Yes. What they found for rabbits, back in the day whilst figuring out how to design it, was that they'd always go right up to the fence and then try to dig. If they hit metal then they'd move sideways rather than backwards, so the skirt goes about 40cm outwards and that prevents all the rabbit incursions.

At the time I don't think they ever imagined the need to design for tuatara burrowing outwards, but probably good that it's only starting to become a question at about the time they've been planning for the fence to be replaced anyway. It'll be interesting to see if and how this affects all the other fenced sanctuaries that have sprung up later.

Another bonus of replacing the fence is that they'll be able to change the mesh, as the original one didn't have small enough holes to prevent baby mice getting through. I'm not sure how the mice inside will be properly eradicated after that's done. The original eradication was (I think) a brodifacoum drop which would no longer be practical unless everything important was somehow cleared out from inside the fence first.

I coincidentally went to a talk about it tonight where it was noted they're getting so populous that there's a new suspected risk of tuatara burrowing under the fence and letting something bad in.

The fence is due to be replaced within the next decade, and apparently they have tentative plans for an adjusted design to prevent this from happening.

I guess it's a good problem to have.

To elaborate however, although Zealandia has a fenced "scientific" enclosure for Tuatara near the front, there's a separate group of them running wild around the rest of the sanctuary (though still inside the main fence). There's a particular track up near the back of the fence with artificial burrows where they're encouraged to hang out. You can often encounter them in the tracks near there, but it's also completely possible to meet them effectively living wild anywhere else within the fence, and also not entirely uncommon.

But yeah they basically don't live on the mainland outside fenced sanctuaries at all any more. Rats interfered too much that they were effectively gone from the mainland from some time after Maori arrival.

More from The Spinoff today: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/27-05-2024/could-ray-chung-really-be-the-mayor-of-wellington

Chung said that, if he ended up in a similar position, he would look at ways to step back from the mayoral role and stay on as a councillor. He was yet to look into the technicalities of it.

And on this, it could be quite difficult for him.

Under the Local Government Act if he resigns after being declared Mayor then there's an extraordinary vacancy which triggers a by-election for a new mayor. He doesn't revert to being a councillor and push out another councillor who's already been declared elected.

Under the Local Electoral Act he can cancel his mayoral nomination before the close of voting, and then everyone's votes will just transfer to their next preference, but he'd not have the information he wants about other councillors if he cancelled it at that time.

He'd probably need to figure out a way to step back after seeing the preliminary election results but before the final result was declared, and hope the outcome was obvious enough from that, but doing so doesn't seem clear cut.

Under the Local Electoral Act if he died or became incapable after voting closes but before declaration of the final result, then it gets adjusted as if he'd not run at all. There doesn't seem to be a comparable clause for if he simply decided he didn't want to be Mayor, unless it hinges on the definition of the word "incapable"... but it'd be odd for him to be incapable of being Mayor but capable of being a councillor. He's committed to the possibility of having to be Mayor from the time of the close of voting, and if he's elected but doesn't want it then he can't stay on the council even if a ward had elected him.

Can anyone else see a technical way around this for him?

Additional coverage from today (also soft paywall):

Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung will look to vacate top chair if he gets a dud council:

But, he was keen to avoid a repeat of Wellington’s former mayor, Andy Foster, who struggled through his term with a council majority often at odds with him.

Chung said that, if he ended up in a similar position, he would look at ways to step back from the mayoral role and stay on as a councillor. He was yet to look into the technicalities of it.

And How Wellington’s left council may be the right’s hidden weapon which is an opinion piece from Tom Hunt:

... There is a perception, partly founded, that in a city awash with leaking pipes the council is focused on the wrong things.

Former mayors Dame Kerry Prendergast and Mark Blumsky, or Wellington Central’s first MP under the MMP voting system, Richard Prebble, show this famously-liberal city can swing right.

There is every chance it will do it again if the left don’t right the ship.

Councillors – and the council – need to show they are actually listening. They need to leave their party affiliations at the door when they walk into the council chamber. They need to vote for their communities, not political parties.

They need to stop saying their are listening to people when they only hear the people they agree with.

