​When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.
 
This old aphorism should act as a warning for New Zealand politicians – at national and local government levels – as they respond to the damage wrought by the Cyclone Gabrielle weather system.
 
Clear, focused, articulate leadership is needed. “Normal” is not what people enjoyed before February’s storms. People should not be allowed to return to living where and how they did previously. While many affected families and businesses may want to do this, they should not be put in a position where future weather events may affect them to the same degree as Gabrielle.
 
Extreme weather events are the new normal. No part of New Zealand is immune from these.
 
Gabrielle has showed planners where at-risk areas are, just as Christchurch’s earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 did for that city. Vast tracts of Christchurch have been cleared of residential and commercial properties and affected people and businesses moved elsewhere. The same now needs to happen for North Island storm-ravaged areas.
 
The answer isn’t bigger pumps or higher stop-banks. It should be people living in safer locations.
 
Economist Shamubeel Eaqub once coined the term “zombie towns” to describe some New Zealand provincial centres impacted by the downsizing of rural economies and the associated migration of people to larger centres with better services and opportunities. Unfortunately, there are some zombie towns decimated by Gabrielle. While rebuilding these is possible, hard questions need to be asked about whether that is a good idea in the longer term, particularly when another Gabrielle is possible. If a local service town is needed, then it should be rebuilt on higher, safer ground, rather than where it was.
 
If politicians don’t act, then insurance companies and financial lenders will. Insurance companies are quite good at assessing risk. That’s how their business model works – they bet their customers that they will pay more in premiums than they will get in return. This means either massively higher premiums for people and businesses that want to live and work in risk areas, or no insurance at all. No insurance at all becomes an issue and a cost for a government cleaning up after a natural disaster.
 
As well as making decisions that reduce the risks and impacts of natural disasters, politicians also need to focus on investing in infrastructure that doesn’t fail when it’s really needed. Communication systems are particularly vital. Unlike fibre broadband and cellular systems, copper wire phones don’t need mains power to let them work. Analogue radios have greater coverage than digital ones. The internet is pointless if people can’t reach it.
 
Planning for emergencies has a similar model to responding to them. There are some simple questions that need to be asked: What do we what people to know? What do we want them to do? What do we want them to have? Where do we want them to go?
 
Building electric substations at a level lower than the stop-bank that is supposed to protect them isn’t clever. Neither is having back-up power systems that only last for a few hours, in the case of cell tower masts. A cashless society also quickly grinds to a halt when EFTPOS systems and money machines don’t work.
 
Council planners should have known that some newer subdivisions faced flooding risks. Instead, they have probably been seduced by information provided by “experts” paid for by developers as part of the gaming process that surrounds Resource Management Act planning.
 
People affected by the recent storms are restless. They want answers and they want help. Quickly. They don’t care that the help they need may be in short supply and allocated to locations that are deemed to have a priority higher than theirs. They don’t trust central government. They trust local government even less. This is why clear, focused, articulate leadership is essential. Hard decisions are needed. Quickly.
 
Unfortunately, it is likely that only the alligators with the biggest teeth will be sorted and the swamp won’t get drained before next time. It’s an election year, which means that contentious decisions and the conversations that need to be had around those are unlikely to happen.

​My Grandpa and I developed an understanding when I was growing up. Many things he told me I wouldn’t believe at the first hearing. He was a great storyteller and a master of the tall yarn – one that may have started with an element of truth but ended up somewhere else entirely. It was often hard to spot the difference between fact and fiction, such was his skill as a raconteur. On this basis, I decided to err on the side of caution when determining if I should be educated or just entertained by what he had to say.
 
Grandpa had a repertoire of tales that were often repeated. But every so often a brand new one would arrive, sometimes even prompting others who knew him longer than I had to remark that they hadn’t heard that one before.
 
His tales covered a range of experiences that covered his life. He was the eldest of 17 brothers and sisters whose father was a self-taught engineering contractor who built bridges and other civil works in and around Taranaki and was Mayor of Stratford in the early 1900s. Grandpa told of his exploits during World War I fighting Turks at Gallipoli and in Palestine; Home Guard duties in WWII; farming experiences; rifle marksmanship; lawn bowls; livestock; bureaucracy; the bloody royal family; explosives; lawn culture; neighbours; motorcycle riding; literature; politics; bagpipe playing.
 
Occasionally other family members or acquaintances would recount similar tales that Grandpa had told. This didn’t always make those tales true, particularly if they were repeating what they had heard from Grandpa other than their own involvement in the issue at hand. Some family members told the same stories but with different endings, adding to my confusion about which one may be right.
 
