee also removes potential oversight of anything other than just water services (which is to be covered by a separate Water Services Committee with independent chair) – so for example transportation projects get little coverage. In addition, I also noted the presence of a handful of un-elected representatives with granted voting rights – that is something I formerly campaign pledged against, so to be consistent with that I expressed my objection.

Pull the other karakia please: I recently made a bit of a fuss about the regimented format used in Council Chambers the past year or so, whereby everyone including visitors was expected to stand whilst the official Taupo District Council version gets recited in unison by elected members, and that the only permitted variations were in Te Reo. I never did get any satisfactory explanation as to how that all came about, and have for quite some time been concerned about its apparent exclusiveness. So after I submitted my own proposed way forward for karakias, last week we had a workshop presentation about it (unrecorded for public viewing of course) – and guess what? Here was me thinking all along that karakias are a spiritual thing, when all along they’re not!

We were told that karakias only became religious after Europeans hijacked them in their colonial way of doing things, and prior to that were never meant as prayers at all! Well blow me down if I found this all a bit hard to swallow, and from its very first line the Council opening karakia is hard to accept as just being secular: “Tuia ki te mauri o te whenua / Connect to the life essence of the land”.

Anyway to cut a long story short, it was decided by majority decree that going forward only the official Council (secular!) version will be recited, and we are thankfully dispensing with the obligatory standing. My own summation: This is at best a missed opportunity for openness to other belief systems, and at worst a cultural and spiritual imposition onto the rest of us. Somehow I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic partaking anymore, but I won’t be making any scenes like this Community Board member did in Whangamata.

We have some money in the bank, didn’t you know? After the electricity companies were sold off late last century, someone decided that Taupo District Council would look after the money on your behalf. It is otherwise know as the Taupo Electric Limited (TEL) fund, and here is Sophie M Smiths useful three-part series of what it is all about. My own simplified take: the $80M or so is a community owned fund, the dividends of which some other Councils gave away directly to their constituents early in the piece. Until very recently the TEL fund was tied down as a form of insurance against infrastructure (i.e. instead of paying premiums to insurance companies), but that obligation no longer applies. Yes there are some current policies in place to govern its application, but elected members could for example by majority vote change those settings and likewise give it all away if we wanted.

Sounds like a plan: If we copy Thames Coromandel who have set up a Mayoral taskforce aiming to cut rates in half, then because our current forecast is 6.7% we should be about bang on to capping it to inflation just as myself and our new Mayor have pledged. No word of any taskforce happening yet though.

That much, really? Taxpayer’s Union was recently harassing Christchurch City Council for allegedly spending $1.36M on Ngai Tahu consultancy services over a three-year period. That is less than Taupo District Council has set aside for the next ten years on that sort of thing, so I am guessing nobody has tipped them off about us yet.

Too many Council staff? A recent review by Deloitte suggests that Wellington City Council has 330 more staff than they need to, I wonder if we should get a quote from them to look over us too?

Now that would be an interesting conference: There is a Marxism conference happening in Melbourne April next year, which I think would be far more straight-talking and entertaining than a Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) bash. I don’t think I can convince our Mayor to send me along at your expense, but I recommend it to anybody who is interested in the future of this nation to attend – even if only for information gathering purposes.

What has The Treaty got to do with school anyway? On the most recent consternations being thrown around after the government threw out obligations to The Treaty of Waitangi out of the NZ School Curriculum, I think Sean Rush’s letter to his local Roseneath School Board stands out as a reasoned argument that schools should stick to their knitting which is to educate kids and to stay out of politics.

Climate Education or Misinformation? Nowadays it’s hard to tell, but if local esteemed scientist Dr Dick Reaney’s recommendation is anything to go by, then visiting professor William Happer of Princeton University will be worth listening to at this FREE event next Sat Dec 6th as per below. You will need to RSVP dickreaney@outlook.com to secure your place.

Fridays roundabout revelry: Four bendy-buses trapped themselves and others into a stalemate situation for about ten minutes recently at a roundabout in Alexander Kiellands Plass in Norway (right-click translate to English if you don’t speak Norwegian). One bystander: “I don’t know what I’m most impressed by: That they managed to get into the situation, or that they got out of it”.

Fridays Circus Starting Again

31 October 2025

Councillor Duncan reporting, and whoever said local government wasn’t interesting? Today we had our inaugural Council meeting of the new triennium, with Declarations of the newly elects to do the right thing by Taupo constituents and also a reveal of who the new Deputy Mayor will be. The Council media team are right onto it and although we aren’t quite up to livestreaming yet, you can watch the 30 min proceedings here or read about it here on the Council page.

Mayor John Funnells choice of Deputy is an interesting one, and will be controversial with some. Cr Kevin Taylor was also the Deputy Mayor under the previous Mayor David Trewavas, and so might not represent the clean break with the past that the 63% of Taupo District voters who voted for change were expecting. Like myself, Mayor Funnell stood on the key election pledges of transparent decision making and tying rates to inflation – not what Taupo constituents have been experiencing to date, and not what Cr Taylor aspires very much to in my experience either. Kevin and I haven’t always seen eye to eye by quite a long shot, so I wonder how things will be different this time around. Then again we do both claim to be Christian men of faith, so it won’t be a very good look if we don’t even try to get along will it? So we will just have to see.

