Yes, I do think that CCC has created congestion on purpose, and for a number of reasons.

With the construction of the Northern and Western suburbs outside of our district, there is a real risk that our inner suburbs become nothing but a transit space with empty homes. We already have enough empty homes already, we don’t need more.

There has to be a reason to by a home in the city, if you’re working in the city then the position of our council has been that we really do want you living close to where you work, and it has been for a long time.

The media, the community and the council does a lot of waving of hands about main routes like Cranford Street and Addington Road, but I think that’s mostly to keep the outer suburban people thinking we care when in fact we don’t, our focus as a city is on developing a ring of communities, some of whom work in our CBD.

This is a hard question to answer given what I wrote above.

We have to speed those up and we can’t keep slowing them down. Our people have to travel. We have to be able to get to work quickly. Many of us work all around the city all day. From delivery drivers to sales people, trades people, everyone has good reasons to need to move around the city.

Right now we’ve gone bonkers. In my area there was a proposal to put 7 speed zone changes on the main road between my home and the local hardware store, that’s bonkers!

We’ve gone a bridge to far and we have to get some sensible back.

I agree that people were doing 75km in 50km zones and that has to stop, however now we’re seeing road rage in 30km zones by people who are now past frustration when caught behind someone who actually follows the law.

A problem with traffic accidents, in my opinion, is that the people having them often aren’t following the law anyway. I’m not seeing evidence of 50km accidents that are causing harm that are a result of people actually following the rules. When people ask council for evidence it currently feels like a blanket idealism is being pushed and not proper science.

The ideology is great, but it’s just not our city right now. I think that the purists would argue that “we’re in the transition phase”, the problem is that the transition is currently distressing us and I’m not convinced that we’re actually going to head that way.

I love parked cars!!! A car that’s not moving is the most environmentally friendly. So the faster we can get a car off the road the better. I own 4 vehicles so parking is really important to me! At least 85% of people use cars all the time, so it’s the first choice for transport by most adults every day so we have to give them priority.

At present I feel like a lot of our city parking is well over priced and land owners are getting more than fair land rent from them and we need to address that.

In our city we also still have to much vacant land or land with buildings due to be removed, pending new development that could be used for fair priced parking.

We have to much civic money tied up in a carparking building that wasn’t being fully used the last time I looked at it. It’s important for the state to invest in assets but if there is a good market for those assets then we need to move them on.

I am a technology guy and I see technology having a huge impact on vehicle parking. Cars are now quickly moving to having autonomous driving features. I can see a near future where cars can park themselves, this means that parking can be more dense as space between cars isn’t required to get in and out.

I can also see a future where cars will simply take themselves away. If a park in the city costs $25 dollars per day to park but the fuel required to return them home, or somewhere else, is less then that is what will happen.

We build roading changes for 50 years but driverless cars are less than 20 years away, so we have to be careful about our investment today.

I remember the scene from the movie Pretty Woman where Richard Gare had to take a friend’s car because his limousine was parked in. In our future that won’t happen, rather than a valet taking an hour to move 20 cars, the 20 cars will simply move themselves all at once and release his limo in 5 minutes.

Allocating 50% of the roadway to 5% of the people is wrong, it’s just wrong, especially when it makes so little difference to trip times on the bus because the bus still waits at lights and in congestion.

A benefit of a bus with 50 people on it is that in theory (and it’s only theory) is that it takes 50 cars off the road. I think that’s a reasonable benefit for everyone (including the bus users) in itself, and that giving half the road to that 5% is simply greed gone wrong in the other direction.

There’s lots of academic thinking around this stuff and I simply don’t agree with most of it as it might or might not apply to Christchurch.

We have seen the introduction of Lime e-scooters pull in more brands and a massive growth in private ownership (yes I own one of those as well after having decided that they’re just fun to ride!).

Mobility scooters are on the rise as they give independence to people who can’t drive and have trouble walking.

Electric cars are coming like a freight train. I personally own 2.5 (yes one car is a plug in hybrid, and those are also happening). China has made massive investment and they’re driving international trends.

Our market is quite fractured. Christchurch is a great place to own an electric car because it’s so flat and even the ones with small batteries perform well. However people are taking a wait and see approach around the world because we’re all seeing the cost of batteries drop and drop and drop. This has happened because of the global ramp up of production, however the cost of production will eventually level out, it hasn’t yet.