And they need to find some drastic ways to cut back on rates increases (at the current projected rates increases, a ratepayer charged $4000 in rates last year will face a $11,035 bill within a decade).

Because, if they don’t, a Chung-led council will find some drastic cuts – and they won’t be where the left like.

Obviously this isn't the first time he's run for mayor, but last time it was more about building his profile for the councillor position he really wanted instead. This time around he seems to be a bit more serious in wanting to win it. I don't really know how he's likely to go, and maybe that depends on whether he becomes the focal point of the anti-Tory-Whanau campaign.

Last time I watched him in a local candidate meeting. He repeatedly stated straw man facts that were outright wrong, attacked them, then had to be corrected by other candidates, even by Diane Calvert! Afterwards I checked with one of the other candidates who confirmed that every single debate (and there are lots because it's Wellington) he'd been bringing out exactly the same wrong statements to make his points in front of the new crowds, and then being corrected in the same way.

I didn't think he'd do well then, but with him being very strongly elected before the other two councillors, other voters in my local western ward sure showed me. I really do wish the advocates on that side could find some candidates who were a bit more likeable and positive instead of just angry about everything, though. It seems like a long time since we've seen a Mark Blumsky in the mayoralty race.

My thoughts too. From memory sales of double cab utes also surged immediately before and plummeted immediately after the prices went up as expected due to their high emissions.

Heh. I'm afraid trying to answer that question is above my pay grade.

This is my layperson's reading of the law, but I think it's from an Independent Hearings Panel that the council was required to establish under this part of the RMA in relation to an Instrumentation Planning Instrument (basically all the changes going through the motions in the housing density rules).

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1991/0069/latest/whole.html#LMS634247

Next the council has to consider each recommendation, and accept it reject them. It can provide alternative recommendations but in doing so it can only consider evidence that was submitted to the Independent Hearings Panel.

The council doesn't have to accept its recommendations, but if it chooses not to accept any or all of them then the Minister gets to decide if they have to be implemented.

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1991/0069/latest/whole.html#LMS634479

Expect plenty more lobbying aimed at Simeon Brown.

Yes it's certainly costed out by the councils. It'd vary for each council in the region but (for example) WCC shows 13.46% of rates going into water, not including wastewater and stormwater which are costed separately. I think there would be an outcry if people had to pay for meter costs without rates dropping proportionately. It's probably not entirely clear though, because some of the current rates allocation could be for certain overheads that it mightn't be sensible for meters to cover. Also costs are just generally rising for everything, so even if the cost of water is removed from rates, it mightn't feel as if it has been for most people who pay them.

Personally I'd be mildly concerned for renters. I think it's highly likely that many landlords would simply pocket any rates reduction while their tenants get a new bill to pay, assuming meters are used for billing rather than just measuring or only billing for excessive use (which is also an option). That said I don't think a broken rental market, which needs to be fixed in other ways, is a good enough reason to hold off addressing fundamental problems with the water system.

As far as paying less for water, though, that's what supposedly happened in Kapiti when they went through the change a decade ago:

In Kāpiti the installation of water meters had an immediate impact on water usage, with the discovery of 443 leaks initially and more over the years. Fixing these leaks means millions of litres of water are no longer being wasted.

Reduced household water use has also decreased substantially, with a sharp drop as soon as the 23,000 meters were introduced, a reduction which has been maintained overtime.

High water users have reduced their consumption by 70%. Many of these were our keen gardeners, so it’s great to see we still have healthy green gardens in the district.

I think it'd be silly not to at least have that on the board for consideration as a possibility for how to manage things in certain circumstances, even if it's then ruled out or considered highly unlikely.

I've had leaks outside the house which, to me, looked very significant. They've sat there for two or three months after I've reported them, and gotten visibly worse over that time (which I've also reported), before eventually seeing them addressed.

They do turn up and assess them early, though.

According to Wellington Water, at least, many of the worst leaks are underground without being visible from the surface at all. Those are the ones that tend to get prioritised for traking down and fixing between all the others, but i think a fair amount of effort sometimes also has to be put into tracking down exactly where they are.

