At 2pm every day this week, The Spinoff will be counting down 100 local television moments of the decade. Today, moments 100-81.
100) Kiwi Steve makes it through to Conan, 2017
Not strictly local television, but this moment had about a one in a bajillion chance of ever happening, and yet somehow… it did. In the lead-up to the release of The Disaster Artist in 2017, a single billboard was erected in LA featuring James Franco as Tommy Wiseau and a mysterious hotline. Little did the general public know that the number connected with James Franco himself via a flip-phone, or that he occasionally answered it. Live on Conan, the flip phone started to ring and Franco decided to take it. It was only bloody Steve Newall, editor of Flicks, trying his luck during his lunch break in central Auckland. That’s the universe for ya – buzzy as hell. / Alex Casey
99) Live deep dive to nowhere, 2014
“Steinlager Pure were all in on William Trubridge’s attempt to break the record for deepest dive on a single breath, decorating Auckland with massive billboards. It never happened. The failure was absolute, a multi-pronged shambles of a presentation.” Like most things, it was partly Rawdon Christie’s fault. / Duncan Greive
98) Story’s story about the uncuttable ankle bracelets, 2016
After Corrections tried to convince us that their new ankle monitoring bracelets were indestructible, it only took a pair of kitchen scissors and the brute force of a Story cameraman to prove them wrong. How embarrassment. / Tara Ward
97) Ally spews on Bachelor Winter Games, 2018
The Bachelor Winter Games was a huge moment for our local reality stars to shine on the world stage, but nobody performed quite like Ally Thompson from The Bachelor NZ S3. Right before a televised kissing competition (it’s fine it’s just romance), she shuffled away to vomit profusely in a nearby loo. Ever the kiwi battler, five minutes later she was back in front of the judges and pashing her crush without a care in the world. God defend our free land. / AC
96) Ed Sheeran on Shortland Street, 2014
Long before he pissed off everyone by popping up in Game of Thrones for no reason, Mr Ed trotted down to Ferndale to strum on a guitar at The IV for no reason. Also, remember when KJ Apa was just a Shorty kid and not an international jumbo Netflix superstar? Take me back. / AC
The Spinoff’s Decade in Review is presented in partnership with Lindauer Free*, the perfect accompaniment to end-of-decade celebrations for those looking to moderate their alcohol content (*contains no more than 0.5% alc/vol).
95) Eric Young gives the backwards peace sign during the news, 2011
It was a private joke between colleagues that we weren’t supposed to see, but when Eric Young accidentally gave the ‘naughty fingers’ to the nation during the Prime nightly news, it proved more surprising than any Wellington rugby result. That was New Zealand today, this is Eric Young’s fingers tonight. / TW
94) The Project NZ’s la la launch, 2017
It’s not the, it’s not the, it’s not the same old song and daaaaaaaaance. / TW
93) The Brokenwood Merveilleux, 2015
Our answer to The Midsomer Murders, the grisly intrigue of The Brokenwood Mysteries found itself an unexpectedly huge audience in France after premiering on network television there in 2015. Raking in an audience of over three million every week, I think I speak for everyone in both Brokenwood and New Zealand when I say this: allez les bleus. / AC
92) Hilary Barry loses her shit over an emergency defecation situation, 2016
The only thing better than watching Hilz Baz on our screens is watching Hilz Baz struck down with an infectious case of the giggles, live on air. It was wrong on so many levels, yet like everything Hilary Barry did this decade, so right. / TW
91) Sonny Bill’s shirt rips, 2011
“It makes me think that there is a higher power” an anonymous source told The Spinoff. / AC
90) The emancipation of Lily, 2017
She was New Zealand’s most iconic furniture superhero, until 2017 delivered a thousand big sales and a brand new Lily. Old Lily disappeared into a blizzard of crazy prices, never to be seen again, and nothing seemed right with the world any more. / TW
89) The MKRNZ guy who looked heaps like Johnny Depp, 2017
88) The Block NZ’s Alex and Corban give Quinn & Ben $30,000 live on air, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0X8L4m7_Uc
Back when people made money on The Block NZ, Alex and Corban stunned the nation during the live final when they announced they were giving some of their $307,000 winnings to losing contestants Quinn and Ben. Alex and Corban were officially out the gate, before being out the Block gate was even a thing. / TW
86) Leidy Lei screams “I’m fucked” on House of Drag, 2018
Has there ever been a more honest reality TV contestant in the moment? Leidy Lei rode the back of the pack to third place in the first season of House of Drag, despite a simultaneous lack of polish and apparent lack of realisation that the show shot during the day. Her exclamation was entirely correct, entirely spontaneous and if she doesn’t lip-sync to that moment every gig she has, it is an opportunity lost. / Sam Brooks