Government subsidies have also had a massive disruptive impact on the market. People have held out for subsidies and then purchased in numbers before they were taken away again.

However the right products for this market have been slow to appear. Many of our people have real reason for a good UTE, many do need a station wagon or people mover and those products simply haven’t got to the market properly, yet.

For New Zealand and Christchurch specifically, electric vehicles make great economic sense. In the South Island we have plenty of off peek electricity. Every petrol car we take off the roads is forigen exchange money we don’t have to earn overseas to pay for fuel we import.

If you look around the world at the rich countries they’re the ones with energy to burn. We have energy too, it’s just not oil, it’s electricity and a huge capacity to make more.

In Christchurch I’m told we’ve spent more than a billion dollars in the past decade to try and chase down our emissions and haven’t won. At present there is a narrative that if we slow vehicles down we’ll reduce emissions, it’s part of the reason for our ‘slow zoning’.

We’re pulling the wrong levers and we’re trying to drive change before our market is ready.

I’ve seen the response to ‘speed humps’, people are just buying bigger cars so they can drive over them at speed.

The biggest impact we can make is reduce congestion by making as much road available as possible, making sure that we get cars stopped as soon as possible (by parking them!) and make sure the trip is as smooth as possible (that means making sure our traffic lights do the best job they can).

We do need to make more electric charging stations, but that isn’t on council. The best place to charge cars is where we park them, so supermarkets are a fantastic place

MRT seems to be just an excuse for officials to write endless papers about ideas that simply aren’t realistic. My view is that at present people keep writing plans that are so grand they have zero hope of ever getting across the line.

Bus transport is far more complex to understand in my view. The business case for busses is dying because of technology. Traditional bus users are moving to other modes of transport. More and more old and disabled people are using mobility scooter that have ever growing ranges. More and more youth are moving to “electric everything”. Where someone may have used a bus because a trip was to long for a bike, ebikes are meaning that people are now ‘riding’ further.

People are also more and more time poor and value their time. People love the ideology of public transport, as long as it’s someone else being the passenger.

From an environmental standpoint, we’re not winning with electric busses. While they are zero emission and the maintenance costs are lower for some parts of them, the impact on tyres, the roads and bus stops is much greater. Unlike a truck, busses stop hard in the same places day after day and we’re now seeing bus stops that are having to be repaired because of it.

However, in my view, we still need a bus fleet for other social reasons. If we have a disaster and have to move a large number of people then busses are the only option. If we have large city events we’re still going to have a reliance on some public transport for those because of car parking constraints. We have to remember that once the rest of our city facilities are complete we could end up with 55,000 people in the city at once.

Firstly we need to listen to communities and not waste huge amounts of money on arguments that could be spent on construction in communities who want them. The reality is that some of our communities want investment while some don’t and our council is not listening to that at present.

I have a balanced view on gold plating. What we build today has to be in keeping with individual communities and where we see the housing going in the near future.

I don’t like the narrative that we should spend as much as we can so we can drag money from Wellington. Wellington is really good at putting those costs back on us in tax, so this thinking that we’re getting them for free from Wellington is just wrong.

At some point we also have to call the program “job done” and stop the endless spending, and more importantly the endless road disruptions.

A lot of what we have built so far will be for far more than bikes. I see a future where mobility style scooters are self driving, you will order one like an uber on an app and it will come to you automatically. The technology is already here with one of our e-scooter brands.

I don’t personally think they’re safe for anyone but they are good on the coast where community comes together for active exercise. As a transit option the idea of riding a bike up behind someone who’s walking is just frightening.

We have to make those smarter in so many places it’s frightening. The bike and bus options that happen when there aren’t either is really annoying. This is a technology problem waiting to be solved!

I love them but the public should have much more access to them. We also should have much faster access to incident footage. We pay for them and should have access to them.

Road cones, post earthquake, seem to have become a whole industry of their own behind the cry of “but what about safety”. Most people in Christchurch work hard and have to clean up each night before going home. If you’re working as a trade in a mall then you have to contain your work all the time and I don’t see it as any different on our roads. In malls the work is contained so the business of the shops around the work can continue, on the roads the business is the rest of us doing our jobs.

Cones should be cleared down at end of day. I agree that parts of a site sill need to be coned off but not as much as when there is active work happening.

