MEDIAWATCH: Bryce Edwards vs the shallowness of the Wellington Left Professional Managerial Class
A blistering analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards over the shallowness of the Wellington Left Professional Managerial Class.
The audacity they are running a PR campaign to eclipse their shallowness is gasp inducing…
City Council spin
The WCC is in financial disarray and currently considering cuts across the board in services to the public. But the areas deemed off limits for cuts are the PR and senior management roles – the types of people that are increasingly referred to in Wellington as the “professional managerial class”.
This part of the Council has just launched a new billboard and t-shirt campaign called “Positively Pōneke”, which the WCC’s economic wellbeing manager Anna Calver says is designed to “help keep people aware of all the good change under way” and bring “those absolutely positive vibes to a hoarding near you”. The big public relations campaign will, according to the council, get Wellingtonians “to stop grumbling about our brilliant city” – especially the “grumbling” journalists who have been reporting on the local politicians’ infighting and waste of ratepayers’ money. This was revealed yesterday by one of the grumbling journalists – Andrea Vance in her Post article, Council’s ‘spin spend’ revealed (paywalled)
…TDB has blogged numerous times regarding the self-serving Public Service culture alongside the Wellington Left Professional Managerial Class and how their collective incompetence and short sighted vision has blunted true progress on the issues the Left claim to champion…
Wellington public service PR and comms have been reported to have increased by more than 50 per cent in recent years, and similarly, the local government is now employing huge numbers. Vance reports that the WCC Comms budget has grown to $5.3m: “The list seen by The Post shows 54 in the comms team, though the council claims the number is 47.1. Seven are managers and seven create “content”, including three producers and a photographer/videographer. Four people are hired specifically to share the council’s messaging via social media, and there are seven graphic designers.”
The WCC had previously also been spending millions more via the local government agency Let’s Get Wellington Moving. Much of the budget of LGWM – which was recently abolished by the new National-led Government – was spent on consultants, and its biggest output was in terms of communications rather than building any infrastructure.
…The legacy of the crony capitalism of the Wellington Lef’ts Professional Managerial Class is less an exercise in the brutal use of political force to change a rigged system of capitalism and more incremental meaninglessness for a class who have all got their foot on the first rung of the middle class property ladder and have zero intention of blunting their privilege.
When compared to the cavalcade of crony privatisation capitalism National, ACT and NZ First intend to ram through, the Wellington Left’s Professional Managerial Class are Absolutely Positively Basic…
Leaked emails reveal new spat among Wellington City councillors
More than just Reading between the lines
Health not the only system ailing
Time for the public sector to take out the rubbish
In each we see the Wellington Left’s Professional Managerial Class propping up social services for their virtue signalling wokeness rather than their delivery and the stuff they did manage to save are pointless corporate welfare deals at the cost of the people.
Currently, the biggest issue of contention at the Wellington City Council is Mayor Tory Whanau’s secret negotiations to buy land in Courtenay Place under a cinema complex, giving the multinational Reading Cinemas $32m so they can more easily afford to earthquake-strengthen their building. The Council is meeting today to decide on this.
The biggest concern about the deal is that it amounts to “corporate welfare” and sloppy management of ratepayers’ funds during a time of WCC’s financial crisis. But the secrecy of the deal is also highly controversial, which led a Council insider to blow the whistle, leaking details to the media. The Mayor then spent $43,000 hiring Linda Clark to hunt down who leaked it, but she came up with nothing.
…The Wellington Bureaucracy is a culture war of woke middle class Identity Politics aspirations backed with State funding, they may aesthetically be Left but they sure as fuck aren’t economically Left. To brand the Public Service as ‘Left’ misdiagnoses the disease, symptom and patient!
The real power struggle in NZ isn’t Left vs Right, it’s between the Professional Managerial Class Corporate Consultants who influence policy to maintain their dominance and profit margins vs the self serving Public Service wanting to spend taxpayer money on their latest glass palace.
The Politicians are merely a masquerade of democracy to ensure participation that generates legitimacy, but the real power is between the Corporate Consultants who influence all policy to keep NZ deregulated and the self serving Public Service who are in it for their own fiefdoms.
The only chance any truly progressive movement gets in NZ politics is to ram your changes through in the first 100 days of any new Government.
That stops the self serving Public Service from stymieing your agenda and it stops the corporates from influencing it.
If we want true progressive policy to tax the rich and remove costs from peoples lives, it needs to be rammed through in the first 100 days or it won’t happen.
That’s why Labour have been so feckless and useless, they had no 100 day plan in 2017 and they didn’t expect to win an MMP majority in 2020.
They effectively became captured by the self serving Public Service and the Corporate Consultants.
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Throughout the U.S. alliance countries, the press barons and media moguls refuse to report the obvious: Reaganomics has lead to collapsing infrastructure and failing public services. Not to mention falling real wages, poor housing and terrible public safety.
The capital city “fiscal crisis” is manufactured — they under-taxed property owners for years, along with nearly all the other city/borough/county (‘district’) councils. Recall that this is the same city council that was loudly proclaiming that the world would overheat at any minute, and then simultaneously destroyed the entire electric trolley-bus network, and said it had no plans to make the tramways operational again either.
It’s not the left – it’s everyone. This is the problem with treating senior public servants like private enterprise CEOs seems to me. They get a huge salary and a similarly sized sense of entitlement. You never saw these huge PR departments when they were actually servants of the public. And this has been true ever since Roger Douglas was let loose, so it’s not just this council. When my son was a kid years ago he asked me once “What does the council do?” I said well it looks after the parks and collects the rubbish and fixes the water pipes and so on. I was obviously wrong about the last one, and all I can say is what the hell were you doing all this time.
Guerilla surgeon. How right you are. If the Wellington City Council were seen to be doing a good job, then they would not have to be hiring PR people to try and make us like them. It’s the Meghan Markle syndrome, but we ain’t that dumb.
Their rubbish collectors leave bits and pieces in their wake, and the street cleaners sweep cans, bottles and bumf into the storm water drains, except, I assume in well- heeled places like Oriental Bay – or Tawa, the refuge of boring public servanty types where property values don’t fluctuate too much. If they had half the brains of Singapore they could reap a fortune fining litter bugs who do their grubby best to make the capital’s streets look like the road to the tip in a southerly wind. Their inexplicable need to proclaim their LGBTQ proclivities with a stupid rainbow pedestrian crossing while the pedestrians sidestep potholes in the pavement and random geysers in the suburbs, is school council level decision-making.
Kristoff R rightly laments the destruction of the effective trolley bus network, but fortunately it’s a fairly walkable little town, although this can be a challenge on cold winter nights tired after work with half the street lights dim or defunct, while the electricity lines owner gets richer over in HongKong, and everyday folk tussle with themselves about the cost of turning heaters on if they get home without wrecking their ankles or axles.
Covid changed the whole world, and the WCC’s secretive shenanigans about the Reading Complex is a futile turning-back-the-clock exercise when they should be addressing the big stuff instead of proclaiming, “ Look at us, we’re nice.” No.
There are too many chiefs and not enough Indians! Too much talkfest, too many egos, zero experience in running a large organization, zero experience in managing infrastructure, and they bicker like children in the playground.
Benny. But at least Wellington will be a Te Reo city by 2030 thanks to the prioritising of yet another imperious departed female councillor, and bewildered cruise ship tourists will have no idea what anyone is talking about, or where they even are, if they de-colonialise the street names as well.