Grandpa was a big part of my life. He and Nana had retired into Stratford from their sheep and cattle farm at Wharehuia just before I was born. Mum and Dad’s farm was about 12km away – an easy drive in a Triumph Herald – and Grandpa would often arrive about morning tea time and stay for lunch. I’d follow him and Dad around. He and Nana would come for Sunday dinner at weekends. Silent reflection wasn’t part of his vibe and I am a sucker for a good yarn.
 
Grandpa was widely read. Bertrand Russell’s autobiography and Shakespeare’s plays were read for pleasure. I think he became an atheist after reading the Bible. He was always keen to hear what I was reading and a challenge was always to summarise it in a sentence.
 
He taught me how to play chess and a range of card games, including Euchre and 500. I learned that when played by skilled opponents, the game of Draughts is like Tic Tac Toe – there can be no winner.
 
A skilled marksman, he taught me how to shoot. I am right-handed but left-eye dominant. Grandpa insisted I shoot left-handed so as to keep both eyes open.
 
A good gauge of how factual Grandpa’s tales may have been was brutal honesty, often about himself. This included how he choked during a Ballinger Belt marksmanship competition. It also included many of his wartime experiences, like plagues of blowflies at Gallipoli in no-man’s-land while stalking Turkish snipers. And his admiration for a Turkish sniper he was stalking in Palestine who shot him instead. What should have been a bullet through his heart was absorbed by his ammunition bandolier. “Great shot. At 300 yards with less than 3 seconds to make it.”
 
Wartime stories that were less hard to believe included a perennial gem about how, when in service in the desert at Palestine, he had grown a beard but shaved it off when the crickets in it kept him awake at night with their chirping.
 
Another tale involved finding a set of bagpipes abandoned in the desert, presumably by a Scottish regiment, and making makeshift reeds from things he found lying around so he could play them. There were a couple of versions of this tale that I had discounted as fiction. At the social event following Grandpa’s funeral, I got into a conversation with a member of Stratford’s pipe band community who told me that not only was Grandpa a skilled piper, but that he had the pipes Grandpa had brought back from Palestine. Grandpa had gifted him those some years before.
 
I wish I had asked Grandpa more questions about his life and experiences, like why his family moved to Stratford in the late 19th century and about his grandparents. The answers he gave may have been true.
 
Thank you for indulging me, Robert Adam (Ad) Sangster 16 March 1891 – 15 May 1987. You were a bloody legend. I am forever in your debt.

It’s said that people learn more from their failures than they do their successes. If this was true, then after more than 100 years of endeavour, local government councils and agencies would operate faultlessly.
 
Yet every year brings a new local government case study of how not to deliver services. Last year the poster child was Wellington City Council’s Island Bay cycleway. I was wondering how that community engagement disaster could ever be beaten. That is until this year’s public transport reforms led by the Greater Wellington Regional Council rolled along. “Train wreck” is probably not too harsh a summary of what ensued.
 
I believe that the most important, if not the only thing of real value possessed by an organisation or individual is their reputation.
 
That said, very few if any organisations have key performance indicators for reputation. It’s something that is never formally on their radar and something they do not devote any real resources to protecting or enhancing in a measurable way. Perhaps this explains why it gets treated with contempt.
 
In the past few months, the Greater Wellington Regional Council has enjoyed reputation meltdown of epic proportions. It has gone from being “that forgotten council”, community newspaper fodder where retired mayors and Members of Parliament could quietly supplement their National Super, to one that is front-of-mind for most of the region’s residents, being particularly distrusted and loathed by the region’s public transport users.
 
Does that outcome seem to worry that Council? Surprisingly, no, if its strategy of denial and blame-shifting is any indicator.
 
So what went wrong with Wellington’s public transport network in July 2018?
 