I’ve also traveled around the country a lot in the past few years and there is a clear disparity between what other cities think is required and what we think is required. In Wellington where the streets are tighter the management of cones is very different.

The biggest question is chlorine, followed by leeks and then fluoride.

Let’s pick the easy one first, fluoride. I agree that we must all have the right not to be medicated. I personally grew up on fluoride tables as a kid because it wasn’t in the water when I was in London as a child.

Leeks aren’t a problem other than the amount of energy we use to pump extra water and the chlorine that we push into the environment. We have an old network in many parts of the city which are going to keep getting leeks when the ground shakes, however we don’t have the same issues that Auckland and Wellington have, we have heaps of water under ground. We need an agile aproach of continued improvement but we have to balance that with the cost of doing the work and rates.

Chlorine is a nightmare on us for more than one reason in my view, it’s complex. Repairing pipes comes with risk and to date Christchurch has done well with managing the risk by having a very limited number of people allowed to work on our network and strict controls, however that also comes at the cost of expensive contractors. Having chlorine lowers the repair risk and opens the door to more contractors with less strict controls. Our well heads have been upgraded which reduces the risk that caused the Havelock North contamination happening here, however we still have exposure in transit from the well to our homes, chlorine addresses that.

“Risk” is the big new word and the government has made contractors legally liable (the actual people, not just their companies) and that’s a big risk that those people aren’t going to take.

We often see people asking the council to remove the chlorine, however in my opinion it’s action our MPs that we need to have the conversation with and right now they’re not very interested in that discussion.

The councils’ own staff have already expressed that they don’t see the chlorine coming out this side of 10 years as our network is still not up to standard and isn’t going to be for a decade.

Chlorine can be removed by a filter in our homes and if anything, I would like to see the council provide a filter installation service that provides finance to homeowners to install them and make repayments via their rates over the life of the filter.

If it creates well paid jobs for our people that would be compromised by change then we keep the asset unless the return for the whole city is so significant that only selling makes sense.

A problem with selling right now is that CCHL has a lot of debt that each asset is providing security to, so like selling your house, you have to repay any outstanding debt. That doesn’t make the case for selling to hot.

We do need to test the market all the time. We need to keep the bosses and workers in those companies honest. Some of the staff are on over a million dollars a year with our assets while we pay higher rates to service council debt.

It’s hard to see what the community really thinks because those with vested interest in the current state of pay make very good arguments and lobby hard to keep their gravy train going with stories of hardship for the rest of us if they’re sold.

I think this is very bad! Frankly the amount we pay our councilors isn’t high. Our council now has many staff on packages over $200,000.00 and some in our companies are on over a million dollars but we’re expecting our elected members to be working for a charity.

Many people are complaining about the quality of candidates who run for council, I suggest to you that in part it’s a problem because the pay for the amount of work that’s actually required is far to low.

I also think that a great deal of the work that the mayors welfare fund does is things that are already funded by WINZ or should be and we waste a huge amount of money from our endowment fund that should be pushed into the welfare fund.

I think part of the social contract of being an elected member is a level of perks and our members don’t get them. When platters were provided in community board meetings there was outrage.

In government there are many perks for elected members and at present our council is out of step.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that international travel and junket tours should be on the agenda but I think we could go further and find a better balance.

I also think that there’s a community of contributors who speak often in meetings and they’re not even offered as much as a decent cup of coffee and a bit of cake.

At community board level the ‘junior councilors’ (as I like to call them) aren’t paid a great deal for the amount of work that is actually required.

I would shut it down and transfer outstanding funds to the mayors welfare fund, the endowment fund or return it to the donors to do as they choose.

It’s been claimed that other cities have these fund and we don’t, I simply don’t agree, it’s a pure duplication of effort as we have two funds for the same purposes.

It’s cost rate payers thousands to pay staff to fly around the world looking for donations that simply haven’t shown up.

I don’t accept that there is a public desire to give to it. We have so many charities and so many worthy causes.

The Cathedral that needs $150 million, the museum that needs $40 million, the civic chambers that needs $200 million and that’s all before I think about the demand for social housing for the homeless.

It’s next on my personal list and something that can only make our country more wealthy. Solar and battery technology locks in a cost for power for the life of the equipment which puts pressure on the big gentailers to keep their prices in check for everyone else.

