Catastrophic sewage failure starts with pisspoor decision-making

"[T]he cause of the calamity are ... sitting, neatly itemised, in Wellington City Council’s own records. ...

"On 27 May 2021, Wellington City Council’s Long-Term Plan Committee faced a clear fork in the road."Officers presented councillors with water investment options, including one — Water Option 3 — that contained a $391 million wastewater renewals programme... to reduce sewage pollution, starting with the central city and south-coast catchments now making headlines.

"At the same meeting, officers recommended Cycleways Option 3, with capital expenditure of $120 million over ten years. ... An amendment was moved by then-councillor [and now Green MP] Tamatha Paul ... to adopt Cycleways Option 4, expanding the programme to $226 million — nearly doubling it.

"That amendment passed.

"Accelerated wastewater renewal did not.

"The vote is on video. The numbers are in the Long-Term Plan. The consequences are now floating in Cook Strait."

~ Peter Bassett from his post 'Wellington’s Sewage Crisis Wasn’t an Accident. It Was a Vote — and Everyone’s Pretending Not to Remember'

Paying bureaucrats is not a stimulus programme

"It would be a mistake to view public sector staffing as a stimulus programme for Wellington and cafes and bars."

~ Eric Crampton (and Liberty Scott) on Tova's tosh

 

A question for you all on those sackings [updated]

 

At times like this you might ask yourself:
"What would Sir Humphrey do?"

Imagine you're Sir Humphrey. Head of a government department.

Now, imagine you minister has issued instructions to sack a given number of pen-pushers in your department. Simply to sack a given number, without real guidance as to whom. Leaving it to you to decide on whom the axe will fall.

So, here's the question: do you sack the folk who are most effective and most needed?

Or are those to whom you give the DCM the least useful, most surplus-to-requirements?

I'll give you a moment to think about it ...

"Wellington's consultancy-industrial complex is in a funk." Good.

"[Wellington's] consultancy-industrial complex [is] in a funk, because philosophically and culturally, the change in government has shown up the gulf between them and the government. It has also demonstrated two major issues: The dearth of strategic and intellectual grunt in much of the public sector; and the ideological chasm between many of the ... public servants [sic], and the Government ...
    "[Ten years ago] there was a significant cohort of senior and leadership talent in parts of the public service [sic] that were formidable in their intellectual capability, commitment to ideological neutrality, and interest in an evidence-based approached to public policy.... [along with] a deep understanding of what they did and did not know, and what they could not know. ... They all knew that, by and large, they had no idea how much of the economy worked in any detail. ...
    "The beginning of change in that culture happened under the Clark Government, which was much more pro-active and wanted to 'do more.' ... the Ardern/Hipkins Government put it into overdrive, and the Luxon Government will be seeing the signs of it. ...
    "The elections of [Tory Whanu as mayor], Tamatha Paul as MP of Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter as MP for Rongotai provides a sign of what has happened to the Wellington public service [sic] over that time. ... The Wellington public service [sic] grew enormously in the past six years, drawing upon enthusiastic graduates, predominantly coming with ... left-wing enthusiasm for state intervention, regulation, spending and taxation, with suspicion around ... the views of significant portions of the public, including those of more senior civil servants, because of identity factors (e.g. race, sex, gender &c.) ...
    "None of that would matter one iota if they could put that to one side and be highly-competent public-policy analysts, but that competence is wanting ... lacking historical knowledge and being weak on analytical capability.
    "As a result the mood today in many government departments ... is one of fear and depression, as a workforce of relatively young public servants [sic], most of whom did not vote for this government, struggle to cope with being asked to implement policies they don’t agree with. ...
    "[T]here is significant scope to scale down the numbers of people doing policy in government in Wellington ... because there is a distinct lack of talented, capable and clever people, who put aside their personal political biases in favour of evidence-based policy advice. Most importantly, there are few who will admit to Ministers 'we don’t really know how to do that' or 'we don’t know how that part of the economy works' or 'we don’t have the knowledge or experience on that issue ... '
    "[T]he government appears willing to lean down on the state sector (albeit not enough), which should provide ample opportunities to send blinkered ideologues with mediocre intellectual grunt to a new life not serving a government they hate."

~ Liberty Scott, from his post 'Wellington is in a funk'

"It may sound stark, but Wellington city no longer adds up."

The Aro Street Geyser. [Pic from Stuff]

"The Coalition Agreement between National and ACT states as a 'principle' that decisions now will be 'based on sound public policy principles, including problem definition, rigorous cost benefit analysis and economic efficiency.'
    "So what is cost-benefit analysis? It is not simply calculating the ratio of the benefits to costs of a decision and choosing to spend money when the benefits exceed costs. No, it involves calculating those ratios for all prospective projects and ranking them from highest to lowest. 

    "Given a limited budget, one must select projects with the highest ratios until the budget is spent. On such a basis, Wellington should be left to fail. Why? Because its vast infrastructure needs, ranging from Mount Victoria Tunnel to port facilities to shambolic water leakage problems involve relatively limited benefits & massive costs that make no sense when compared to the urgent needs of Auckland....

    "It may sound stark, but Wellington city no longer adds up. It is built on subsidies and the backs of others. The costs of running it are no longer justified. An unshakeable implication of the Coalition Agreement is that Wellington should be left to fail and many of its Ministries moved elsewhere.'

~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'If the Coalition Agreement Stands, Wellington Will Cease to Exist as a City and become a Town, maybe a Village'

RELATED:

• 'Whatever happened to the idea that building and maintaining infrastructure is council's core business?' - NOT PC
• 'How Wellington has become a NZ tragicomedy' - Oliver Hartwich, NZ Initiative

Whatever happened to the idea that building and maintaining infrastructure is council's core business?

  

YESTERDAY MORNING, THE RESIDENTS OF Waipukurau were awoken to loudspeakers in the street "spreading the message of immediate and vital water restrictions" after a "major leak."

South Wairarapa residents endured water restrictions two weeks ago due to leaks in their water infrastructure.

All summer, water and sewage has continued to pour downs Wellington streets, while water restrictions are imposed in Wellingtonian's homes and the council starts planning for a state of emergency. (An announcement this morning says Wellingtonians should prepare for "Level 3" restrictions, and the declaration of a "drinking water emergency.")

And on Boxing Day in Auckland, thirty-six of Auckland's beaches were off limits because they were contaminated with poo.

It's all a bit shit at the moment, isn't it. All too literally.

