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Open Mike 11/09/2026
31 comments on “Open Mike 11/09/2026”
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Yes, I think we "should just shut up". Climate change is a contentious issue and one that the various parties use to their advantage playing whatever riff to suit their ultimate goal which is power.
NZ is a parochial chihuahua yapping away at elephants in the distance- our voice is meaningless in the global context. The heavyweights do what they will with the earths resources and we go along with it because we want the lifestyle. Much climate conversation is moralising, it is neither evidence or solution based. To get the world to agree on how to then actually implement a strategy is impossible. Buying an electric car is not going to cut it I'm afraid.
Blaming every adverse weather event on CC damages peoples psyches, catastrophising things people feel powerless to change leads to bigger problems such as a no future mentality among the young and various anti social expressions among old people.
Energy needs to be put into adapting, into developing shared values that promote social cohesion and building resilient communities. Technology is not going to save us, nor is a retreat into the past.
[I don’t allowe climate denial under my posts. I didn’t write the Labour press release, but I did use my time and effort to post it on TS, so I am telling you now, stay out of that commenting on that post. You can continue to comment on Open Mike. – weka]
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Well, IMO thats straight from the NACT1 page. And so IMO …you dont see Labour or Green as your voting option.
All good to know.
So amusing to see this Mayor of Auckland and the volumes of National Party politicians who went out of their way to kill the City Rail Link, now praise themselves and each other when it comes to the official opening this morning.
Thank God previous Mayor Len Brown will get a moment in the sun again for actually leading and funding and leveraging it through central government. His was two terms of highly ambitious and successful multi-generational change.
Don't anyone for a second think that this was anything other than a Labour Mayor leading both our largest infrastructure project and our largest CBD revitalisation. The right deserve nothing for this.
Wasn't it Key who worked with Brown to greenlight the project? Committing central government funding, after the business case was demonstrated.
As a society, we need more cross-party infrastructure projects – since these require decade-long investment and delivery. Trying to corral all of the 'glory' for one side – rather defeats the goal.
Not taking anything away from Brown – who had the vision and championed the project. But supported by a centre-right government.
Business case? Very much an after-the-fact agreement.
No, what happened was Brown got the old developer to alter the design of the two towers so that we could slide two rail tunnels right between them, straight after Auckland councils were emalgamated.
Then he got the Council and AT to form the design for the route and a reasonably good design for the whole thing.
Then they let two large contracts to form the first 1km of the entire tunnel set and lift and rebuild the old CPO.
Then you saw most of the properties up Albert Street sell up and most of them get demolished and in time rebuilt.
So Key as PM was simply responding to the overwhelming momentum Mayor Brown has got rolling, all the way through 2016.
Finally the government came on board with the signing of the contract on the CRL construction site October 2016.
To be fair to Len Brown and the left, National only came around to the CRL half-heartedly, begrudgingly, and after a couple of genuine attempts by Gerry Brownlee, then Minister of Transport, to kill it.
Key's main contribution was eventually recognising that it was both necessary and politically popular, and bringing central government to the table.
That's certainly better than continuing to oppose it, and the eventual cross-party support deserves acknowledgement.
But it's a bit revisionist to turn that into National having been a partner in the vision from the outset. Len Brown spent years dragging them towards it.
Nor is it 'fair' to characterize this as entirely a project of the Left – as the OP, did.
A nice little write-up on who deserves credit, which is not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing, in many cases.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/18-08-2026/the-real-heroes-of-the-city-rail-link
They should be planning the next section, not patting themselves on the back.
I agree over the planning. However, I think that the people of Auckland deserve a breather, and a chance to see whether the pain was worth it – before we launch into a new round of infrastructure development.
Don't underestimate the huge negative impact that the build process of the city loop has put central Auckland through. Nor the impact of (seemingly) endless shutdowns of the existing train network to get it ready for the implementation – and the impact on the train catchment areas.
People need to see that the last project is working before they're ready to fund the next one.
There’s always planning required, which is a long way off actually funding it and hitting ground. A city of Auckland’s size and complexity doesn’t allow for nice little breather breaks – this is the 21st century.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/partner/10-09-2026/pc-gone-mad-everything-you-need-to-know-about-auckland-councils-controversial-housing-plan
You can think about things until 24 September.
https://akhaveyoursay.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/aucklands-future-housing-plan
I can think about things for a lot longer than the 24th of September.