85) Mike Hosking tries the Chewbacca mask on Seven Sharp, 2016
“Despite Toni prying open the jaws of the mask to release the Chewie noise, Mike could only deliver some alarmingly shrill complaints from beneath the plastic. No laughs. No tears. No buoyant joy. He tossed the mask back to Toni, questioning the craftmanship of the product and its relative retail value. ‘You must have a weird chin,’ Toni suggested.” A wonderful time with good friends. / AC
84) Cooking with Late Night Big Breakfast, 2015
How did they get away with this? Is this cancelled? Is Nadia Lim cancelled? Are whisks cancelled? Am I cancelled for laughing at this every single time? Essential questions of life. / AC
83) Colin Mathura-Jeffree wears a meat dress at the VNZMAs, 2011
Can you even believe that Lady Gaga’s meat dress happened this decade? Everything happens so damn much, crazy to think that just eight years later Colin would find room temperature meat turning on him in a very different way. / AC
82) Camilla’s ponytail slides off on Dancing With the Stars NZ, 2019
Forget Ariana Grande circa 2014. The real ponytail of the decade was the long one that slid off Camilla’s stumpy one circa 2019. It happened off-screen, but in true Nordic fashion, Camilla owned up to her ponytail clamouring for its own spinoff. And, in true unpredictable Tocker fashion, Julz held the stray platinum hair aloft like a trophy. It was a weird moment, and a reminder that sometimes even our extensions fail us. / SB
81) Trotie, 2011
Just a beaming boy, standing in front of a giant trophy, accidentally calling it a “trotie” in front of the entire world. The dubstep remix of John Key’s flub quickly took on a life of its own, forever a time capsule of the joyous wuuuub, wub wub wub viral videos of the early 2010s. Straight to the pool room – or should I say the trool tomb. / AC
The Auckland Harbour Bridge is made up of a lot of steel (Photo: Brendon O’Hagan).
The Auckland Harbour Bridge is made up of a lot of steel (Photo: Brendon O’Hagan).
Richard MacManus finds out how 5G will help Auckland smarten up by building better relationships with its citizens.
In its latest Smart Cities Index, Swedish company EasyPark ranked Auckland 58th out of 100 worldwide cities. Decidedly average. But it gets worse, I’m afraid. In the same list, Auckland was ranked 85th out of 100 cities for its traffic congestion and 73rd in parking.
Clearly Auckland has major infrastructure issues to sort out. Rapid population growth this century and under-investment in public transport, housing and other crucial infrastructure has left the city suffocating under its own weight.
However, technological developments present an opportunity for Auckland to start to solve some of its longest and largest problems. It’s a chance for Auckland to become a “smart city.”
5G is the latest generation in mobile networking and Vodafone has become the first provider to go live with a commercial 5G mobile network, rolling out in parts of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown. It’ll be a key technology for Auckland’s growth since it will enable fast, reliable internet connectivity across the entire city. Everything from the city’s trains and buses, to your electricity meter, and even the bins you dispose of your rubbish in, will get connected and become smarter. This simply has to happen if Auckland is to address its infrastructure problems.
Motoring misery: Auckland’s obvious infrastructure issues are also its biggest handbrakes (Photo: Getty.)
But what is a “smart city” anyway? It’s not just about using technology to upgrade a city’s infrastructure. It’s also about the residents of a city being more aware of what’s going on around them. Even better, giving people the tools and data to interact with their city and make positive changes – for both themselves and the environment.
According to Usman Haque, the founding partner of London-based urban technologies company Umbrellium, a smart city is ultimately about the relationship citizens have with their city. He prefers to use the phrase “engaging cities” rather than smart cities, because it puts the needs of people first.
“Very often what you’re looking to do is to bring about improvements through people’s relationship to their city,” Haque told me, “and their relationship to each other.”
With the emerging “Internet of Things” (IOT), tens of thousands of objects throughout Auckland will eventually get connected to the Internet via tiny sensors.
For Michelle Sharp, Head of IOT at Vodafone New Zealand, the key is for these types of solutions to go “beyond just connectivity.” It’s about getting useful data from our surroundings, which we can use to make positive changes in our daily urban lives.
New Zealand has so far been an early adopter in IOT, at least according to Vodafone’s global rollout of smart objects.
“Around the world, Vodafone has over 80 million IOT connected things across 30 countries,” Sharp said, with 1.6 million of them being in New Zealand.