Billions of dollars are supposed to be needed to fix New Zealand's threadbare infrastructure after what's said to be decades of underground under-investment.  Local Government New Zealand (a lobby group for the very people who under-invested) reckons we are "heading toward a tragedy if more is not invested in council infrastructure, and that people need to get used to double-digit rates increases." Infrastructure New Zealand (a lobby group who chases government dollars for its members) reckons the number of billions needed is somewhere near 200 billion.

The solution from both lobby groups is supposed to be lots of central government cash.

Meanwhile (to pick one council just at random, since it's where I live) Auckland council's rate this year are going up another 7.5 percent this year. And that's with a mayor supposedly reluctant to raise them. And to pick another (let's use Wellington since it presently has the highest-profile mayor) they've just voted to "invest" $330 millions dollars in a tumble-down town hall —on the back of a 12.3 percent rate rise which still doesn't cover what could be a billion-dollar hole in their accounts.

Um.

May I ask a polite question?

Just what the fuck is the primary purpose of local fucking goivernment? 

Whatever happened to the idea that building and maintaining infrastructure is council's core fucking business?

If I refer to my handy copy of G.W.A Bush's history of Auckland Council (if you just give me a moment to find it) we find that the clamour for setting up the damned thing back in the 1840s was because sewage was flowing in the streets. Specifically Queen Street. "Auckland," wrote the 1847 editor of The New Zealander, while it is "erected in the healthiest country in the world, has enough filthy lanes and dirty drains to keep up a virtual plague, had it been situated in a less airy country." Set up finally in 1851, its core business (reflected in its six committees) was Bye-Laws, Roads, Public Works, Public Health, and Charitable Trusts. This reflected Lord John Russell's instructions to Governor Hobson back in December 1840 that "district governments" should be set up "for the conduct of all local affairs such as drainage, bye-roads, police, the erecting and repair of local prisons, court-houses, and the like."

Much responsibility has been taken away from councils since (bye-roads, police, the erecting and repair of local prisons, court-houses, and the like) so from the Lord's list we're left, as core business, just drainage.

Fucking drainage.

You know, the stuff that's supposed to contain that stuff that's running down our streets.

This is what Labour's Three Five Six Waters was supposed to solve, taking away this the core business of council. National has binned that, but continues to dangle to councils a somewhat similar carrot. Because some councils were, and still are, keen to off-load the job of drainage to someone else. 

But if I may again ask another polite question: Why the fuck aren't councils doing the fucking job they were specifically set up to do?

Huh?!

It's not like they've been keeping rates down while they've under-fucking-invested.

New water infrastructure is desperately needed around the country because, for the most part, for at least two decades, council's haven't been doing their core work.

Why do I say two decades?

Guess why: just over two decades ago, in 2002, the then-Local Government Minister was the hard-left Alliance Party's Sandra Lee. And it was then that local government debt began to rise dramatically — not because councils around the country were over-investing in infrastructure; not because they were going hard on their core business; not at all because they were building, maintaining and upgrading roads, bye-roads, drains, pipes and parks as they were damned well supposed to. For the most part, instead, with some significant exceptions, they weren't. What they began building instead was a lot of expensive fucking monuments. 

Monuments mostly to themselves.

The culprit here was Sandra Lee's Local Government Amendment Act 2002, which granted to city councils, district councils and regional councils a "power of general competence" (I know, right?) which would enable them to enter into any activity they wished, with the only limit being their imagination and the pockets of their ratepayers.

Prior to Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, councils could only do what they were legally permitted to to, i.e., to carry out their core business. After Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, however, the leash was off. And council credit cards started straight away racking up debt for vanity projects everywhere. 

I'd like to say I told you so. I'd like to, so I will. Because I was as outraged then as I am now:

Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell is outraged at today's announcement by Helen Clark and Minister of Local Government Sandra Lee to grant local authorities "a power of general competence" in order to "enhance the well-being of their communities." "The well being of everyone in a community is more likely to be enhanced by retaining a tight leash on councils," says Cresswell, "since most councils have already well demonstrated they struggle for competence."
    "Local government throughout New Zealand's history has demonstrated its utter incompetence in handling the loot they confiscate from ratepayers by wasting it on such idiocies as the New Plymouth Wind Wand, the Auckland Britomart edifice, and the Palmerston North empty civic building." he said. ...
    "More substantially," says Cresswell, "there is a crucial constitutional principle at stake -the constitutional principle that citizens may do whatever they wish, apart from what is specifically outlawed, whereas governments and councils may only do what is specifically legislated for. The main purpose of this constitutional principle is to keep a leash on government, both central and local. It is this leash that is beginning to gnaw at local governments, and it is this leash that Clark and Lee propose to untie."
    "It is a dangerous step to take," warns Cresswell, who points out that councils are being given more 'freedom' at he same time as the Resource Management Amendments Bill threatens to take away even more freedom from New Zealand property owners. "The constitutional principle is being reversed," he says. "Even as they propose giving local government wider powers to act, they are taking away the power of individuals to act for themselves," says Cresswell. "Every property owner should rise up in protest," he says.
    "Libertarianz will be making a strong submission on the consultation document," says Cresswell. 

Which we did. For all the bloody use that it did: The Clark Government passed it, a succession of Local Government ministers since since has kept it, and every bloody local councillor ever since Sandra's "permissive" Act has spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave with a start-up founder's credit card.

The New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency (LGFA) supplies around two-thirds of that council debt, and last time I looked their tab was just over $18 billion. That's about $20,000 for every ratepayer. Add to that an existing $5 billion of Auckland and Christchurch council debt. And those numbers are every year by around a billion a year as ballooning rates rises fail to keep up with even-more ballooning council spending.

And as you can now see, it's not like they've been spending much of it underground.

In Christchurch they've been turning the city into "an innovative and modern community with major facilities from Akaroa Wharf to Te Kaha Canterbury Multi-Use Arena." In Wellington they've been watching the city's infrastructure crumble while they vote to spend hundreds of millions on earthquake-prone inner-city monuments of questionable value. And here in Auckland, council have allocated yet another billion dollars (plus fuck-ups) to pour down the ever-expanding black hole of Len Brown's train set, plus several hundreds of millions more to continue transforming the place into "one of the world's most liveable cities."

A shame there are very few plans to make it an affordable one.

What on earth is to be done?

You know, here's an idea.

Instead of keeping Sandra Lee's Local Government Act and binning Three Waters, which is where this new Coalition Government is at the moment, how's about — and hear me out, now that you've all heard the story —how's about we bin Sandra Lee's act and tell fucking councils to stop over-spending, to close down their PR departments, and to get back to their core fucking business.

Maybe you could suggest something like that to Simeon Brown, who's the current Local Government minister. 