We don’t have a problem with power anywhere in New Zealand, we do have issues with peek loads around dinner time in winter in some areas. The more we can all do to lighten the peek loads the longer we can push off massive government debt to build more generation. I think that’s important.

Short answer, yes! …but there’s also a longer answer.

We need to stop collecting rates for things in the Long Term Plan that aren’t delivered when the democracy has agreed they will be delivered.

At present we have this system of ‘carry forward and bring back’. If something can’t actually be delivered in this year for what ever reason then we pull something from the future forward and do that instead, we shouldn’t.

At the same time we have so many projects that ‘go over budget’ that we then ask for more and more money, a head of inflation, each year.

We have to get control of our procurement policy, and at present we don’t. Anyone knows that you always ask for 3 quotes before we do work that we’re not sure what it costs (yes if you’re buying apples at the supermarket you don’t ask for three quotes, but you also don’t buy them out of season).

If we can’t get quotes from the market, then we need to park that work until the market is ready to respond.

In my view we also need to remove woke policy ideals that are causing to many in the market not to engage. Right now bidding for work with council has become to hard and or to tiresome for to many who we want to actually be bidding.

In my view, staff have read the room well and have done a good job, the problem is that we as a community have simply voted by not voting and the messaging withing council is being read to far to the left. In the last general election the city actually voted center right in the party vote, but they also didn’t show up in the previous civic election with 3 out of 5 people not voting.

I think some of our levels of service and customer satisfaction are out the gate right now while some of our facilities aren’t well used.

I was in the central library recently, showing some visitors the building, and I can understand why our libraries score so well in council surveys. I never expected personal tour guides but I got them, a cost that I don’t feel like we need to afford, especially when I already know enough about the building to provide a tour.

But we’re not all, all over, enough of our city assets. I confess that at the Art Gallery I would like a personal guide because I haven’t done my homework.

Many of us are wanting lower rates but we also, as a city, need more income. I believe we all need to become better ambassadors for our city. I still talk to way to many people who continue to tell me they haven’t even done ‘the free stuff’.

I also think that some of our survey results should be lower, representing a little less ‘personal attention’.

Gold plated and not environmentally friendly as it should be or could be. All our bins are now tagged, so the trucks know exactly what they’re collecting each time they pick it up. The bins are weighed.

There is no reward for people who minimize waste and there should be.

I am concerned that every bin lifted uses fuel, so it would be more ideal if we picked up full bins less often. I’m also concerned that people who used to compost don’t any longer.

Mean while some people have valid reasons to need more than one bin, but they don’t always need to use them. I would like to see additional bins simply provided and then charges applied when they’re lifted.

I think we should also provide credits for bins not collected. If you only need to put a recycling bin out once a month then you only pay for 12 annual collections, same for red, same for green.

This way, people who choose to minimize can reduce their costs. Lots of retired people and low income people trade their ability or willingness to work more by reducing costs but our council doesn’t empower them, it should.

Right now candidates on the right are calling out that they need more seats around the table to get better control on costs and rising rates, however it’s not just the council table that they need support, it’s also the balance of power within the six community boards where the left currently has the balance of power in four out of six.

In the last election the candidates expressed who they wanted for mayor and those on the left also told the community who to support in the community board race.

This election, if the mayor wants to see more of the policy that he was elected on actually happen then candidates on the right are also going to have to find, endorse and promote center right leaning community board members.

We have now spent the past decade building tourism assets. In the next term we need to start getting a return from every asset we’ve just about finished building. This is going to mean marketing, lots of marketing, and good marketing, not just expensive spend on ‘the best bid of a bad bunch’ like seems to happen all to often.

Renters drive on the roads. Renters are struggling to work longer hours and get paid when it takes them longer and longer to get to work.

Renters do pay rates, everyone pays rates, the only difference is that their landlords pay for them, so if the rates keep going up faster than inflation so does their rent.

The council spends $1.5b each year and collects almost a billion. We can’t control the rises by choosing another supplier like shopping for petrol, so ‘yes’. I think that elected members need to give more focus to the power of council spending on inflation.

Trust is built with communication, being seen to communicate and people growing a sense that you know what you’re talking about even if they don’t fully understand what you’re saying.

A problem is that staff don’t give members much warning of papers in to many cases.