I think this is a big reason why WW is so keen on smart water meters becoming a thing. It'd allow for relatively immediate information on exactly how much water is leaving very specific parts of the network out of places where it's not meant to be leaving, and allow it to be tracked down and fixed rapidly.

I remember them in the UK when we visited as long ago as 2012. My main recollection was that they seemed very effective at causing you to think very carefully about your speed, because in a long line of traffic nobody wants to be the person who drives extra slow to make up for accidentally going too fast a few seconds earlier.

I'm curious to know the reasons for them apparently being hated.

Just on this, it's extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.

Several major parties this election have list candidates who'd not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It's not as if we haven't had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren't as stupid as some people like to think.

If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who'd simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.

I'm sad I missed it. For our family this sort of thing seems as if it'd have been much better value for money than the Jurassic World Brickman exhibition on in town.

It's been a while since I've seen TNG and maybe my memory's bad, but the first one that came to mind, Data's Day, seems to be one that nobody's yet listed.

This is really interesting. Is it something to do with people wanting to feel as if they're on the winning team, even though you can effectively declare you're voting for someone and there's still no way for anyone to prove it^*?

^* Although the recent trend from the past couple of elections of people photographing their completed ballot papers and posting to social media really needs to be clamped down upon, imho.

Okay 'guided' might've been the wrong word, but more just that they're involved in the discussions more than most people are likely to encounter offline, and that's going to affect the tone. We shouldn't ignore it because these days a lot of us spend a lot of time hanging around r/nz and other places like it and forming opinions.

We don't (and can't) assess people who contribute online in the same way as people we interact with in person. When a trigger topic comes up, and everyone who's attracted to it converges on each other, we'll get more exposed to those views and dopamine kicks from interactions with people we'd never have encountered the same way elsewhere. For anything resembling murky common ground, they encourage us and we encourage them, and there's none of that inconvenient stigma to deal with from knowing who the other person really is or what they'll take from it.

I didn’t think it was a particularly sensible thing to say but holy crap, the level of hate that brought up was insane.

Yes and I think part of what gets me is that it's still going. It's really common to see people exclaim something like "I quite like the Greens (for some reason) but there's no way I'll vote for them while Marama Davidson's there... but frequently they can't articulate why they dislike her so much. It's just become normalised to express dislike of her, or worse, and then expect to be rewarded for it, or something like that. In a forum where we reward each other for what we say via rating buttons, expressing hate for Marama Davidson is just a trendy thing to do for which our brains are being trained that we'll be rewarded with a dopamine hit.

Recently I've been following RNZ's Undercurrent podcast. Episode 5 (Muddying the water) covers what's happening for politicians. Much of it is sadly what we've come to expect regarding the amount of toxicity, hate and threats that politicians get from certain sectors of the public.

As well as referencing the two UK MPs who've been murdered in public in recent years, they interviewed James Shaw about being physically attacked and beaten while he walked to work. Golriz Ghahraman, who seems to be another favourite target for hating in social media, talks about all the threats and hate and lies about her that she has to cope with. It notes that in March when Posie Parker visited, Marama Davidson was the target of intense online attacks that spiked to a level of abusive content, particularly from the far right and neo-nazis, higher than anyone else in NZ has ever faced except for Jacinda Ardern. This was all at about the time that r/nz was going insane.

What really struck me with the episode, though, is that Brooke van Velden acknowledged that "some people" get some forms of abuse and threats, but she herself doesn't believe it's that large and nor does she feel threatened. Nicola Willis also said that while she accepts this happens to other people and is concerned about it, she doesn't get a lot of it herself.

I think this is likely more complex than strictly being a partisan thing, but to me that sort of comparison really shows up how, at least right now, one side of politics is really attracting this abuse whereas the other side seems to be passively benefitting from it, just kind of cruising and happy to see that big negative cloud surround their opponents. A few years ago, maybe it was the other way around with people like Simon Bridges or Judith Collins on the receiving end, or not, but whatever the case right now that's not what's happening. I don't know how we deal with this effectively, but I can't see how we can unless people like Brooke van Velden, Seymour, etc, who are passively benefitting, get up and own it, and tell people outright who support them that what they're doing to those on the other side is absolutely not acceptable.