I seriously doubt that there will be any new transport infrastructure (especially including the harbour bridge replacement) covered in the housing plan.
You’re prone to making sweeping statements that often include absolute terms but in reality, they show your ignorance and when challenged you twist & turn. Here, you’re missing the point again.
https://akhaveyoursay.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/aucklands-future-housing-plan
In other words, PC120 is inextricably linked to city infrastructure but obviously doesn’t cover (major or minor) transport infrastructure projects per se, which is a straw man.
On a side note, you seem to have a fondness of serious doubt; I counted 49 occurrences of “seriously doubt” since you started commenting here just over four and a half years ago and 28 of those were by you
Nice to see that you have nothing better to do with your time, than count up phrases commenters regularly use.
Unlike some here, I try to put some effort into my thinking and into my comments before I hit the button – it didn’t take as much as it seems. In any case, idiosyncrasies say a lot about the person and they can be so recognisable that they effectively become (unique) identifiers, in objective and subjective sense, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, Nah. It's bordering on creepy.
Nah, your MO is distinctive and easily recognisable to anybody who pays a little attention and has a memory slightly better than that of a goldfish. You lack self-awareness when you comment here, which is another one of your traits.
Imho that's creepily accurate – "female commenter" is a new wrinkle.
A distinctive MO indeed – laser-focused on your behaviour!
I'm talking about your behaviour.
Researching a female commenter's speech patterns, and then commenting on them is borderline creepy. The fact that you don't see it, puts you over the border.
And now another male commenter is doing the same thing.
One with previous … history.
This is exactly why it's not a good idea to model this behaviour.
We all have history B – your sterling OM defence of Minister Upston's recent behaviour was unsurprising.
She has now accepted responsibility and offered an apology.
As history is being rewritten now, here's a reminder:
A brief history of National MPs trashing the rail link they just funded | The Spinoff
From the parties of personal responsibility.
ACTing support from the party of better legislation. Legislation, under urgency (what was the rush?) that is unable to be competently enacted by a public service that has had the scythe go through it.
You can't write this stuff.
No apologies from the minister who gets paid to live in her own whare while making the benefits harder to qualify for. These folk have killed off any satirists.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/1229211/stubborn-mps-allergic-to-apologies
two new posts up
https://thestandard.nz/the-robots-are-coming-to-get-us/
https://thestandard.nz/why-does-national-despise-the-poor/
can someone do me a favour and comment below (say test or something) in a new comment not a reply. I need to test if moving to OM works.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
test
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
George Monbiot puts an excellent and compelling argument as to why Burnham should leave North Sea fossil fuel in the ground.
But Burnham is old school Labour. The environment is irrelevant-he didn't mention climate change once in his first few weeks in power. He will “drill baby drill”.
Trump will be proud of him.
More importantly for UK climate security, Polanski calls for the unredacted release of an underplayed 2025 government report from UK security agencies. It concluded on a likely 'collapse of Britain's food production and water systems' in the event of an international food security crisis.
https://bsky.app/profile/greenparty.org.uk/post/3mv6b6kxobn2c
Agreed tWig…that is what Monbiot discusses in the article I posted above.
Here's a much more measured analysis of the Hugging Face ai escape than I referenced the other day.
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading-metaphors-and-real-risks
'…it is essential for lawmakers, and the public, to understand that none of the reported incidents actually involved loss of control at any time, or arguably even “rogue agents,” or any kind of humanlike agency on the part of AI models. Instead, the blame lies with the humans who failed at engineering safe testing conditions, and who train AI models using RL methods that incentivize high persistence, autonomous decision-making, and reward hacking. To use a different analogy, for me this incident was reminiscent of a 2000 New Mexico wildfire, in which officials did a “controlled burn" of a section of forest, but failed to heed wind forecasts, and the wind-fueled burn spiraled out of control.'
Martin LeFevre on Scoop with his Meditations gets to a different part of my mind. I feel that I can take on more now I have dropped some unhealthy stimulants like the hourly radio news, newspapers, television, and I read voraciously. It helps with my understanding, fiction is good as the author usually has a line throughout the book and a definite end, unlike our reality. I'm trying to take in a spectrum; read little about the USA keeping in touch with world politics overall.
This week's meditations is on evil which seems to be spreading these days. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2609/S00031/where-does-evil-come-from-and-what-can-we-do-to-end-its-reign.htm