I would like to see members more involved during the development of papers. Perhaps papers should be appointed a ‘first and second’ when development is started and then those members given drafts are the paper is produced ‘for their information’. I wonder if this could reduce the number of, some times, stupid questions that are asked at the table.

I also wonder if the member who ‘first’ the paper should be introducing it at the table to their fellow members to give the public a more clear impression that a member does understand what is going on.

I agree with the call for all votes on papers to be cast electronically and real time reporting via the council website with the ability to look at members voting records.

I would like to see every elected member set up with an email mailing list and assistance to send out updates to people in their wards.

At present we’re seeing to many people showing up who claim they didn’t know anything about the issues.

I understand that not everyone is going to tune in on every issue every day, but many will and then pass on what they know.

We’ve seen people asking why the council hasn’t done letter box drops for old people and people not on line, I think that we have to ask the community to share. Paper is expensive to deliver and often only ends up in the bin.

We also need to be “asking for the order”, we need to be asking the community for help to fix the trust and communication problems by getting more involved and then provide them more ways they can connect with different sets of information. “Have Your Say” is great but are enough people connecting with it?

Wards have up wards to 20,000 voters and I think that it should be a target to have 10,000 email addresses on file for each ward.

We need to update the social media policy and more clearly outline expectations.

I would like to see the council declaring some expectations for both members and the public.

Following what we’ve seen recently on social media, we’re seeing to much bullying by both members and the public.

I don’t think members should be commenting on each others pages. If they have something to say then say it on their own page.

I also think that if members of the public have something abusive to say then they need to say it on their own pages too and that members should be asked to simply delete posts that don’t maintain some level of decency.

Members also need to take care to communicate balanced and full information. Saying something costs money that actually makes a return without pointing out the return while only pointing out the cost isn’t balanced.

Council and members use RAs extensively to communicate with the community but the community doesn’t always show up and information from RA’s doesn’t flow into the community.

The council needs to inform the community how it engages, because it does engage well but the community doesn’t always know this.

The council needs to provide digital resources to RAs and publish a list of RA’s on it’s website.

Council has traditionally provided printing services to RA’s for news letters. In a digital world it needs to support RAs with mailing lists.

Mailing lists are important and while many RA’s made good use of social media, AI in those platforms doesn’t always push messaging at members.

I think council spends way to much time on issues that it shouldn’t be. Wellington causes our council staff to spend a lot of time finding out what we think and then telling Wellington, that’s Wellington’s job to do via it’s members and departments.

I would also like to see the MPs in the chamber every couple of months giving updates on their electorate just the same as community boards present monthly.

Ten minutes to speak with the same for member questions.

I think if MP’s have time to throw stones on social media then they also have time to address our council elected members.

I’m an environmentalist, I think we need to do as much as we can to protect our environment and reduce pollution, however I oppose “Climate Faith”.

I feel like to many people have joined a bandwagon because they are faithless, looking for a faith and climate issues have become a faith as much as a real issue to address. We need to see the difference.

We need to look at climate accounting properly, professionally. For example, spending $20,000 to replace lights with LEDs to save $2,000 in power over the life of the new lights is not good accounting if there is life left in the existing lights.

Building cycleways all over the city so that people can choose to live with bikes everywhere doesn’t make good climate sense to me. We need to look to build well in limited places and then work to move cyclists into those areas. I accept that argument that we want to encrouge everyone to use active transport, but I also think we have to be practical.

To me, the word “Woke” simply means “unprofessional”. Being white, black, red, yellow, pink, LGBQT, Christian, or of any faith, including ‘climate’ doesn’t make you woke.

Claiming that speed humps are saving lives because accidents aren’t happening, when they are, but they’re not being reported, is “woke”, it’s simply unprofessional. Claiming that speed humps are calling less accidents and that they’re slower accidents with less harm, because there is evidence, is professional. Saying “we simply don’t know” is professional.

Not filling roles in council because a person who fits a “DEI” profile is “woke”. I accept that diversity is important and complex. I accept that it’s complicated if, for example, the only people wanting to apply for roles answering telephones are of a single gender, race, age and or faith. I also understand that it’s complex when the people with the most experience and skills are all coming from a limited pool of diversity.

However we also have to keep our eye on the purpose of roles and make sure we keep the quality of service and outcomes at an acceptable level at the same time. I accept this can be a hard balance to find.

