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GEORGE WOOD CONSULTS HIS FELINE OVERLORD. PHOTO: JOSE BARBOSA
GEORGE WOOD CONSULTS HIS FELINE OVERLORD. PHOTO: JOSE BARBOSA

AucklandJuly 25, 2016

We found it: the stray cat who’s ruining Auckland

GEORGE WOOD CONSULTS HIS FELINE OVERLORD. PHOTO: JOSE BARBOSA
GEORGE WOOD CONSULTS HIS FELINE OVERLORD. PHOTO: JOSE BARBOSA

We found the the evil goblin sabotaging Auckland’s future. It’s an adorable cat who lives in a bus stop in Northcote Point.

Why is it so hard to make good things happen in Auckland?

Every positive project proposed for the city seems to have to hack through a horde of perma-frowning objectors. Everyone from Mayor Robbie to Len Brown has had to navigate a gauntlet of violently nostalgic greybeards to get approval for anything resembling a good thing.

It’s like there’s a force holding the city back. A psychic overlord working to maroon us in a 1940s time prison.

If you think that’s far-fetched; think again. Today, we can reveal the true identity of Auckland’s villainous hope thief.

We found the culprit after he slipped up and appeared in the sparsely populated back channels of YouTube, in a video starring one of his supplicants, councillor George Wood.

At exactly 3 minutes and 23 seconds into his anti-SkyPath propaganda film, Wood does something seemingly unusual: he approaches a cat for advice. “We’re now further down Northcote Point. I’m just having a talk to one of the residents here,” he says, gently stroking a message out of the animal’s feline mind.

At first it seems concerning that a sitting councillor is taking advice from a cat. Should a man charged with deciding the future of our largest city really be taking telepathic transport tips from an animal with a brain the size of a walnut?

But watch the clip.

Think about what the cat’s saying.

Its quote could be the bugle call for every angry ratepayer in the last two decades; the fiery sigil of House Boomer.

It’s a perfect, concise summation of everything that’s holding Auckland back.

CatQuote

Look at the City Rail Link: a transparently necessary project held up for years by people who said it was too expensive, unpopular, or unfeasible.

Were Gerry Brownlee and Steven Joyce making candlelit pilgrimages to Northcote Point to prostrate themselves before the glowing eyes of their cat lord? The answer is undoubtedly yes.

CatGerry

Or SkyPath – perhaps the most obviously good project in New Zealand. It was approved last week after roughly 14,327 hours of inexplicable debate. A man gave up nearly every second of his free time for a decade to make it happen despite being written off as a “cycling freak”.

In the end, almost everyone relented to sanity and agreed the project should go ahead. Everyone but the NRA in Northcote Point, where the cat’s whispers resound the strongest, echoing in the clatter of car wheels outside Bridgeway Cinema; whistling through the streets with malign force.

It’s the same with just about every major progressive project.

Britomart. Cat.

Wynyard Quarter. Cat.

The HOP card. Congestion charges. Trains on the second harbour crossing. Cat. Cat. Cat.

Now the Unitary Plan is coming up to its final hurdle. A summary of the document – perhaps the most important  in Auckland’s history – is set to be presented to council on Wednesday.

Already the cat is mustering his forces.

He performed his dark dance across the minds of his staunchest supporters in a council meeting back in February.

But that was just a skirmish. The real battle for Auckland’s future begins this week. He will be opposing density, saying you can’t have houses for poor or young people in Herne Bay; or that three-storey apartments would sully the untouched beauty of places like Mission Bay or Kohimarama.

CatMissionBay
THERE ARE ALREADY APARTMENTS IN MISSION BAY, YOU MORONS. PHOTO: BARFOOT & THOMPSON

He must be opposed. This malevolent cat lord has held our city in his vice-like grip for too long.

It’s time to take it back.


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Keep going!
A CRH high-speed train runs across Urumqi city during its test run in China.  (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)
A CRH high-speed train runs across Urumqi city during its test run in China. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)

OPINIONSocietyJuly 22, 2016

Auckland must embrace the exponential economy – or risk being left behind

A CRH high-speed train runs across Urumqi city during its test run in China.  (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)
A CRH high-speed train runs across Urumqi city during its test run in China. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)

Spark Ventures CEO Rod Snodgrass on what the ‘exponential economy’ might bring, and how Auckland might tap into it to accelerate its transformation.

There’s plenty of noise going on about the future of Auckland, from familiar and unfamiliar voices. That’s no surprise – we all have a vested interest in inhabiting the world’s most liveable city. And in having a city that will attract diverse global talent in a world where the war for talent is increasingly ferocious.

So, here’s a few more unsolicited reckons to add to the mix.

Like it or not (and travel to some of the more remote parts of New Zealand and loudly espouse this view at the local pub to see how well it goes down) Auckland is New Zealand’s only city of international scale, in a world where global ‘city-states’ increasingly dominate, particularly in the war for talent.