But you'll have to explain to him first who Sandra Lee is, and what she did back then to stuff things up. Because I don't think he was born then.

"For the govt's managerial class, the primary purpose of the state is to create high income jobs and lucrative contracts for the cognitive elite..."

"Our fire trucks are breaking down, the road toll is up and we’re desperately in need of more nurses. But rather than tackle these urgent issues, the government drops billions on consultants, comms staff and various other removed, abstract thinkers...
    "It’s almost as if the primary role of the administrative state is shifting from serving the people to the redistribution of wealth to the staffers, lawyers, PR companies, managers and consultancy firms that work in them, or for them. A billion dollars a year in public sector consultancy is an awful lot of money when you’re running out of teachers and nurses because you don’t pay them enough, and the fire trucks are breaking down...
    "For [the government's] managerial class the primary purpose of the transport agency and the rest of the state is to create high income jobs and lucrative contracts for the cognitive elite – they are the true value creators, after all – and to deliver media campaigns celebrating the bravery of their visions, the nobility of their aspirations; to affirm that they are the good and smart people. The actual safety conditions of provincial roads are largely irrelevant.... the decision not to fast-track nurses into the country [is similar]. Nursing is a credentialed, moderately well paid profession. But nurses are not knowledge workers the way medical doctors and some other health professionals are. Nurses work almost entirely in the real not the abstract, therefore [with this view] they can’t be adding 'real' value to the health system, any more than safety barriers installed by uneducated manual labourers can reduce traffic fatalities, or fire trucks can put out fires....
    "I’m not arguing that [this] perspective explains everything (or that I agree with [it]). But I’ve come to the end of this essay in early August, and the health minister Andrew Little has just announced a suite of measures to address staff shortages in the health sector. No, he’s not changing the immigration rules for nurses – but the government is launching a media campaign, teaming up with Shortland Street to promote nursing as a career. The cost of the campaign will not be made public."
           ~ Danyl Mclauchlan, from his op-ed 'An Administrative Revolution'

Let's Get Wellington Moving is more about the opposite, explains The UnCivil Servant in this guest post. In a city, and a country, in which we have a crisis of unaffordable housing, these people are essentially just telling we peasants: 'Let Them Eat Monuments.' Expensive ones ...

Let’s get Wellington moving by removing 'Let's Get Wellington Moving'

by The UnCivil Servant

A RUNNING JOKE AROUND Wellington is the organisation for activist bureaucrats Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM). A running joke, because it is a symbol for how bureaucracy barely let's anything move at all. 

The last National Government foolishly set it up to try to get agreement with local government on fixing transport problems in Wellington. Labour however has since changed its objectives, and painted a wide band of Green all over it. So now it isn’t really much about transport at all.

When set up the organisation's primary objectives were stated as:

to develop a transport system that:

Enhances the liveability of the central city
Provides more efficient and reliable access for users
Reduces reliance on private vehicle travel
Improves safety for all users
Is adaptable to disruptions and future uncertainty

Now, the objectives for Let's Get Wellington Moving barely mention movement, and nothing at all about "developing a transport system":

Our programme objectives [they now say] are:

greater liveability, including enhanced urban amenity and enables urban development outcomes
more efficient and reliable access
reduced carbon emissions by increasing mode shift away from reliance on private vehicles
improved safety for all users, and
resilience and adaptability to disruptions and future uncertainty.

The upshot of this capitulation to blancmange is that LGWM is now less about transport and more about enabling intensification for housing development, and reducing carbon emissions. In fact, almost all about carbon emissions. Note: not noxious emissions like particulates (many of which come from vehicles, and actually DO affect health), but climate change. This ignores that nothing LGWM can do will actually impede or affect that in any case because of the Emissions Trading Scheme (which caps total emissions from transport). 

It is also single-mindedly focused on reducing emissions solely by mode shift. Not by travelling less, not by moving to electric or hybrid vehicles, or by reducing traffic congestion to waste less fuel. LGWM is instead now almost solely focussed on enabling more housing (on one corridor), and on making peasants like you drive less by using public transport more.

While politicians, including the expert on (abolishing car) parking Julie Anne-Genter, might be obsessed with the idea that people need to drive less, and that big expensive public-transport projects are needed to enable more housing, this is demonstrably nonsense. LGWM already notes in its reports that 16% fewer people commute by car into central Wellington in the morning peak in 2017 than in 2000, although 12% more people are travelling there at that time. So there is already a decline in car travel into central Wellington by commuters.

So there isn't a problem of more and more people commuting by car into central Wellington. What there is (about which Genter and LGWM seem entirely oblivious) is a growth in traffic seeking to bypass the city. 

Around a third of all traffic heading into Wellington city is seeking to bypass it. The people bypassing the city are coming to and from the airport, hospital, and the eastern/southern suburbs, and heading to and from the northern/western suburbs, the Hutt Valley, Porirua, Kapiti and beyond. 

THIS -- THE LACK OF ANY GENUINE BYPASS --  is the source of the single biggest transport problem in Wellington. This is blatantly obvious to anyone who isn’t blinded by the Green (and now Labour) Party’s trendy North American urbanist blinkers. These people trying to bypass central Wellington quite simply are not going to change onto trams and buses to double their travel time, and no amount of Neo-urbanist hand-waving will make them. 

The problem is easy to identify: Wellington’s urban motorway ends abruptly at Te Aro at one end, and at the other end, SH1 from the airport stalls at the bottleneck of Mt Victoria Tunnel, with one lane in each direction. This causes congestion all day long and on weekends as well. Plus between 15-40% of traffic along Wellington’s waterfront is travelling to avoid that congestion, according to LGWM, that’s traffic that helps separate Wellington city from its harbour.

The latest draft strategy released by LGWM indicates how it isn’t that interested in fixing that problem. Instead, like Minister Michael Wood, it is hooked on a tram line -- after dumping an earlier proposal from the city to the Airport, the tram fetish this time focusses on a linefrom the city to Island Bay.

However, the putative Island Bay tram isn’t about addressing a transport problem either. There is no transport problem from Island Bay at present that a tram line will fix -- no problem of overcrowded buses, no congestion at bottlenecks fivable by tram. No, the tram line is all about housing. LGWM thinks that without a tram line to Island Bay that could cost $2.2 billion, there won't be enough intensive housing development along the corridor. 

That's $2.2 billion (plus fuck-ups) to solve a non-problem. After all, it's not lack of tram lines that is causing a shortage of intensive house building!

This policy of LGWM is straight out of the North American urbanist planner playbook, which calls for more "PT" (public transport) to induce more high-density housing. A policy that  has had the same success in addressing housing shortages and traffic issues there (i.e., virtually  none) as it would in Wellington. 