I spoke to Matt Montgomery, Head of Innovation at Auckland Council, to find out how Auckland plans to use technology to help make the city smarter. A key concept in Auckland Council’s future plans, Montgomery told me, is something called a “digital twin.” This refers to “a digital representation of a physical object” in the city’s infrastructure, based on data provided by tiny sensors. The goal is to understand how each object – for example a building or a road – is performing.
It’s important to note that Auckland doesn’t yet have any of these digital twins in operation. But here’s how it could work in Auckland. Montgomery gave the example of adding sensors to the City Rail Link (CRL), to give people a better train experience.
“You might have sensors in the platform which tell you how many people are waiting to get onto the train, and sensors on the train which would tell you how many people are currently sat on the train. Then [the system] will help people align themselves on the platform, to ensure they are getting in the right door where there’s the right number of vacant seats.”
An artists impression of the Karangahape Road train station as part of the CRL.
That train network could also integrate with other transport sensors, to provide a better overall transport experience for Auckland commuters.
“So if you’ve got a big flood of people coming out of one station,” said Montgomery, “you can dynamically adapt some of the traffic lights around that area, so you can safely get people to cross the nearby roads, and distribute them across the city more easily.”
To help make sense of all this projected sensor data, Auckland Council is building an Internet of Things network and a central platform.
“My team has been a pioneer in the development of a low cost, open source Internet of Things architecture,” Montgomery told me, “which essentially democratises a lot of this technology and enables every organisation to connect with this network and share in the opportunity.”
Currently, there are only around two dozen connected objects in Auckland Council’s IOT network, although it expects to “ramp this up significantly starting in February.” Montgomery listed some of the initial use cases being tested.
“We’ve got water quality sensors out in the streams looking for pollution events, we’ve got air quality sensors – which also showed what was going on during the Convention Centre fire – and we’ve got sensors in rubbish bins telling us when the bins are full and looking for patterns.”
A common theme in Auckland Council’s IOT projects is an environmental focus. The rubbish bin sensors, for instance, show how and when people are filling up the city’s bins. That helps the Council optimise collections and ultimately reduces the amount of rubbish clogging up streets.
Collecting and analysing data throughout the city is one thing. But we also need new design ideas, to help citizens understand and engage with that data.
Cam Perkins leads the City Centre Project Design team at Auckland Council. He’s especially passionate about tackling air pollution in the cities. He thinks interactive LED signs in Auckland Central could help with data transparency, and more importantly get people thinking about “where we are right now and where we need to get to.”
“Imagine you’re walking down Queen St,” Perkins told me, “and there’s this incredible LED – like a light art piece – that shows in real time what the air quality in that particular part of the city is. You could go up and engage with that, and see that there’s a problem. That starts a discussion with the community and that community has a discussion with the politicians, and that’s how we get stuff done.”
It’s also crucial to get city occupants to think about their urban environment in new – and perhaps unexpected – ways. Usman Haque of Umbrellium told me about an interesting experiment he was involved with in Toronto.
“In one of my own projects, Flightpath Toronto, we looked at how to develop a public transportation system that could be rapidly deployed and re-deployed, specifically so that citizen engagement and decision making were at the heart of the process.”
In that project, Haque and his collaborators used a zip line (a pulley suspended on a cable) to ‘fly’ people over a public square in Toronto. It was all about getting people to “re-imagine the city and the way we move through it.”
Okay, so flying like a bird over Aotea Square probably isn’t viable for Auckland – at least until those long-promised future jet packs arrive. But the point of Haque’s Toronto project was, as he put it, to prompt people to “rediscover the ‘sport’ in transport, and to excite imaginative possibilities for our shared urban infrastructure.”
Andrew Gurr is CEO of Fusion Networks, a local IT company that has implemented transport technologies in Auckland – and other parts of NZ – for about ten years now. Gurr is also Vice President of the ITS organisation in New Zealand (Intelligent Transportation Systems), so he’s at the cutting edge of technology solutions for transport.
One of the big projects Fusion is involved with is Auckland’s Waterview Tunnel. At 2.4km, it’s New Zealand’s longest road tunnel and arguably its most technologically sophisticated.
“Waterview was the biggest national project that’s been undertaken in quite some time,” Gurr said to me, “and there’s a significant amount of technology in the tunnel; for operations, safety, speed management, and monitoring of traffic.”
Britomart train station (Photo: Getty Images).
I asked Gurr how New Zealand – and Auckland in particular – compare globally, in terms of transport technology:
“Auckland is a long way ahead on a worldwide stage,” he said, “in terms of trying to automate and manage a transport network.” He pointed to the technology Auckland Transport uses to link together all its different modes of transport, including the use of advanced AI software to power safety and traffic optimisation for Auckland’s CCTV cameras.
