Banks and the South Auckland bashers

Written By: - Date published: 1:32 pm, October 2nd, 2010 - 27 comments
Categories: auckland supercity, john banks, local government, melissa lee - Tags: , , ,

On Thursday I posted on John Banks bashing South Auckland:

A political salvo aimed at wounding the leadership aspirations of Manukau mayor Len Brown is still causing outcry in South Auckland tonight. Last night on the Close Up debate, Banks told Brown he didn’t “want South Auckland replicated across the North Shore and across all of Auckland”.

Banks said Brown had “led a social disaster, his city has been a social disaster for Auckland”. Brown, Banks’ main rival for the role of Super City mayor said today Banks’ comments were out of line. … Banks is also being criticised by long-time residents of South Auckland. “I think his comments are very divisive, they are very old fashioned. How on earth can one man lead one city when he has a very entrenched view about South Auckland?,” said Colleen Brown, a Manukau City Councillor.

“I have lived here for 20 years, I love the place, I choose to live here, so do a lot of other people. As a mayor of a city you need to have a political awareness of what to say and what not to say and he he’s alienated a very huge number of people by these comments which is unwarranted in my view.”

This was not an off the cuff comment by Banks – bashing South Auckland is part of his “strategy”. It’s in his robo-phoning pitch:

Jessica received a charming, recorded cold-call from the John Banks campaign. “Apparently if I vote for Len Brown, he’ll hike my rates and send the money to South Auckland to pay for its crime and problems. Gee, I thought I moved to Remuera so I wouldn’t have to think about those less prosperous than me. How can they assume that just because I live in Remuera I’ll automatically have a ‘xenophobic’ view of South Auckland? This is why I did not vote for John Banks.”

Charming. In Thursday’s post I pointed out the similarity to National Party flameout Melissa Lee, who blew her own My Albert by election campaign out of the water by evoking similar stereotypes about South Auckland. And no surprise now to find the unfortunate Cameron Slater playing the same game.

Nice one “Banksie”. You can tell a politician by the ideological company they keep.

27 comments on “Banks and the South Auckland bashers ”

  1. Irascible 1

    As a person who lives in South Auckland Cameron Slater is probably the only real example of the sort of person the city should be quit of as he gives the area such a bad name.

  2. Draco T Bastard 2

    I’m still amazed that supposedly serious journalists actually ask Slater anything at all.

  3. I am constantly amazed just how wrong you always get things.

    I picked up on the person moaning about roller doors and told them they knew nothing of South Auckland, that their fortress North Shore mentality was what was killing the prospects of a new Super City which should have an aim of raising everyones standard of living, not building walls around their standard of living to stop other people having a go.

    You have got this so wrong, but then again, you wouldn’t want to spoil a good (made up) story.

    • IrishBill 3.1

      A made up story? Isn’t that your cue to fraudulently edit an interview or something?

    • millsy 3.2

      Hey Blubberboy – I bet youre going to sell of the parks, pools and libraries if you get elected..

      • RobertM 3.2.1

        I quite like the Devonport library. Its rather leafy and has one of the better selections of the suburban libraries. But we need a somewhat less PC buying policy. More books on the actual fighting in the American civil war rather than Jeffersons sex life.
        However my impression of the North Shore is that it needs more bars and clubs. Devonport needs more pubs for the Navy to have runs in. A branch of Spearment Rhino, possibly.

  4. r0b 4

    I am constantly amazed just how wrong you always get things.

    I am constantly amazed at how frequently you lie and then gloat about it. So to each their own I guess.

    Any mistake I make is an honest one. If The Herald article linked has portrayed you incorrectly then I apologise for perpetuating the error. Which is more than you ever do for the victims of your deliberate lies. Think about it Cameron.

  5. The Herald article didn’t portray me incorrectly, you did, making a leap to fit a meme that you want to run.

    That’s fine, you do that, I don’t mind, usually I don’t get the ability to say anything but for some reason today I am allowed to post comments, I can’t imagine that lasting long.

    The point is though, at public meetings most of the other candidates have pandered to the fortress North Shore mentality, at Campbells Bay it was particularly ironic since I had to crawl in a window to open up the hall because the organiser had locked his keys inside.