At least Treasury and the Ministry of Transport have been on the ball, advising Ministers that any mass transit proposal for Wellington will only produce “secondary” transport benefits that are "insufficient to justify them on their own." In other words, it’s a boondoggle: the costs to taxpayers for these transportation white elephants far exceeding any alleged "economic benefits" from improving mobility. It's a money pit, but a totem for politicians to show off -- a monument-building vanity project.

In a city, and a country, in which we have a crisis of unaffordable housing, these people are essential telling we peasants: 'Let Them Eat Monuments.'

Of course, the argument that you need a tram line to intensify housing is rubbish, as demonstrated by the latest inspired announcement to abolish the need for a resource consent to build a three-storey residential development in major cities. Assuming the rule change works, and it encourages more intensive housing development in Wellington, the idea it will not happen first in Mt Victoria, Mt Cook and Newtown, close to the CBD rather than Island Bay is rather fanciful. Being that close to the CBD encourages walking and cycling and hopping on one of the multiple bus routes that already pass by on the way from the suburbs. 

The tram is a massive boondoggle that neither enables nor is necessary for housing development. It's a fetish of Green activists; it is not rational economics.

AH, BUT WHAT ABOUT EMISSIONS? Minister Michael Wood is particularly keen on cutting emissions, but Island Bay already has a preponderance of electric buses that go some way to do that. 

And it’s particularly ludicrous to talk about spending $2.2 billion on a tram line, when both the Government and the Greater Wellington Regional Council baulked at spending just $53 million to replace some of the infrastructure to keep Wellington’s city-wide trolley-bus network moving. A network that went from Karori to Island Bay to Miramar to Aro Valley to Kingston to Seatoun to Lyall Bay. Anyway, only an idiot, or an MP, thinks any of this will reduce emissions. (But perhaps I repeat myself.)

"But, but..." you say, "aren’t they proposing a second Mt Victoria Tunnel too? ... and doing something called 'grade-separation' at the Basin Reserve?" Sure they are, but the proposals for the second tunnel are ludicrous. One is to build a new tunnel, or to convert the existing tunnel for walking and cycling only. Another is to build a new tunnel, but with one lane each way for buses – when today virtually NO buses go through Mt Victoria Tunnel, because there is already a one-way bus tunnel just to the north that bypasses the congestion. So all of the proposals essentially keep the current road capacity and do nothing at all about the bottleneck. This is straight out of the Green Party “building new road capacity is bad” school of thinking, on the basis people might have the audacity to drive (even with an electric car). One has to suspect the proposals are designed to just be dumped for being uneconomic, because they won't encourage housing, won't reduce emissions, nor encourage people to shift modes.

WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF WELLINGTON you ask? That's certainly a fairer question. Wellingtonians in the western and northern suburbs could certainly be excused for wondering why LGWM has nothing for them. Karori, for example, has a highly-congested tunnel and bus route about which LGWM is studious silent. However, you should stop thinking LGWM's sporadic but well-funded campaigns are really about transport anymore, because they ain’t. What they are is a crusade by activist Ministers and car-hating planners to justify building an expensive shiny new tram line, one that they can claim as theirs -- a monument to their egos -- pouring billions of unnecessary dollars into one lone corridor in a city that has had widespread and ongoing issues with throttled roads, cancelled bus services and, of course, a crumbling water infrastructure.

Meanwhile, LGWM embarrasses itself by its recent focus on “projects” that are nothing more than micro-management tinkering. Its main website notes one of its great successes as …. lowering the speed limit in central Wellington to 30 km/h. For a large intergovernmental project team meant to be focused on major strategic policy ("delivering a shared vision for Wellington" their website grandly proclaims) to be left instead to be noodling around with lowering speed limits is both embarrassing and ludicrous. Which is precisely what LGWM has become. 

Indeed, their proposal to install a pedestrian crossing and lower the speed limit on a four-lane stretch of state highway along which there is zero property access, has seen some call it Let’s Get Wellington Stopping.

They are a joke. But an expensive well-connected one.

If we want to ever get Wellington moving, a first step must be to remove Let's Get Wellington Moving. It must be stopped.

Thereafter, Waka Kotahi should be directed to finish SH1 in Wellington with a second Terrace Tunnel and Mt Victoria Tunnel; to trench the highway under Te Aro; and to grade separate at the Basin Reserve. Wellington City Council should put in place bus-priority measures at strategic points across the network, and this entire folly of a programme dreamed up by LGWM should be ended. All of this for much less than what LGWM is proposing.

Now about Michael Wood’s other tram proposal….

* * * * 

The UnCivil Servant is neither civil nor servile. He is not however entirely unfamiliar with the civil service.

Wellington post-quake visit

 

Yesterday I was out and about looking at damaged buildings around central Wellington to help understand why they were damaged. (This is what designers do.)

As you can see, there are three main clusters of damage: on fill at the waterfront and Te Aro flat, and above Waterloo Quay in Thorndon:

 

 

Several things struck me (observations rather falling masonry, fortunately):

• Perhaps the greatest thing to notice is not so much that so many buildings were damaged, but that so few weren’t! Around 60 buildings are on the official list of damaged buildings, and there is talk that maybe four will be demolished. Only four in a city of thousands! Focus on that and you realise what a job those engineers did.
• It’s true however that not all damage has yet been found (not all buildings have their structure as openly exposed as the Courtenay Place/Reading Cinema carparks), nor that all of it is visible from outside. Yesterday, for example, when I walked past the Asteron Centre in Featherston St, it was still considered sound. Overnight however cracks were found in the stairwell, and the building is now officially declared unsafe. The only damage seen from the outside however is a plywood sheet over a windowpane – and much the same can be said of the officially-damaged Deloitte’s building on Brandon St, below, which aside from a few fallen ceiling tiles looks undamaged from the exterior. And as for the pipes and cables under Featherston St, well, that’s another story altogether …
• That said, there was talk about town that the building in Featherston St had suffered in the 2013 Seddon earthquake, and surprise that it was not on the ‘damaged list’ this time.
  And this was a theme with several of the damaged buildings I saw: new cracking evident from the outside (in the precast panels of the Revera building in Mulgrave St for example, seen below) had clearly joined hands with cracks from earlier times that had been cleaned up and painted.

Cracking evident at spandrel/mullion joints on precast panels at the closed Revera Centre in Mulgrave St

• Let’s also celebrate the crews out cleaning up all the debri. This is work they hadn’t programmed, and yet just ten days after the quake the damage to the city is clearly well contained. Glass and tiles fell from tall buildings along The Terrace, for example, but the fast cleanup leaves the streetscape looking as clean as it always has – and much the same can be said of the rest of the city I saw.
  
