Aucklanders are to get a say on whether the city’s ports operations should be sold off, after a knife-edge vote.
Auckland Council’s budget committee had to decide which parts of mayor Wayne Brown’s proposal for the council’s Long Term Plan, which includes a 10-year budget, would progress to consultation with residents.
The big ticket items in Brown’s proposal include establishing the Auckland Future Fund with a portion ring-fenced for self-insurance, transferring the council’s remaining shares in Auckland International Airport Limited (AIAL) to the fund with their future to be decided by fund managers, and either selling a 35-year lease of Port of Auckland operations or retaining the port in public ownership.
Wow, the Boomer King Mr Fixit is already out of ideas past selling the Airport and the Port???
Bhahahaha, suck it Auckland.
The Boomer King was elected with no mandate in a rigged privately run election that was focused on voter suppression by barely having a dozen actual election booths for a city of almost 2million!
Watching him sell and privatise everything not bolted down is hilarious. Boomers don’t care if the assets are sold or not, they won’t be alive to see the consequences of privatising the City!
If you are feeling angry Aucklanders, GOOD! You should be incandescent with rage!
No one wants to talk about the true reason we have crippling roading gridlock and explosive rents because in New Zealand we only focus on the symptoms and never the underlying problem.
The problem of course is mass immigration and no taxing of the rich to pay for the infrastructure required to cope with that mass immigration.
The Woke Left view any discussion of migrants that isn’t positive as xenophobia so the Left can’t talk about the underlying problem of mass immigration or risk getting cancelled and the Right benefit from exploiting migrant labour because our country is addicted to a low wage economy, so they have no interest in mentioning it.
On a burning planet, we need degrowth Capitalism using Think Big Economic Sovereignty to make NZ sustainable.
What we get offered up is globalist free market mantra. Both National and ACT (and to a lesser degree the Greens) see throwing open the immigration flood gates as the solution to tepid GDP growth.
It’s what Key did for 3 terms and it inflated GDP while causing infrastructure gridlock and skyrocketing rents.
The reason we have a vast under investment in water infrastructure is because Local Government won’t upgrade a system put under immense stress by Central Government’s open door immigration policy and low wage economy addiction.
Suburban home owners are fine with this mass immigration policy and infrastructure gridlock because it pushes up the untaxed house valuations they have gotten used to gaining year in and year out.
Neither Central Government nor Local Government want to have an honest discussion with voters about higher water rates and higher taxes.
Someone has to come up with the $150billion over the next 30 years to keep up with the expected population growth from the mass immigration policies of both Labour and National.
ACT and National point to the labour shortage pain crippling our economy and pretend importing cheaper labour is the solution when that was the problem in the first place!
We are addicted to hyper tourism, property speculation and a low wage economy by using international labour flows.
We have become so blinded by free market mythology we refuse to acknowledge short sighted lazy immigration and a user pays view of essential services has caused the issues we have now!
We are addicted to a low cost labour force and force our domestically trained teachers, nurses and Drs offshore to repay the student loans we saddle them with!
The bitter harvest of user pays is biting us now and all the right have to offer as a solution is more cheap labour, crippling public transport and an extension of user pays!
Congestion charges and Tolls are a means to privatise the roads so that only the wealthy can afford to drive on them.
Without massive investment in free public transport, putting in privatisation models that create a gated community user pays culture over roads the taxpayer has paid many times over for is a political crime against the poor!
Watching the Boomer King drown in problems he can’t solve is glorious.
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Sigh! 100%
The right are soon to realize that 3 waters wasn’t about Maori stealing the water. The right really have no solution for the cost of living but spin BS platitudes and slogans that work during an election cycle but won’t if they can’t deliver on bringing the cost of living down. ACT Van Velden has already fuck ova the working class she claims to advocate on behalf simultaneously pushing slogans like bringing the cost of living down.
Free Aotearoa
National will bring in the Chinese to build the roads around the country and the tunnel from the North Shore into the city in Auckland…
i.e.Key and Bill English’s Chinese Belt and Road world domination scheme is back…apparently to save the taxpayer money…
They will then be owned and tolled by the Chinese… until the planet becomes unliveable….
So say for the next 10 – 15 years..
Stupid is stupid does …
Yes and in 9 to 10 years time all those roads will have potholes, just like what was created under the previous 9 years of Nationals Chinese roads standards.