This week we also have:

Passengers beware: Bus driver killed in fiery Auckland crash with an electrical engineering professor subsequently inferring that lithium battery buses are a risk in any collision and we should be wary. Any bus passengers in Taupo worried about safety, had perhaps better sit close to the emergency doors – because as far as I know, our only commuter bus is electric.

Dubious distinctions: The Ombudsman’s Office had a record year with complaints up 30% from the previous year. For any regular business this would be something to be proud of, but certainly not this one. Do we even have a Public Service to speak of anymore? I have my sincere doubts, and my experience of the Ombudsman is that they stick up for bureaucrats like themselves more than the public interest. I say New Zealand’s reputation as one of the least corrupt places in the world is hard to imagine as deserved, and perhaps it’s the strict definition of ‘corruption’ which needs updating.

Corruption or incompetent? While we are on that subject, Erika Harvey of Lobby for Good does an interview with David Baker of RapidQS who says he could without fail save 30% off the price of most Council projects valued under $100K. Erika also muses that commission-based litigation of the United States hands down beats the New Zealand system for the average person to be able to claim damages. Sad or maddening, take your pick.

Who owns the coast? Elliot Ikilei of Hobsons Pledge puts out his view about the passing of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Amendment Bill and applauds New Zealand First MP Casey Costello for helping to make it happen. Casey was formerly with Hobsons Pledge and around two years ago offered to come down from Auckland and present to Taupo District Council free of charge, but elected members of the time didn’t want to hear about it. I really wish Casey could have made the trip and got listened to, because she has some interesting stories which might have helped broaden some of the narrower points of view.

Class ‘N’ word Act: In this interview Mayor Nobby Clark (former) of Invercargill makes left-wing interviewer Guy Williams very uncomfortable in a humorous way with his frequent use of the ‘N’ word. I reckon that Taupo District Councillor who in 2020 got pinged for doing exactly the same thing only accidentally – should perhaps have done it with as much gusto as Nobby to avoid himself all that trouble.

Judge knows best: Kaipara mayor survives recount bid because a judge decides that a 21 vote margin isn’t reason enough to justify. Because the electoral process is bulletproof and people in this country don’t ever make mistakes or manipulate. Yeah, right.

Most successful worst Mayor ever? Blogger Bruce gives his 13 min take on South Waikato Mayor Gary Petley’s narrow win. The 70% who voted for change didn’t get their wish, greater than the 63% for Taupo – think about that. I think Bruce does a great job of keeping elected members accountable, and encourage anyone else out there with some spare time to do similar.

Not fitting in: Given the playground atmosphere of the last Council which I have in previous posts mentioned, I reckon this social experiment demonstrating learned helplessness of adolescents is also relevant for newly elected members to please take note. And a reminder that complacent participation for fear of exposing one’s ignorance or naivety is not going to be of much benefit to the people you represent. Much better to ask dumb questions than to stay silent and portray a disingenuous wisdom.

Council follies: Here is Duncan Garner’s latest podcast this time about Taupo District Councils new building. I suppose it is old news around here and we are certainly not the only Council to commit follies like the ones this Tauranga based advocacy group is getting stuck into.

But I reckon it pays to reflect and remember so that the same mistakes don’t happen again, and if I ever get to be Mayor of this place do pledge to you now to put a plaque where the old Council building used to be on Lake Terrace to help us do just that (and paid for out of your rates).

Staff costing too much? While we are on that subject here is Sophie M Smith’s latest piece entitled Inside the Machine: What 430 Staff and 9 Comms People Tell Us About Taupō District Council. I think staff numbers are an important part of the story, but not all of the story. The other is how much is spent on consultants and contractors, with a Taxpayer’s Union report of 2023 indicating that TDC spent $50M as opposed to similar pop. Councils of Invercargill and Kapiti Coast which each spent less than $5M (I mention this in one of my 2025 Campaign pages). I have not been able to 100% confirm the veracity of those figures, but intend to follow this up for 2025/26. Because high staff numbers can be acceptable if it means we are spending less on consultants, but it seems we might be getting the worst of both worlds.

Cutting corners: Anyone driving the new roundabout at the intersection of Crown Road and Taharepa Road better not do what the picture on right shows, because that would be illegal and maybe even dangerous. Bridge engineers work with steel and concrete, but for traffic engineers like me our material is humans – and with experience they aren’t so unpredictable. So let’s see what happens.

Oops got that one wrong: Here Bill Gates backpedals on climate change and Donald Trump pounces on him for doing it. I learnt some time ago that the cooler periods of Earth history were worse for agriculture and humanity, if Bill Gates is so smart then how come it took him this long to realise?

Tribalism not so good: Here we have Tom Henry’s interesting take on tribalism as it relates to the Scottish clans and New Zealand in 2025, saying in his summation: “NZ has reached the stage where government miss-management, tribalism preferred over democracy, lack of real practical education, corporatisation, amalgamation, centralisation, the introduction of preference and privilege depending on who by race or association and connection, all have combined to intentionally hand this country over to the Globalists, one massive tribal system that wants individualism crushed, and humanity replaced”. Is he right, and is it too late anyway?

Friday because it’s Halloween: And I am fairly sure it was The Warehouse who slipped that formerly unknown tradition into New Zealand before we could even realise what was happening.