• A solution was provided to something that most community members didn’t see was a problem. Wellingtonians were largely happy with their bus network, widely regarded as New Zealand’s best, and were unaware that it was “on the brink of failure” until a Regional Council manager made that surprising revelation.
• The council’s “solution” was ideological and not based on any meaningful community engagement. The council’s policy analysts have an unshakeable belief in what they refer to as a “north south topology”. They believe that success will come from combining this with an atomic clock and punitive fines for operator non-compliance.
• Community engagement, such as it was, overlooked many community groups with an active interest in or use of public transport services. The council made no effort to go after hard-to-reach groups who are active users of public transport, such as young families, school kids, beneficiaries, aged people, recent immigrants and people with disabilities. Even peak-time commuters seem to have been overlooked, if comments at recent public meetings and online are any indicator.
• An unstated objective was to reduce costs, rather than enhance services. This is backed by the council’s desire to blame the previous government’s Public Transport Operating Model (PTOM) as the reason it chased low-ball tenders. PTOM contains no such requirement.
• The Regional Council over-promised and then massively under-delivered the changes. Large portions of supporting infrastructure were uncompleted, services such as Real Time Information were completely untested and failed spectacularly, and council management has admitted that passenger load testing was not part of their planning. Indeed over 15 years of “big data” available from Snapper went unused because the council did not want to pay for it.
• Most of the service delivery business was let to a bus operating company with no experience, no systems or infrastructure, no buses, no drivers and no money. The Regional Council has invested many millions of dollars to ensure that this company succeeds. This company is also strongly anti-union, which aligns nicely with the council’s desire to lower wage costs.
• Any scope for flexibility, adjustments or rapid changes was foregone for pedantically detailed contracts with service providers. This makes it really hard for council to quickly introduce new or extend existing services.

 
In simple terms, what was unveiled at a cost of many tens of millions of ratepayer-funded dollars just doesn’t work. More galling is a reluctance from Regional Councillors and their officers to admit blame or to seek solutions to fix the train wreck they have created. They have grudgingly made themselves available to attend public protest meeting organised by local MPs and others. They have promised an independent review, when a rear-view mirror is the last thing that’s needed. They are doggedly determined to make their new system work, yet they have no basis to believe that, given unlimited time, money and community patience, it ever will. Meanwhile they have lost their Social License to Operate.
 
A social license to operate, or SLO, is a term used to describe the level of acceptance or approval by local communities and stakeholders of organisations and their operations. In simple terms, it’s reputation by a different name.
 
Some organisations value it highly, and invest heavily in maintaining strong relationships with stakeholders, communities of interest and the general public. Other organisations, particularly characterised by New Zealand local government councils, care not a jot for their organisation’s external reputation. Part of their terms of engagement with communities is to only do what legislation requires of them, and to seek any opportunity possible to avoid it. They only engage when a law says they have to, rather than because they want to and would be hard pressed to argue otherwise.
 
Over several years the Regional Council has been building a brand – Metlink – for its public transport services. What Metlink’s brand values are supposed to be is a mystery. They clearly don’t include attributes such as honesty, trust, reliability or transparency. On recent efforts it’s clear they do include such traits as inconveniencing the travelling public, bullying and obfuscation – not what a business seeking to create a “zesty green region” should be seeking to attain.
 
The Metlink brand has become a smelly turd. While the Regional Council may try to roll it in glitter and add V I Poo™ to its container, it will remain a smelly turd. It will always be remembered as such, even in the unlikely event that in the future the public transport network it represents can be made to work. A competent professional marketer would probably advise rebranding once the old Metlink has been flushed away.
 
Solutions?
 
Honesty and openness from the Regional Council would work well. One of the key principles of effective community engagement is knowing that if you treat people as adults, they will respond as adults.
 
Another key principle is to share a problem with a community and to ask for solutions. It is well known, amongst community engagement professionals at least, that a crowd will always produce a better solution than will an “expert”.
 
Rather than calling for written submissions and organising a few public meetings, Councillors and officers need to actively seek community engagement, particularly with groups that are hard to reach, like the young and the old, infirmed, non-English speaking, working-class heroes that use public transport yet have neither the time nor the ability to cope with constructing a written submission or giving up watching a more accessible train wreck such as Married At First Sight to get to a meeting in a school hall.
 
Local government only ever does community engagement because it has to, not because it wants to. Regrettably changing that mindset will not happen quickly, or indeed at all, unless train wrecks become more commonplace.

There are many different types of love. The feelings of affection that one has for a place, a motorcycle or a sports team are quite different from those that one has for one’s life partner, one’s parents or one’s family and friends.
 
I have learned that the greatest test of the significance of love comes when the object of one’s affection is removed.
 
Yesterday my Dad, Robert Hine Sangster, died peacefully at the age of nearly 93. I loved him deeply, as the growing sense of loss I am currently experiencing testifies.
 
Dad was a major part of my life, from my earliest memories to watching him pass away yesterday. He was a friend and confidant, rescuer, protector, and a really good mate. We are alike in many ways, different in others.
 
I love machinery and gadgets, as those who know me well may attest. I hear the nodding heads of such people as they read this.
 