• For the most part, the effect of the quake (if any) on smaller buildings was barely evident in most parts of town I saw. Those suffering damage were primarily taller buildings. That said however one of the worst damaged buildings, the comparatively new Statistics House (below, behind a severely damaged low-rise building on the disturbed ground around both), is low-rise. The effect of poor ground conditions here at the severely damaged Centreport compound– sitting on fill that has clearly suffered – is undoubtedly a large factor. So the role of all Welllington’s reclaimed land is clearly a factor to bear in mind.

The much-discussed Statistics House, sitting on failed reclaimed land next to a severely damaged low-rise
building on the right. Note the drop in ground level by the lower building’s entrance step.

• The building code requires that “significant” buildings which includes council buildings, defence buildings, archives etc. be given a higher level of seismic performance. Yet both the 2007 Defence and main Archive Building (first picture below), and both Wellington Council and Greater Wellington Regional Council Buildings, were all damaged – just Christchurch’s council building was damaged in the Canterbury quake. There are good reasons for the damage to all of these, but perhaps the damage to these last three especially might suggest that the expertise assumed to reside in these buildings about these very issues may be very much less than many might suppose.

Damaged Defence Building, above left; damaged Archives Building, centre; undamaged private apartment building, right.

Greater Wellington Council and Wellington City Council buildings (above and below) both closed for business.
Not altogether a ringing endorsement of the expertise alleged to lie within.

• Remember, there is no such thing as earthquake-proof. The first responsibility of the structural designer is primarily to maintain the building’s integrity in  quake sufficient to get the people out, resulting in what might be called “controlled damage.” Although the quake happened at midnight rather than midday, and at one-third of the intensity the structures were designed to withstand, this was achieved all across town.
  Damage to secondary elements however, caused by failure of partitions, windows etc. to move with a building’s more ductile structure has sometimes caused significant failure that could, if the damage had occurred at midday, been catastrophic. Falling wall tiles, falling fittings and falling panes of glass from tall buildings for example: several buildings suffered in this way, and all of these would have been deadly to anybody in the street. (While not itself very tall, the new BNZ building on damaged ground at Waterloo Quay, below, exhibits this kind of failure, with internal infill walls cracked and window rubbers and external fittings and finishes popped out or unfastened.) This is not so much an engineering failure as one of the designers of those secondary elements – a warning to all designers to understand a building’s earthquake response, and also a reminder of the risk of potentially dangerous finishes and styles of buildings in a city located on a significant fault line that has itself not yet ruptured.

BNZ Harbour Quays building on damaged reclaimed land beside Waterloo Quay

Statistic House exterior: stiffer secondary structures (wall, glass curtain walling system)
crushed and/or buckled by movement of more ductile structural frame

• This, in other words, is a warning that should be heeded.

[All pics by PC, unless otherwise noted]

to be continued …

.

Earthquake engineering is harder than you think

 

DESIGNING BUILDINGS THAT respond safely in an earthquake is much harder than you think.  I hear folk who think it’s simple; who wonder why even in a “moderate” quake Wellington’s buildings seem to be falling apart. The thing is that designing to respond properly to every earthquake means designing to respond to every possible earthquake – and there’s no way of knowing what earthquake you are going to get when even The Moderate One comes.

Just remember that the earthquake that proved most disastrous in Christchurch was the one in which the ground did something it wasn’t supposed to do at all, which was move violently up an down. Buildings aren’t designed for that: until then we’d always assumed they are thrown side to side, and designed for that.

So we learned something from that, just as seismic engineers learn something from every earthquake. This is what the best of them keep a suitcase ready beside the bed when they hear a Big One hits somewhere in the world: they want to see what happened, and how, and which design responses worked best this time.

Seismic design is hard. You don’t want a building that’s too strong (because that strength attracts more loading), instead you want it to be ductile. You don’t want a building too closely tied to ground movement; because then it moves with every little jolt. And there is no such thing as a perfectly safe building. Even a perfectly ductile building with total base isolation is going to have problems if a fault line opens up underneath and starts moving – like it did under this house (that’s the driveway up there on the right on the section of land in Kekerengu that shifted over ten metres during the quake, dragging parts of the house with it):

Earthquake engineering is harder than you think. Basically what you’re going is designing to avoid total collapse, to get people out safely, and that’s about all. In other words, to fail safely. So in that respect, the house above succeeded admirably in difficult circumstances.

But it does mean that, once the shaking has stopped, every building that’s been shaken needs to be checked to make sure any failure that has occurred has only been in secondary structures (such as ceilings) and not in the primary structure itself. So do bear in mind this is perfectly normal, and not a failure of designers. Every building remaining standing after a quake is a success, regardless of how damaged it appears.

CONSIDER HOWEVER THE Statistics Building on reclaimed land in Wellington’s downtown, in which a whole floor appears to have dislodged itself and dropped onto the one below:

The Government Statistician Liz MacPherson, asked the obvious question:

How is it that a building that is as new as Stats House, with the [earthquake] code rating it had, could suffer this sort of damage.

The simple answer is that even with all our knowledge, the code is still not any guarantee of success. It’s not a matter of negligence; it’s one about the nature of knowledge. Basically, there is no way to be omniscient about how the ground will move – particularly reclaimed ground, as here, which is always prone to localised softening – so that any code will only reflect what that last generation knew (or thought they knew) about earthquake design. And a lot of earthquake design is about designing that safe mechanism of failure.

So what may have happened here, where the failure is clearly unsafe? First, be aware that all multi-storey buildings since the early eighties have been designed with ‘weak-beams/strong columns.’ This means that in any shake, it’s your beams that fail first – and since these beams are generally tied at each end, your floor will generally sag rather than collapse. In other words, to fail safely. The alternative (designing for strong beams/weak columns) promotes the potentially disastrous alternative of having columns fail first, with the disastrous failure mechanism thereafter of one floor dropping onto another, then another, until a twelve-story building quickly becomes a ten-metre high pile of rubble, as happened (from memory) with Christchurch's Pyne Gould building. (And when you contemplate that designing with strong beams/weak columns was considered “best practice” only a few decades ago, you can see how little even the last generation truly knew about all this.)

So to hazard a guess as to what happened here, it may be that the expected beam weakening was accompanied by some localised ground softening which also weakened the column to which the floor was tied, causing one end of the floor to drop (which is how it seems from photographs). Or it may be as simple as a tie at one end of a beam that failed – with the catastrophic failure you see above.