    I was simply pointing out that building walls around themselves wasn’t going to help, that we needed to be moving forward together as a city, not using natural or artificial boundaries to create differences.

    I spend most days of the week in South Auckland, I help a friend mentor kids at a decile 2 school in Mangere, and I am constantly disgusted that politicians who talk all about the “poor” actually have no idea how it really is.

    There is a reason why people in South Auckland want to move to the North Shore, or indeed anywhere, it’s because despite 60 years of socialism solutions of one type or another or one colour or another they still live the same way they always have.

    We need to wake up, because to continue doing the same things will continue to get the same results.

    Whatever has been done in the past 20 years to “help” seems to have missed the target.

    • IrishBill 5.1

      You appear to have lived through a different 20 years than everyone else. The last thing anyone, left or right, would claim was that the last two or three decades have seen a shift toward socialism.

      South Auckland in the days before rogernomics wasn’t exactly bed of roses but it was a lot better than it is now.

      I ‘ll agree with you that something needs to change but it sure as hell isn’t a shift further right.

    • Colonial Viper 5.2

      Whatever has been done in the past 20 years to “help” seems to have missed the target.

      I suppose you are talking abour Rogernomics and Ruthanasia here.

    • r0b 6.1

      If you use the “Reply” link at the bottom of a comment then your reply appears underneath. Makes it easier to hold sub-conversations within the general flow of comments.

  6. If chucking money at the problem would make it go away is the solution then it was a damn silly question.

    Literally billions has been poured into solutions to alleviate poverty, and you know what..its still there.

    The people who have benefited are the alleged social services organisations. I know of at least three that have been the beneficiary of millions of dollars per annum, they have nice flash offices, in fact better offices than the people actually employing people in the same street, and nice flash leased cars, and brand new office furniture and an IT system only a government department could design and the people they are meant to be “helping” are just as poor as they ever were.

    Same goes for the myriad of “training” institutions. the only people being helped by those are the shareholders of the “training” institutions.

    The system is broken, it was broken under Labour and now it is more broken under National.

    In my opinion there are no parties or politicians in parliament that actually have any idea as to possible solutions.

    A pox on all their houses.

    • IrishBill 7.1

      It was broken by the fourth labour government and then the next national government stuck the boot in just to be sure. The social service organisations are, and have always been, ambulance at the bottom of the cliff answers to a broader economic problem.

      The simple matter is that if you take away the ability of people to earn a decent living and instead set the system to divert the gains of their productivity into the hands of a few shareholders then no amount of band-aids will stem the bleed.

      I understand you are reasonably far right. I’d like to know how you think further liberalising the economy would help the poor of south Auckland.

      • Whaleoil 7.1.1

        I wouldn’t describe myself as reasonably far right. Someone who is reasonably far right according to your description wouldn’t go Vanuatu and help establish a biofuels plant to enable a school to be come self sufficient in fuel using their own coconut plantation. They actually now make enough to be able to sell surplus to resorts for their generators, they make far more now than they did making copra. Plus they get the added benefit of having enough fuel to run their generators pretty much 24/7 instead of only 6 hours per day.

        Anyway I digress. There isn’t a golden solution, but for sure it isn’t handing over money. Making the economy stronger and encouraging business to employ people is what is needed. But what we get is billions in corporate welfare for failing finance companies and billions if rural welfare for farmers who get bad weather.

        I am working on some posts, due soon, that will show that our undying love for the rural sector in New Zealand is actually strangling us to death. They actually take more than they give and until National divests itself of their rural rump they will continue to miss the point.

        The undue haste with which SCF was bailed out and then the farmers in Southland shows just how out of whack we have become.

        We haven’t learned a thing in the last 30 years.

        Have I got the solutions? no, but then at least I am trying to look for something which is more than can be said for anyone in parliament.

        • IrishBill 7.1.1.1

          When you write these posts you would do well to think about the reserve back act and the way it rewards speculators at the expense of those who actually make things.

          It’s not the rural rump that has done so much damage. It’s the finance sector.

          • Whaleoil 7.1.1.1.1

            Them too, but the rural rump use the finance sector to hold onto their farms in the desperate hope that land values will go up and they can cash out leaving the succeeding generations loaded with debt, just as soon as they do cash out they then want to stop everyone else doing it.