In the procurement space this can get more complex. In traditional markets it’s not the councils role to be forcing change using its market power and I currently wonder if it has lost focus at the expense of cost on rate payers.

Western Australia introduced a law requiring cars to have immobilizers in them 30 years ago while I was living there. They had a problem like we have today, kids taking cars.

I remember the debate well… “but what about the poor people…”, but the market reacted with a solution as cheap as $20 at the time.

In Christchurch we need this but it’s not a council function, so as I see it, our council’s response to the problem of kids taking cars for a joy ride has been to introduce more and more speed control.

We’re all hating speed humps but we’re now paying the price of inaction on slowing the tide of stolen cars.

In my area there has been debate about 20 trees that are to be cut down that have been there for more than 60 years.

The council said the trees had to come down because they’re to close to the power lines but I think there’s more to it.

The community said they’re sick of the road flooding as much when it rains. Last winter I asked the council to sweep the roads more, well I got the cost of that cleaning and it came in at almost $35,000.00 last year.

I think we have to start having a real think about our threes that are getting old. I don’t think we can afford rates to pay $35,000.00 every year to clear leaves just for one street.

I know that new trees are expensive, but I also now know that sweeping streets is also really expensive.

As a city, I understand that we spent almost $1.5 million dollars last year to sweep

Council Response

Leaf Collection in the Northern contract is priced on the total kilometres of leaf collection; for example, in the Northern Area there is a total of 49,398km at a total annual contract price of $1,087,794. As a note, this does not include leaf dumping costs.

Emmett Street leaf sweeping covers 1457km annually, and therefore equates to approximately $32,084 per annum (not including leaf dumping costs – this is approximately $90 per tonne and difficult to quantify for Emmett Street alone).  Additional leaf collection required are charged at an hourly rate, and to date on Emmett Street this is approximately $2,000.

We don’t know, no one knows, and that’s a problem.

In September 2024 I asked ChristchurchNZ, the councils marketing arm, if they knew how much accommodation is free in the city each night, they didn’t. They basically said that the government had been working on a project to know but haven’t got it done.

I think it’s important to know because without knowing, organizations like airlines can’t plan or market the city.

I am concerned that we’re not getting the bus loads of tourists in groups because we don’t have hotels for them to stay. I understand that there is something like 5 more planned but many haven’t broken ground, others are waiting to see what the space looks like and are worried about the amount of AirBnB that’s in the city that is competition.

I see AirBnB as a different market to hotels and I think we need both.

As I see it, tour group planners around the world have lots of choice and if you’re a planner you’re not going to try and host 300 people in 300 local AirBnB apartments, you want to book out a hotel. So group planners are looking to other markets where they can do a single deal and know that their whole group is looked after.

However how does anyone sell anything when they don’t know what we have free to sell. If you’re running a fruit shop you don’t put an ad on the radio to sell apples if your store is empty but full of plums.

We need to fix this problem so we can tell our community what we have to sell and have our whole community helping to draw visitors into our city.

Elected members are our voice at the table. Their job is to provide governance over the operations of the council. They aren’t involved in day-to-day operations.

I don’t see my role is to ask elected members for their views, but it is my role to share my views with them and ask them to represent those views at the table in decision making.

It’s their role to moderate my views. For example, I might think that we should be pulling out speed humps across the city, but they have to moderate that view with the views of other residents, and what they campaigned on that gave them the mandate to hold office.

If your struggling with council staff then your elected member is there to provide a bridge, if your elected member is not then your recourse is to show up in the council chamber and ask for assistance from the whole council and the mayor.

If everyone is giving you the run around then you can reach out to the Ombwardsman (but that can be a very slow process), or you can speak with your local MP or the local government minister, if all that fails then I suggest that the community simply doesn’t agree with your position, consider running for council so you can actually speak at the table yourself.

Elected members aren’t there to answer questions, that’s the job of staff, they exist to speak for us at the table and make decisions based on what we tell them.

Getting information is easy, just ask the staff directly: How to request official information (LGOIMA) : Christchurch City Council

There are lots of ways to lobby a position and get council staff and elected members to hear you, but it does take effort.

Share and Test Your View

Social media is a great space to test your view. Facebook is well followed by both council staff and elected members, who can see your view and follow the views of the community who engage with you.

Set up a Petition

Presentation of a petition at council is a formal way to as council to consider acting on an issue. It’s a very useful and formal way to show public endorsement for your position.