As an infant, my Mum eagerly waited to hear my first word, as mothers are want to do. Much to her disappointment, mine was “tractor”, testimony to the impact that Harry Ferguson’s TEA 24 – the Little Grey Fergie – had made on me even then.
 
Dad and the Fergie were a big part of my life growing up. At this point any health and safety aficionados should stop reading.
 
I started my driving career by sitting on his lap as he drove during feeding out routines to the stock on the farm. As I got older, I was allowed to sit on the seat and steer, while Dad stood on the rear-mounted tray and spread hay from the cut bales. In time, my feet reached the pedals. Shortly after that I was allowed to drive a tractor unsupervised and operate it for all of the various farm tasks for which it was used. I would have been about 11 years old at that point.
 
It was the same with other farm jobs. Once Dad was satisfied that I was up to the task, I was allowed to proceed unsupervised. He was generally always around to help if things broke or went pear-shaped, but there was always an expectation that I should be able to sort out things that went wrong.
 
Rabbit shooting was the same. Perhaps understanding the temptation that could come from a teenage boy being allowed out and about with a .22 rifle and a box of ammunition, Dad had a system. It started with being allocated only two bullets. When I came home with two rabbits, I was allowed four bullets for my next outing.
 
Blame and bullying were not part of how Dad operated. Trust and respect were. So fixing my own mistakes and not asking for help were things I learned at an early age. He was the best boss I’ve ever had the privilege of working for.
 
Dad never judged me. He let me be who I was and supported me. He was never far away if needed for advice or encouragement. I know I’ve done things in my life that have disappointed him, but he’s never said anything about those or held those against me.
 
Dad never complained or moaned. There was always a bright side to life’s knocks and set backs. He was loyal to family and friends.
 
He had a great sense of humour and loved to share jokes or funny stories. As kids we were frequently regaled with elephant jokes and similar. The more ridiculous the better.
 
When I moved to Wellington in 1984 I met a chap at MAF who had once been a practice vet at Eltham.
 
“Brett Sangster,” he said. “Any relation to Bob?”
 
“He’s my Dad.” I replied.
 
“That’s right. Bob Sangster. What’s yellow and goes click, click?**” he mused.
 
That was definitely my Dad he was remembering.
 
Mum and Dad built something pretty special together on their Taranaki farm. Their garden was amazing – it stars on the cover of and is included in the Taranaki version of the Private Gardens of New Zealand series of books. Mum was the creative genius plants-woman. Dad did the heavy lifting.
 
Surprisingly they sold up 21 years ago and, almost on a whim, decided to relocate to Waikanae. Not that surprising in some respects, given that all of us kids had ended up in Wellington. Another fabulous garden emerged there.
 
Mum died about 18 months ago. Dad loved her to bits. As she became increasingly frail and affected by dementia during her last years, he took over her roles as creative gardener and cook. Not bad for an 80-year-old. He never complained. He just got on and did, as he always had.
 
Earlier this year he decided that enough was enough at Waikanae and moved to the Bob Scott Retirement Village at Petone. Unfortunately, what should have been Quality Bob Time for Dad in his last years was not to be. Health issues caught up with him. Right until the end he was always great fun to visit and interested in what we were all up to. He always enjoyed a beer or a single malt whisky, particularly during a televised sports event.
 
Loving, caring, great fun, enterprising, reliable, dependable, forgiving. That was my Dad – my Little Grey Fergie.
 
 
**A ball-point banana is yellow and goes click, click.

If flutter-boarding was an Olympic sport, I could have been a gold medalist.
 
I was not only good, I was unbeatable at this sport in what was probably a pretty small talent pool of central Taranaki primary schools.
 
However my tenure as an unbeatable champion was short lived. A wiser, older person (probably my Dad) brought it to my attention that the flutter-board was only intended as a confidence-building device for young swimmers. So my options were either to give it up and learn to swim without one, or spend the rest of my life racing seven-year-olds.
 
“What’s a flutter-board, Brett?” I hear some of you ask. Said object was a slab of polystyrene that was gripped firmly in one’s hands whilst propelled forwards by kicking one’s feet and legs. All the rage too they were, back in the day.
 
One of life’s key lessons is that change is never easy. It was at about this time that I learned that my buoyancy was directly inversely proportional to the depth of the water I happened to be in at that time. I learned that there is more water in most pools than I was capable of drinking in one visit. I also learned that successful swimming involved the simultaneous coordination of several body parts and that I was not particularly flash at coordinated multi-tasking.
 