The only thing about which to be thankful is that it wasn’t a top floor that failed, causing a pancake failure onto floors below – and that the calamity happened at midnight instead of midday, when this would have been an utter tragedy. But seismic engineering is still not an exact science, and unlikely to ever be so.

ONE LAST QUESTION a lot of folk have is the very reasonable one of wondering why there are so many high-rise buildings in an obvious seismic trouble spot that have dangerous panes of glass ready to be dislodged. That’s a very fair question, but not one easily remedied by any code. It is instead one that every designer should be asking themselves.

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The right place for a capital city?

 

I’ve heard folk this morning questioning the wisdom of having the country’s centre of government sitting just above sea level on a known earthquake fault in an active geological zone.

Frankly, I’ve always though that was a feature rather than a bug.

(To those of you down there not working for government: stay safe.)

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The night Beethoven made me cry

Guest post by Terry Verhoeven

I am not one to profit from the misfortunes of others. Saturday night however I made an exception, filling the seat for PC at pianist Freddy Kempf's last NZ performance because he most regrettably could not make it and did not want his ticket to go to waste

It didn't.

What. A. Night. To. Remember.

This Wellington concert was the last in Freddy’s sell-out tour of Beethoven piano concertos which he conducted from the piano, this last night being concerto numbers four and five. Freddy was outstanding in every possible respect. I sat in awe as the maestro demonstrated to me, a concerti virgin, Beethoven's presence. And with what aplomb! The young maestro did The Gracious Mouth Through Which Music Spoke proud.

Conducting while playing was a masterstroke by the composer-pianist. A musician in our group observed later that  playing involves introversion, while conducting involves extroversion, so to be able change between the two modes as often as beautifully and as seamlessly as Freddy did was an amazing feat in itself. And one of the most invigorating and exhilarating things I have ever watched.

The hour and half long extravaganza of magnificence began with the Egmont overture, a stunningly beautiful piece in its own right. It centred the mind for what was about to come.

And then it came. The first movement of number four. How to describe it? No words can do it justice. The only words that come close to describing what I heard are the words attributed to Beethoven himself:

From the glow of enthusiasm I let the melody escape. I pursue it. Breathless I catch up with it. It flies again, I seize it. I embrace it with delight. I multiply it then by modulations, and at last I triumph in the first theme. There is the whole symphony.

I felt and saw the butterflies; in my stomach, from the excitement and exhilaration, and floating over the keys of the piano at a rhythmic pace I never would have believed was humanly possible (we were seated just behind the orchestra so only the orchestra had a better view of hands at work).

If music were honey, then Kempf's fingers were the bees. And boy did they make the honey trickle. By the end of the first movement I had reached cloud nine and the sweetness even drew a tear from me. Not an easy thing to do!

And that was just the first movement. The second was the most sublime thing I have ever heard. So contrasting to the first, yet so complementary. One simply cannot beat a live performance.

After the beauty of the fourth and the anticipation created by the intermission, the fifth was as professionally executed, but my own mind and heart had reached their crescendo during the second movement of the fourth. Still, my heart raced as  I joined in the round and well-deserved standing ovation from a packed house after all three movements of the fifth.

Freddy Kempf and the NZSO were first class. There is no praise too high I can give their performance. I honestly cannot imagine attending another that could beat it. But then again, I am a guy who has just popped his concerti cherry.

RELATED POSTS:

• Of Genius and Genuflection—Freddy Kempf's Beethoven – Lindsay Perigo, SOLO
• Music of the Gods: Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 – Lindsay Perigo, SOLO
• Music of the Gods: Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4– Lindsay Perigo, SOLO

REAL economics

If you’re in Wellington tomorrow evening, this looks to be a great book launch to get along to.

The book is Real Economics by The Foundation for Economic Growth’s Phil Scott.

The book has its own website, where you can read reviews and even download a sample chapter.

[Everyone seriously interested in economics, from students  to intelligent truck drivers,] should have a copy and read this ground-breaking foundation of clear economic thinking.
Real Economics explains how human actions shape our world and why so much seems to be going wrong for Western economies.
This book will bring enlightenment for the general reader who will see why a few very wealthy are becoming exceedingly rich and the middle classes are on the road to serfdom.

It looks and sounds like it’s worth a good read.

Calling all Wellington liberty lovers

Here’s message for all Wellington liberty lovers. Yes, yes, I know it’s addressed as a message for students. But if you’re in Wellington and you’re not a student, then just throw money …

Hi All
    I'm sending this message to you because I believe you may be interested in the Students for Liberty movement (SFL), and potentially supporting it here in New Zealand.
    The reason I'm writing to you is to alert you of several facts. Firstly, we've just created our own Wellington group. Wellington Students for Liberty, which is part of the our regional group, Australia and New Zealand Students for Liberty.
    Secondly, we're looking for leaders, and people interested in joining up with a friendly movement of libertarians in a network that is designed to further promote liberty on a world wide basis. This is a group of people SFL puts allot of work into, offering training, resources, and support from regional groups. We're looking to try and get SFL groups running in all of our universities in New Zealand, with active meetings (Including our own regional conference), and regular meetups.
    Finally, even if you are no longer at university, or don't have the time, I'd still love to be in touch with you! SFL is all about creating a dynamic and ongoing movement to liberty, and you should be considered to be invited to partake in all events organised by us. Our regional organisation is in the process of forming Alumni chapters, so please also get in contact if your interested in making your own headway with a dynamic and friendly libertarian network! There's always plenty of work that can be done to turn New Zealand into a free society .
    We have a number of events planned in the coming weeks!

• A Liberty on the Rocks event: a social gathering of all our members in a light-hearted format at a bar, for networking of all kinds of ages. [Bar sounds good; date would be even better. - Ed]
• We're at Wellington's LGBT pride celebration, Out at the Park this Saturday, running a stall (We're handing out badges and other goodies!)
• We'll be at Victoria Universities Clubs week, and active there on campus all year round.

If you have any further question's, or if you'd just like to talk as a friend, feel free to get back to me or any of our other leaders.
    Regards
    Aidan Carter
    Vice - Chair ANZSFL
    Wellington Students for Liberty (wSFL)

Maybe you can beat Wellington on a good day?

In pointing out the obvious, that Wellington is losing businesses as they depart for places elsewhere (replacing businesses with politicians as one wag said) John Key has stirred up a Hurricane’s nest. Aggrieved Wellingtonians are springing up all over to argue Wellington is not dying.

Mind you, their refutations are not exactly strong—mayor Celia Wade-Brown, for example, in mentioning that only the other day she had met some Chinese students in her office was not really offering strong opposition.