Given global urbanisation trends and Auckland’s projected growth, it will become even more important as the economic centre of gravity for our nation. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, if we can get our collective act together, and super-charge Auckland as a city, everyone in the country will benefit.

This notion isn’t new by any means – there are many very big brains that have been working on this for decades, with plenty of great progress to show for it.

The change is evident. I remember Auckland in the ‘80s when I first came here for University, and while there is plenty I miss about those days, it’s undeniable Auckland is a much more international city today – and that is a good thing. So please don’t read this as a criticism of the great work being done around Auckland – if anything this is a plea for us to put aside our different affiliations and somewhat self-absorbed Twitter battles and paddle the Auckland waka even harder.

A CRH high-speed train runs across Urumqi city during its test run in China. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)
A CRH high-speed train runs across Urumqi city during its test run in China. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)

What provides the opportunity before us is the Exponential Economy. There’s been many books written about this but I’ll make it brief: essentially, smart connected accelerating technologies are driving exponential change around the world. Basically a heck of a lot of change, fast. The only real debate is how fast these exponential trends will occur and where they will impact. Because the impacts will be huge and everything will change.

In my day job at Spark it’s got us thinking a lot about how a company like ours can build the platforms that increasingly connect and enable homes, transport, cities, businesses, healthcare, entertainment and energy amongst others. For Auckland as a city, the real opportunity is to get ahead of the game and drive exponential change.

We need to unleash Auckland.

The reality is that all international cities are looking at how to take advantage of this to some degree – those which do it better and quicker will become more attractive places to live, and will reap more of the social and economic rewards than the others. In the global competition for talent, speed wins.

And speeding up will need a lot of coordinated action for something that simply can’t be done by any single body alone – ‘Government or Council should fix it’ isn’t really a rallying cry, it’s an abrogation of our collective responsibility. It requires a coalition of the willing where we all must play a part.

For Auckland to win in this brave new world, it effectively needs to become a platform for its citizens. That platform needs to deliver a smarter, safer, healthier and more fun city for us where we live, work and play. When thinking about what that means, cities need:

  • To win the war for talent
  • To be adaptive
  • To have open systems e.g. open data
  • To leverage technology and innovation to unleash capacity
  • To understand their unfair advantage

So far, so theoretical. But it isn’t theoretical anymore. The technology to create the Smart City is already available and being implemented. Other cities have already embarked on this path including San Francisco and Barcelona to name just two. The race is real. While predicting the future is a mug’s game, in 10 years, a ‘Smart’ Auckland could lead to:

  • A place where smart kids from around New Zealand and around the world want to come and work and play and live – why not Auckland rather than New York or San Francisco or Berlin or Barcelona or Shanghai or Sydney?
  • A city that attracts huge amounts of innovation and investment from offshore, eager to do business with all our city and the people in it – a city that proactively chases and welcomes talent and innovation and those willing to invest in it.
  • A higher-income city, where the influx of talent, innovation, capital and technology capability drives businesses higher up the value chain and spawns a myriad of exciting new start-ups
  • A city where public, private and academic interests work better together and ‘hunt as a pack’ to invest in and commercialise our great ideas, creating hundreds of new businesses each year and thousands of new jobs
  • A city with a significantly reduced need for new (and old) roads and private cars – with autonomous vehicles utilised at up to nine times the rate of the average car today will it mean the end of the steering wheel in our lifetime? Imagine all the unleashed capacity – roads, car parks and garages repurposed. Not to mention the reduced emissions and smaller city carbon footprint.
  • A city renowned for electric vehicle and electric bicycle use, with thousands of EV chargers and top-up points installed in things like old phone booths, helping residents and visitors get around easily and helping open up public spaces
  • A city-wide wireless data network delivering high-speed connectivity to everyone across the city and helping to bridge the digital divide in business and education
  • A city with smart public services such as street lighting that taps into renewable energy sources, and is only activated when needed
  • A city with all buses and commercial vehicles kitted out with smart camera technology, making our roads significantly safer for pedestrians and cyclists
  • A city where rubbish is only collected when the bins are full, rather than every week regardless, because sensors let the collectors know.
  • An open-data network (or series of networks) allowing thousands of kiwi developers and businesses to create cool new apps and digital services on the back of a treasure-trove of publicly available information
  • A city that uses data and technology to better protect and foster the unfair advantages that Auckland has of beautiful harbours, coastline, nightlife, multiculturalism and a thriving arts and culture scene
  • A city that is so connected to the Internet of Things, and with access to the massive amounts of data created, that it becomes, effectively, an open platform for its citizens to do, virtually, anything. Imagine the possibilities.

I’m a keen, albeit average, surfer, so I think of this as a wave that we need to catch ahead of other cities. Catch the wave of the Exponential Economy, back each other to collectively make the bold decisions that need to be made, focus on the 95% of things we can all agree on rather than obsess on the 5% we can’t and Auckland really can be the world’s most liveable city.

But wait there's more!