Yet primary school swimming events had become a strong feature of our family’s summer calendar, largely due to my successful career as a flutter-boarder. So, in true Sangster fashion, I learned how to wing it.
 
Country school swimming pools near where we lived weren’t particularly large. Some were as short as 15 yards, some as long as 25 yards (pre-1967 measurements used here to add historical perspective). I learned that with a decent lung-full of air, I could dive in and power down the length of the pool in one breath. Good enough. However circumstances were soon to conspire against me, with the arrival of high school and pools boasting lengths of 33 yards or longer, and events that required the traversing of more than one length.
 
Not living in town near a decent practice facility, competitive swimming events were largely limited to the annual swimming sports day. Kids who lived in town all seemed to know how to tumble turn and breathe whilst swimming, skills that imbued considerable competitive advantages over one-breath-splash-and-dashers. So after the third form, I decided that for the purposes of humiliation elimination, there would be no more annual high school swimming competitions. Of course there were, but these were never discussed at home, as newsletters advertising said were not delivered. Successful ways of skiving were invented and tactically employed. Mum and Dad must have known that this was happening. Full marks to them for never bringing it up.
 
If it’s possible to be scarred by water, another life-changing moment happened in my early teens. During an outing to the Kaweroa pool in New Plymouth, I discovered the diving pool. After a bit off bouncing off the lower sprung boards into the awaiting water, I decided to move on to the 3m high board.
 
My first effort was a daring feet first plunge. The pool was really deep, and I was unprepared for how far down my momentum carried me. Never mind.
 
On my second attempt I decided to try something with a bit more flourish, as befitting my earlier efforts off the lower boards. Somehow I managed to either over or under-rotate my tumble and hit the water dead flat, face down. Smack. I was immediately reminded from my physics classes that water was incompressible. At this point the water wasn’t the only thing that was dead and flat. I reckon it would have been softer landing on a lawn. At that stage I decided not to pursue a career as an Olympic diver.
 
And so, gentle readers, is a brief summary of my aquatic aversion. This is why I am so proud of my ancestors, who spent several months on boats getting themselves from England to the fair shores of New Plymouth in September 1841. Knowing what I know now, If I had lived in those days I would not have joined them.

​

After safely delivering a bus load of wringing-wet schoolgirls to Wellington Girls College this morning in Arctic conditions, I took a moment for reflection.
 
My first thought was about the stupidity of teenagers who leave home woefully underdressed for the weather that’s actually happening outdoors, knowing that their bus stop is uncovered and that they will have to traverse several hundred metres from their departure stop to the shelter of school buildings.
 
Another thought was that being soaked for the duration of a school day didn’t seem to be an issue for them. Perhaps the fabrics used to construct their school uniforms are self-drying and heat emitting?
 
I also reflected on my own secondary school days at Stratford High, where wet days were commonplace. Stratford enjoys an annual rainfall of about 2,500mm (about double Wellington’s), with daily dumpings in excess of 25mm not uncommon.
 
Like most Stratford High School students, I commuted on a bus. About three quarters of the school’s role did likewise. This was because this school serviced a large rural area and also the metropolis of high-school-devoid Eltham, just down the road. Wet lunchtimes were spent confined to the assembly hall. A bloke who would become Mayor of Stratford in later life provided DJ services on the hall’s PA system but dancing and singing were not encouraged. Remember that these were the days before the banning of corporal punishment.
 
The wearing of gumboots at school was prohibited. This was tough for us country kids who, while not born in them, largely lived in gumboots. The only other footwear option, black leather shoes, were only ever worn to school or to church on Sundays.
 
Once puberty struck, it was easy to spot country blokes (mostly) at beaches during summer. They were the ones with ring-bands on otherwise hairy legs where the constant flip-flopping of long, rubberised footwear had worn the hairs away. The area of the leg below the ring band was usually untanned, for good measure. Jandal-wearing townies were saved such ignominy.
 
High school’s general gumboot prohibition also extended to school dances. The parental permission slips for these events usually had the words “NO GUMBOOTS!!!” fully capitalised and underlined at the end. Remember that these were the days of typewriters before the arrival of bold letters and a selection of fonts in different sizes, so underlining and exclamation marks were the only means a newsletter editor had of giving prominence to items of great importance.
 
And gumboots were of great importance. Stratford High School had uniform standards to enforce.
 
It took the arrival of Mr Frederick Dagg, famously the Chair of Taihape’s School of Joinery, to reverse the prejudices previously held by many about the wearing of Skellerup’s finest. Many except the arbiters of uniform standards at Stratford High School.