Having visited recently to sample AFL and a fair proportion of hostelries along with my research team, I can say Wellington’s a fine city to visit—but having lived there once before, I can’t say I’d like to again. Mind you, there are things to love, and Colin Espiner's list of 10 reasons he loves Wellington is probably shared with most of his townies. Mind you, it’s also fairly provincial:

1. Better coffee. Wellington is powered by caffeine. And there’s none finer than in the capital. [Nope, on coffee elsewhere in the country. None at all.}

2. The Brooklyn windmill. Don’t scoff. [Too late] One of the first in the country and now a major tourist attraction. The views from the carpark are stunning.

3. The Bucket Fountain. You’ve got to love a town that keeps something so hideous and so broken that it’s become a city icon. [Gore has a fish. Wellington has a bucket fountain. Spot the difference.]

4. The Penthouse cinema. Arthouse cinema at its finest, complete with decent red wine and its own theatre cat. [If only other cities had arthouse cinemas…]

5. Westpac Stadium. Sorry Eden Park, but the Cake Tin is better in every respect. [Maybe. Okay.]

6. Public transport. Aucklanders haven’t heard of this, but it’s a fast, cheap, convenient and quick way to get to work. [What is this “public transport” thing you speak of?]

7. Sunshine and fresh air. OK, sometimes too much fresh air, but Welly clocks up many more sunshine hours than its northern sibling. [Maybe because the wind is always blowing the clouds away?]

8. Cuba Street. No other city in New Zealand does cool grunge like Wellington’s Cuba Street. Plus it’s home to Midnight Espresso, home of the finest nachos in the country. [Our research team decided Cuba St isn’t what it was.  And I reckon even in its day K Rd might give it a run.]

9. Wellington’s waterfront. Whereas Auckland and Christchurch have turned their backs on their ports, the capital’s is a living, breathing, human space. [Maybe…] And you can’t beat Oriental Parade in the sunshine. [Well, apart from Takapuna, Mission Bay, St Heliers, Cheltenham, Long Bay, Piha, Karekare … Shame too you’re not allowed to buy an ice cream or a beer along most of Oriential Bay.]

10. Houses you can actually afford to buy. Not much point in living somewhere if you can’t afford it. Wellington house prices are not cheap, but they’re not stupid either. [Um, I’m pretty sure Wellington house prices as a multiple of income are still score as “severely unaffordable” in world studies of these things. And Wellington housing standards are all too often, how can I say this politely, shoddy.]

It’s true you can’t beat Wellington on a good day. It’s also true however that the gaps between good days can be hellishly long.

Mind you, none of that makes up for it being a city minding everybody else’s business, infested with people sucking off the state tit.  Much like a bigger Grey Lynn.

Here’s my own top ten reasons to love Wellington:

1. Live AFL twice a year
2. Craft beer in every bar—even the seediest. (Yes, I checked.)
3. The harbour—check it out on one of the two calm days in winter, with snow and the hills and the water glistening in the sun. Beautiful … for those two days.
4. A genuinely urban downtown beautifully contained by its geography—a downtown that is not, however, what it was.
5. Michael Fowler Centre—which with the demise of the Christchurch Town Hall, is now the single best place in the country to listen to live classical music.
6. Live theatre—maybe there just seems like there’s more than Auckland has, but there is, right?
7. ….

Can you finish it off for me?

ANZAC AFL [updated]

Anzac Day next week in Wellington represents a significant milestone in Australia-New Zealand sporting relations: the first time AFL teams play for points outside Australia.

The world’s most libertarian sport is “a fast paced, high scoring contact sport requiring a blend of speed, power, strength and skill, which will certainly appeal to all New Zealanders. It is the most watched sport on Australian television … it can be a difficult game to explain to those new to it, far better to show you!”

AFL is  best seen live, and this is every NZer’s chance.  Saint Kilda reckons they’ll have plenty of fans there, and there will be more than a few Sydney Swans fans—and one Canadian Swan, Mike Pyke, who once scored a try against the All Blacks.

His Swans’ teammate Adam Goodes has become a big fan of rugby, and the All Blacks.

"You grow to enjoy it - not so much the success of the All Blacks - but to have a team, with all the games they've played, and have a winning percentage of 80 per cent plus is ridiculous."

For more news and information about the 2013 ANZAC day game, which has a 5pm international curtain-raiser between the New Zealand Hawks and a South Pacific selection, click here.

For Ticketing information, click here.

And keep up on news with NZAFL on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AFLNZ

UPDATE: 19,500 seats sold, and record bookings for Wellington’s hotels.

With just four to go until the ANZAC Day game between St Kilda and Sydney at Westpac Stadium in Wellington AFLNZ CEO Rob Vanstam and AFLNZ Board Member and former New Zealand Falcon Tim Stevens were guests on Radio Sport with Murray Deaker yesterday. Deaker also speaks with AFL International Manager Tony Woods.

Links to the interview here:

• 3.00pm-3.15pm (Start from 10.50 in)
• 3.15pm-3.30pm
• 3.30pm-3.45pm
• 3.45pm-4.00pm

ANZAC Day AFL in Wellington, 2013

A sight for Wellington eyes: St Kilda’s Nick Riewoldt marking over Gold Coast Suns’s Karmichael Hunt (which he’d do all night if Karmichael keeps jumping like that)

It was reported first by Rod Shaw on the World Footy News blog, and now all but confirmed today that as of next year the St Kilda and Brisbane Lions AFL teams will play an Anzac Day AFL premiership game at the Wellington Cake Tin—as a complement to the regular Essendon-Collingwood Anzac Day thriller at the MCG—with plans still afoot for St Kilda to play up to four “home” games at the Wellington stadium every year for the indefinite future.

Apparently Councillor John “Mystery” Morrison was part of a delegation of Wellington councillors taking the trip to the MCG this year to join 86,900 fans cheering on the game that has become an Anzac Day tradition in Melbourne, won this year in a breath-taking finish by Collingwood. Unavailable for comment after the game (rumours that the hospitality proved too much are hereby confirmed as being totally unfounded), before leaving for Melbourne, Morrison and businessman John Dow – a key figure behind Wellington hosting three pre-season AFL games between 1998 and 2001 – told the Dom Post:

It's still got a fair way to travel but we've had positive talks about St Kilda being associated with Wellington and looking to play up to two, maybe even three, major club games against opposition like Collingwood, Essendon or whoever.
    So the two factors make it pretty interesting, that we've got a club who wishes to be in partnership with us and we've got the governing body. We're talking about this partnership arrangement kicking off next year with an Anzac Day game here. I think that's a particularly good marketing ploy.