            The manipulations by the finance sector and rural sector have been going on for generations.

            • IrishBill 7.1.1.1.1.1

              Nope, just for the last generation (assuming a generation to be about 25 years). Before that we regulated that kind of absurdity.

            • Zaphod Beeblebrox 7.1.1.1.1.2

              In NZ pretty well all the construction industry, not to mention road-builders are being sponsored by government largesse at the moment. Six or the seven largest building projects in teh country are government financed. If you are unhappy about the amount of welfare, maybe you should direct your ire to the multitude of builders, consultants and building material companies that suck off the public teat.

        • millsy 7.1.1.2

          Blubberboy, the simple fact is, that if it wasant for the welfare state that you hate so much, you yourself would be on the street in a cardboard box. Lets face facts. That sickness benefit you drew after the insurance barons stopped your payout saved from from destitution. Sure you may have lost your house, but its not like you ended up on the street.

          So before you start calling for the destruction of the welfare state, please, just think about that.

          [Deleted – I’d rather we didn’t get so personal Millsy. — r0b]

    • Colonial Viper 7.2

      Literally billions has been poured into solutions to alleviate poverty, and you know what..its still there.

      That’s what you get when you have a system which is determined to suppress pay and conditions for the very many, and let the very few at the top rake in all the productivity and capital gains occuring in marketplace.

      Trying to paper over that failure of a system by simple handouts is never really going to solve the problem is it? It would take a fundamental rejigging of the system to ensure that inequity is simply not perpetuated in ever increasing and unsustainable cycles.

      But no party seems to have the vision or the stomach for it currently.

    • RobertM 7.3

      In part the problem is alturism. The feel good feeling the left get, from doing the ‘right’ thing-and trying to help, intervening or interfering. Of course there’s a venal side to it, those jobs in social work,psychiatric nursing, counselling are a step up for people who would probably be factory workers, shop salesman or sex workers. Maybe they would actually help more people if they worked as a beautician, in a cafe, as a hairresser or prostitute. Maybe the best social work, conselling and therapy or even talk psychiatry is provided by sex workers. Certainly there are quite a few who moonlight in both professions.
      Ultimately to be healthy people need a clean comfortable flat, adequate money and company which in reality for a lot of people means sex. But generally speaking I think social workers, consellors, CYPS even, Income support interviews and harrassment all do more harm than good. You are the only one who can solve your problems. It seems to me if you apply Hayeks idea that the market is better because its the sum of a lot of individual assessments and choices and that a social planner does not possibly have the knowledge of people to make decisions for them.
      The individual or patient or client is almost always in a better situation to decide for himself or herself. So rather than social workers, nurses or psychiatrists, people should be able to write their own persciptions rather than face endless hasles, interviews, professionals, unhelpful advice.
      People want to live to have expectations and the employment , life and travel and sex options of anybody else. All the social workers, doctors and psychs ever do is tell you you are useless, that you have to live a limited life, be a quiet little humble mouse and take huge doses of fatening drugs that destroy any decent opportuninty of sex life friendship- and the thing is they don’t listen at all.
      All consellors do is scan for signs indicators of medical compliance and side effects- they do not listen or hear anything the client wants to communicate or needs. So what I always call for is a revolution against the social worker police state, because there the ultimate parasties and do little but harm.

      • Colonial Viper 7.3.1

        What the. 😯

      • RobertM 7.3.2

        Its not just the bottom feeders, complete deregulation of the legal profession, medicine and psychiatry is required=so the the fields are open to all competitors. Pharamacy also needs to be opened up with all drugs available for sale to anyone over l8 including psychiatric drugs and most illegal ones. Dangerous and fattening drugs like Olanzapine and Lithium would be outlawed. The professions are protected monopolies of control and profit exploitation. Anyone should have direct access to any professional. Pharmac should be abolished, it isolates us from modern drugs , america and the west.

  7. Jeremy 8

    Talking about roller doors, I was surprised to see the Panmure town centre literally closed when I went to pick up something I bought off trademe – it was in the middle of the day too. I had to knock on the roller door to see if anyone was there. The town centre looked clean and as if it had new paving as well, I guess it just boils down to the type of people in the area.

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