Make a Public Forum presentation or Deputation

You can present your position on just about anything, to council, at the table, for between 5 and 10 minutes.

There are some rules, if the issue you’re concerned about is an item on the agenda for the day then you have to make a ‘Deputation’ and you get to speak longer. If you just want to share a view that’s abstract then you can make a “Public Forum presentation”. You do need to seek permission for deputations, that are approved by the chair of a meeting (which is not always the mayor), and it’s just polite to seek permission for a Public Forum. Either presentation has to follow the rules within “Standing Orders”, for example you can’t use the space as a platform to express your concerns about a specific staff or elected member, you need to be on topic of your issue.

Using the Media

Depending on the scope of your issue, the media can be a very useful tool to drive your concerns, but it does take effort.

To gain media attention you have to think about what the story is that is going to gain interest of their readers. Media lives on outrage. Media typically isn’t interested in a story that has already been done to death, so your position with them has to be a new angle on an issue.

Different media organizations are interested in different stories. In Christchurch, Chris Lynch Media is great for local stories, as is the Press, NewsTalkZB and Star Media. TV typically only covers issues that will be of interest to the whole country.

Call a public meeting

Just about nothing draws attention, from elected members, like a public meeting. If people are willing to show up it shows engagement. Members are moved by engagement on an issue.

Involve your residence association

Council engages with and does listen to RA’s. If you have an issue, take it to your local RA and ask them to help by advocating for you.

In 2019, my now good friend, Stephen McPaike showed up at the council table in tears asking council to approve some money for installation of heat pumps in the councils social housing.

In the subsequent election council released a big document about social housing that Stephen and I turned into a website, see: oursocialhousing.nz

I also own some, and manage other, housing for offender reintegration with Salvation Army.

I agree with people who say that this is all work that should be done by government, and it’s not core council work, however I also have to agree that council simply does it better.

I just hate it when people show up at the council table in tears, and that’s just what Vickie Walker did, so I reached out and introduced myself.

Stephen McPaike and myself then went on to do a social media scan of the issues and realised there was a problem that we’d been unaware of that needed to be addressed.

I’d had a few problems with the sewer system in my own street and well understood the challenges with getting council to focus and move with haste, and I felt is was only the right thing to do to offer these people some assistance.

We set up a separate social media page and a website, sewercrisis.nz with information and updates and then went about lobbying council to act faster and respond better to community concerns.

A public meeting was held with more than 200 locals and this quickly led to a million-dollar community support package.

When I saw Stephen McPaike in tears at the table about heating in his social housing unit I was moved, but I was just annoyed when I saw a paper return to council with the impression that staff hadn’t well read the tone of elected members in wanting quick action to get heat pumps installed for that winter.

Being by yourself at the table on an issue is hard work. It gets easier when you have someone with you to support your case.

Over the years a great friendship has grown and Stephen and I have tackled a number of social issues together including the response to the WWTP fire, Long Term Plan submission, and other social campaigns.

It’s actually Stephen in the shark suit in the video below.

I grew up in Lower Hutt and I still have many friends living there. When I started reading articles on social media about the stench problem I jumped in to have a look, I called a few friends to understand how bad it really was and asked what they knew.

After the problems we’ve had with the Bromley plant, I jumped in the car and went for a look when Wellington Water announced that they were holding a public meeting.

Some people would argue that I don’t live there so why should I care. I care because if I had a problem in my area I’d like to think that people with some knowledge of how to drive change would come and help me.

On my trip in November 2024 I ended up meeting with the local mayor, staff at Hutt council, staff from Wellington water, residents, local media and a number of other elected members.

Having someone from ‘out of town’ show up makes quite a point and I feel the point was made.

Since that trip, the mayor of Christchurch has also visited their plant and the council has reached out to CCC for information about our environmental monitoring program.

This project is cool by the way, buy my interest is, I have to confess, completely self serving, hear me out….

As I see it, our city needs every bit of tourist income it can muster. Anything that drags money off tourists is a thing we need to get behind.

The building that is currently being completed is only phase one of a joined up plan to activate the cycleway and river connection down to the Richmond Community Garden space.

The plan is to add boats and bikes. People will be able to paddle down the Avon then grab a bike to get back to the city.

This is all only good for city income and that’s good for everyone.