Where New Zealand, in Gurr’s view, is falling behind globally is with connected vehicles. By that he means cars being able to connect to city infrastructure, mostly for safety purposes – think smart traffic lights, sensors in busy tunnels, and the like.
The problem, he says, is that NZ has no automotive manufacturers and so we end up importing cars from different parts of the world. Which means the cars on our roads often adhere to different networking standards, making it difficult for our transport authorities to implement technology that connects directly to the cars.
I then asked Gurr what role he thinks technology has to play in the larger context of creating a smart city.
“It will give people the opportunity to change the way they move around the city,” he replied.
Gurr thinks that “different modes of mobility,” like cycling and electric vehicles, together with “the connectivity of the different public transport systems” will show Aucklanders how to “move around their city with the least [environmental] impact.”
That’s something Auckland Council’s Cam Perkins has been thinking a lot about too.
“Our next step from a public transport point of view,” Perkins told me, “is to look at fine-grain ways to move around the city.”
This could include blocking off inner-city streets to private cars, Perkins said. He suggested that “smaller autonomous vehicles” could help replace those cars, especially for people with mobility issues.
The future of Auckland? (Photo by Warner Bros./Courtesy of Getty Images)
Ideally, those autonomous cars would be electric, which would help Auckland City achieve the “zero emissions” goals it has set itself for the future.
I can’t help feeling though that we’re a long way from having autonomous vehicles zipping around Auckland City. Even in the birthplace of autonomous cars, Silicon Valley, residents are squeamish about their roads being used to test self-driving cars.
But as Fusion Networks CEO Gurr pointed out, how are we ever going to get to the autonomous car era if we don’t at least test the technology?
“There’s a lot of fear around things like autonomous cars,” Gurr said, “and just having them be present and visible will help.”
There is one massive issue that must be resolved before smart city technology gets widely deployed: privacy. It’s all very well having smart recycling bins in your home, but you wouldn’t want your neighbour to dox you on social media if you accidentally put a plastic milk carton in the general waste bin.
For Vodafone’s Michelle Sharp, the key is to focus on aggregate data. She thinks new technologies like 5G make capturing this data more secure.
“We have methods to make sure that the aggregated data is being used to solve a problem, not to breach anyone’s privacy.”
Privacy was a big reason why a Google affiliated smart city development in Toronto was drastically scaled back recently.
Michelle Sharp, Head of Internet of Things at Vodafone New Zealand (Image: supplied)
At the end of October, Google sister company Sidewalk Labs got approval for a 12 acre hi-tech waterfront neighbourhood in Toronto. Originally it was supposed to be 190 acres. Privacy concerns and a perceived “adversarial” attitude by Sidewalk Labs towards local developers caused Toronto authorities to scale it back. Final approval to start building will be considered in March next year, after a period of public consultation.
What became clear in Toronto is that Sidewalk Labs failed to build trust with Toronto’s authorities and residents for such a large public works project.
“It’s a cliche, but trust has to be earned,” Usman Haque told me in reference to Sidewalk Labs. “Especially when you’re involved in innovation – which is inherently about risk – the journey has to be one that’s taken together.”
Despite these initial political struggles, the Sidewalk Labs project is tantalising for smart city advocates and could be a blueprint for Auckland. With its emphasis on inner city walking or cycling, its “climate-positive” claim to cut greenhouse gases by 89%, and its promise of affordable and inclusive housing, Sidewalk Labs has seemingly figured out the ideal city of the future.
But ultimately it will come back to the question: who’s in control? Toronto authorities and citizens have made clear they don’t want it to be Google.
Clearly Auckland has a lot of work to do to re-build public transport in the city, along with continuing to build out its nascent IOT network and make tens of thousands of city objects ‘smart’.
The key to success, other than getting funding for the big ticket items like a light rail system and the ‘digital twins’ project, will be engaging with Aucklanders. That means assuring people they can access city data easily – everything from rubbish bins to transport infrastructure. Not only that, but convincing residents they can use all that data to improve both their daily urban experience and the environment.
I liked how Usman Haque put it, that it’s about people having “a sense of agency, rather than just engagement.”
If you’re an Auckland resident, you’ll know it’s a smart city only once you have proof you’re making a difference. Maybe it’s the data that tells you you’re leaving a smaller carbon footprint every time you cross the city, maybe it’s those LED screens that give you real-time facts about air pollution, or maybe it’s finally being convinced that taking the bus or train to work is more efficient all round.
So let’s hope Auckland Council – and the government – keep residents top of mind as they implement smart city technologies. Because in the end, it’ll be about how Aucklanders use all that data that will make the difference.