This is magnificent news for New Zealanders keen to follow the world’s most libertarian sport, fantastic news for those working on the game at grassroots level here, great for Wellington (the Hawthorn club’s similar involvement with Tasmania has proved highly beneficial for both), great for fans like myself who will be making the pilgrimage from all over,* and furthermore it’s just what the stadium was built for. (Yes folks, the AFL played a part back at the design stage in making it the oval it is.) And as NZ-born Brisbane Lions’s chief executive Malcolm Holmes points out, for teams like theirs the travel time is comparable to that of visiting Tasmania or Perth. So no travel problems either for the teams. Everybody wins!

Can’t wait!

This year just the MCG on Anzac Day, next year Wellington as well!

* Which, to be fair, may not be entirely beneficial for Wellington. Although I’d expect the Malthouse at least to prosper.

CLIMATEGATE: Have New Zealand warmists cooked their books as well? [update 4]

A few months back a reader here at NOT PC discovered you could now view NIWA’s raw temperature records online, and what he discovered when he did was that while NIWA was shouting about warming, the raw data said something totally different.  The raw data said there’d been no warming at all.
The NZ Climate Science Coalition saw the same thing, and their research showing what NIWA have done is now big news round the world this morning: the news that the supposedly neutral meteorological organisation has apparently been fudging its figures to say something the raw data doesn’t.
The work uncovering NIWA’s calumny was done by NZ”s Climate Science Coalition, and can be told in these two graphs. The first graph tells the story NIWA would like you to hear, a graph Jim Salinger started working on back when he was working at the now disgraced Climate Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia showing a clear warming trend across the country:

This second graph however tells you the story told by the raw data, that is, no warming whatsoever:
The reason for the difference?  NIWA “adjusted” the raw data because . . . well, for no very good reason at all, really.  Instead of adjusting for the Urban Heat Island effect, which should have seen modern temperatures adjusted downwards, virtually all the adjustments were made in the other direction, to manufacture a clear warming trend where there wasn’t any. See:

These figures, the adjusted figures, have been used to manufacture a scare story now used to justify sending NZ taxpayers a $100 billion Emissions Trading bill. And the people who manufactured those figures?  They’re the ones who’ve been advising minister Nick Smith that his Emissions Trading Scam is necessary. Says the Climate Science Coalition:

There have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organisations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years. But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half. So what’s going on?"  Researchers find records adjusted to represent 'warming' when raw data show temperatures have been stable.”

This sort of review of NIWA’s science is only possible now NIWA’s raw figures have been made available on the ‘net, since as the NZ Climate Science Coalition note in their summary of what they’ve uncovered, “Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered . . . ” You can only wonder why.
This is how climate science has been done here, folks – the science that’s being used to make us all poorer -- and while reviews of that science like this one are still themselves in their infancy, what’s already being uncovered in the CRU emails and data like this is not pretty.
This is undoubtedly the biggest story around this morning, and coming on the back of the hacked emails from that other organisation for which Jim Salinger used to work, it should call into question with every honest person the basis on which the warmist mantra has been intoned.
Read about the story here at Andrew Bolt’s who’s got a great summary too of subsequent developments in his updates:
Climategate: Making New Zealand warmer.
The Climate Science Coalition has an eight-page PDF summarising the scam:
Are we feeling warmer yet?.
It’s a story that’s gone around the world:

• Anthony Watts takes Thanksgiving off to follows up the story from the States:
  Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the “official” one.
  
• The American Newsbusters blog takes up the story:
  Climategate Scandal Spreads to New Zealand as MSM Continues Ostrich Act.
  
• The Examiner from the UK:
  Questions arise about modification of New Zealand climate data.
  New Zealand climate agency responds to charges of data manipulation.
  
• The UK Daily Telegraph takes up the story:
  Climategate: the scandal spreads, the plot thickens, the shame deepens….
  
• From Canada, Lawrence Solomon has the wrap:
  Lawrence Solomon: New Zealand's Climategate.
  
• From South Africa:
  Man made global warming scam, Climategate is in New Zealand.

And from New Zealand, the mainstream media catches up by issuing the denial before the news itself: Climate scientists attack criticism.
And NIWA belatedly explain the arguments for their adjustments at one site, Kelburn, after repeated refusals by Salinger to either release the raw data for all of them or explain the reasons for all the one-way adjustments: Combining Temperature Data from Multiple Sites in Wellington.
I’d like to see that replied to today, and I’ll be checking back at the Climate Science Coalition site regularly to see if it has.
Oh, and by the way, since we’re “thinking local” here, satellite data for the Southern Hemisphere over the last thirty years shows "a warming trend" for the Southern Hemisphere during those last 30 years of 0.00 °C per decade.. . .
UPDATE: In the absence of a swift response from the Climate Science Coalition, Ian Wishart critically examines NIWA’s response re their adjustments to the Wellington data (that’s one station out of seven for which they’ve adjusted temperatures “to hide the decline,” presumably the easiest to explain, they think), pointing out quite correctly that all such adjustments “need to be fully explained so other scientists can test the reasonableness of the adjustment”; wondering if “applying a temperature example from 15km away in a different climate zone [is] a valid way of rearranging historical data”; and reminding NIWA that “we'd all like to see the methodology and reasoning behind adjustments on all the other sites as well.”
Pronto.
UPDATE 2: Zen Tiger hacks satirically into NIWA’s emails to discover the real reasons for their drastic upward adjustments of raw data: The NIWA Emails

UPDATE 3:  Interested readers might like to know that Steve McIntyre discovered serious problems with NIWA's manipulation of the Wellington temperaeture records back in 2007,including it's fiddling around with that of Kelburn.
It all began when NASA lost Wellington altogther, you see, and then discovered it once again . . .

UPDATE 4:  Anthony Watts takes NIWA to task for its response, and for the frankly hopeless state of some if its temperature collection stations [pdf]. He posts a picture of the Auckland station (incorrectly labelled Kelburn), from whence Auckland's official temperature record is kept - right on the NIWA rooftop in Khyber Pass (all that lovely warm concrete), right under the motorway (all those lovely cars) and right next to the air conditioners. So no problem at all with its accuracy then.

And Terry Hurlbut at The UK Examiner comments.

UPDATE 5: By the way, you can see pictures of all NIWA's surface stations caputured on film so far at Watts' Surface Stations Gallery.  Compare them with some of the other horror stations uncovered so far around the world, while remembering that it is from stations such as these combined with "adjustments" by the likes of David Wratt and Jim Salinger that "the" temperature record is made.