It’s very important for the Wall Street propagandists to ensure that nobody remembers anything that happened prior to the mid-1980s. The monopoly press barons have facilitated a three-decade cover up, in which any discussion of the collapse in living standards, social protections and civil liberties (especially workers’ rights) is verboten — because it would inevitably reveal the intensified exploitation of the workers, and those who are responsible.
Importing large amounts of cheap foreign labour, while simultaneously forcing angry locals to emigrate (via economic repression), plays a key role in this process. Expectations must be lowered in order to continue wage suppression, which requires a large mass of desperate people, who can then be forced to work for half as much.
Yep, all true. And everyone knows it. But, the addiction to cheap labour and the limited high from capital gains keeps the entire country heading back to the opium den for more…..
With the last 3 council terms of a Labour-aligned council and councillors running amok with the purse racking up 5 billion dollars of debt. How else are you going to pay for the $500m per year interest payments on the debt alone? 25% rates year on year? Or cut exec wages to be inline or less than the Mayors? Or should central government bail them out?
National/ACT troll much – guess you support the sale of property purchased across years and costly to replace if ever the need should arise. You must be absolutely stoked about the way things are unfolding for our racist/fascist new government. Top work – well done – Mr Hehir must be a wet dream of yours …
Hey nob. No, but its math(s) or higher rates dumbfuck.
Simple math, user pays, so 25% rates per year it is.
Add to that, common sense, get out of Auckland it’s a cesspit.
if i remember right, John Banks actually lowered rates. so dont go blaming just the left wing affiliated Mayors, as the real villians are the rate payers themselves, who whinge and whine if even the suggestion of a rates increase inflames their hemorrhoids’ to the point of bleeding. so now the council can barely maintain the infrastructure let alone expand or upgrade it.
by the way, 9am is a little early to be hitting the whiskeys bruh
Wayne brown’s a bitter old fool who deliberately tries to obscure his in inadequacies by being a bitter old fool.
Selling our cities and country’s assets must surely be stupidity on Acid. Either that, or brown, like the many True Blue neo-liberals before him, has got a hand in the play to make ‘good coin,’ as they say.
There’s also one other small, tiny little other thing.
Auckland. Based on a few inarguable facts, shouldn’t be there. But now that you are, you must anticipate that you’re going to have your bones picked over as you go belly up.
Here’s what you could try but what would I know, I’m only a Southland Farmer, the same ones who were legitimately but not morally exploited to build The City Of Sails. Give the Crown a go before the fascist mafia post neoliberal upper-lower class sell you all to foreign money lenders, you’ll know the ones. They’re in all those big shiny bankster buildings along the waterfront. You can’t miss them. Just look out for graeme hart’s dingy smelling of fore skins and fifty dollar notes.
Here’s what’s happening. Since neo-liberalism has us standing on a street corner in fish nets and high heels promising a good time to anyone or thing with enough money to buy what ever they need us to provide we’ve surreptitiously become a commodity. We’ll be divided which will ultimately lead to the forfiture of entire country once we’re untethered from the crown and once @ Maori are stripped of the Treaty, financially suppressed, drug addicted and living in the sewers. Their wonderful culture will be in ruins and their mana and whanau will be even more lost soles just like the Hispanics, Mexicans, indigenous North Americans and any others who need to be crushed to enable the *alien psychopaths to feast upon us human, beings
* Not real, actual aliens because they’re likely not real of actual. Although… Watch Elon Musk talk? What is it about his top lip then?
What is top lip when he might come to demand? “ Ah… ok….. Ah…Ok. I, that is, me, have ah, bought New Zealand. Tha’s right. I bought you’re country but don’t worry. I’ll give you a generous time frame to enable all of you to move to Australia. I have boats! You can hire them! Excited yet! After that, and since you will effectively be trespassers on now my AO/NZ, I’ll unleash my army of Tesla Bots to aid in your ‘re-distribution’ to where ever your smoking flesh lands! How about that! Exciting right? “
“Suburban home owners are fine with this mass immigration policy and infrastructure gridlock because it pushes up the untaxed house valuations they have gotten used to gaining year in and year out.”
Suburban home owners also have children who can’t buy houses because of these inflated prices, and who couldn’t get jobs because of immigration. So no, we’re not all fine with it.
Boomers? Nah – just the usual corrupt suspects.
From time to time the tree of liberty must be refreshed – or corruption will expand indefinitely.
That’s no recipe for prosperity.
Maybe we should tax the immagrants?