Kiwiblog

North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams writes in the Herald:

A former Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, was asked for his views on the re-election chances of the incumbent Republican President. He smiled and said: “Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me.”

That summed up what so many people were thinking over a myriad issues affecting the political future of the President. Cuomo delivered a powerful call to action to the millions disaffected with the Administration’s policies and performance.

Oh dear, Andrew wants this to be a story about how upset he is that his job has been abolished. But he should think about his political history better.

The Republican President Cuomo was commenting on was almost certainly Ronald Reagan in 1984. Reagan went on to win the election in the biggest landslide for many decades. In fact he was the second President since George Washington to win all but one state or better (Nixon did the same in 1972).

Oh this is hilarious. The Aucklander gives out it awards for 2010. The categories are:

1. Most overinflated view of a local body role.
2. Most creative charity contribution.
3. Most persistent request to be left alone.
4. Most petulant outburst.
5. Most relentless pursuit of the facts.
6. Most frightful drug reaction.
7. Most ingratiating brush with real celebrity.
8. Most insincere apology.
9. Most welcomed media silence.
10. Most unsuccessful media silence.

The winner of all ten awards is North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams. It must be so embarrassing if you live on the North Shore to have to admit Williams is your Mayor. I wonder if house prices have declined on the Shore since he was elected?

The Herald reports:

United Future leader Peter Dunne has given up on his annual list of worst-behaved MPs, saying Speaker Lockwood Smith’s reign has ushered in a new era of dignity and propriety.

To be fair, I think the absence of Winston helps also. But the House has been a far less toxic place this year.

Mr Dunne did honour Labour’s Trevor Mallard with a lifetime achievement award in bad behaviour “for services to melodrama, fisticuffs, and generally aberrant behaviour”.

When Lockwood orders him to apologise, you can actually see the supressed rage in his eyes!!

The Herald does find a few insults though:

Labour’s Moana Mackey apologised for referring to Hekia Parata as “Lady Parata” and “her royal highness”. National’s Paul Quinn was pulled up for calling Labour’s backbench “monkeys”.

I’d rather be called Lady Parata than a monkey I have to say – well if I was a female Parata that is!

Some apologies:

SHANE JONES
For saying of Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee, “the notion of him and energy is a mathematical impossibility”.

PHIL HEATLEY
For claiming another “fiddled the books” in ACC and Housing; for wishing the Speaker would use a 90-day eviction order on Trevor Mallard.

Heh.

RODNEY HIDE
For North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams’ “madness”, for calling Trevor Mallard “the angry one”.

Isn’t truth a defence?

JOHN KEY
For claiming Green MP Metiria Turei thought Phil Goff was “racist”. She had said his speech was “the worst kind of politics”.

So worse than racism?

Jonathan Marshall in the SST reports:

Revelations of after-dark communications with Key come as Wood releases on the internet the abusive rants Williams left on his answer phone in October.

Blogger Cameron Slater – who has feuded with Williams in the past – is from today hosting the recordings on behalf of Wood on his website whaleoil.co.nz.

Cameron has made a nice video including the phone recordings. They reveal a highly insecure Mayor who feels the need to leave abusive and threatening messages on the answerphone of his predecessor.

In investigating the messages to George Wood, the SST found even John Key receives the late night missives:

An exasperated John Key has confirmed that Williams, mayor of Auckland’s North Shore City, has on several occasions sent “aggressive” and “obnoxious” texts as late as 3.30am.

Williams has gained a reputation for firing off intemperate emails, text messages and voicemail to adversaries and colleagues until late into the evening.

In October, Williams emailed his mayoral predecessor George Wood at 11.34pm on a Saturday, describing Wood as a “buffoon” and a “disgruntled, failed has-been”. He also left abusive messages on Wood’s voicemail.

Key told the Sunday Star-Times that he had not replied to any of Williams’ messages. He said they had arrived at “anything up to half past three in the morning. It’s certainly nocturnal.

“I never reply to them , they’re never worthy of a reply. The messages were in an aggressive tone… I’m not going to respond to obnoxious messages at this time of the morning.”

Cameron has done well with this front page scoop for the Star-Times, with the recipients of the calls knowing where best to go to get them publicised. I expect he will end up becoming the most visited blog at some stage – even if he does it from D Block

Yet to buy it, but love this extract from Aaron Bhatnagar:

There was also an amusing set of late night emails from William to Metro Magazine staffers, which goes like this

1:00am – 2 paragraph email attacking the journalist, Donna Chisholm, for a hidden agenda and demanding a meeting with her

1:30 am – 4 paragraph (abridged!) email complaining to another journalist called Jenny who left Metro two years ago, CC’ed to Chisholm, where, among other things, he accuses Chisholm of being in the secret pay of John Banks

5:56am – One line email to Metro “recalling” the emails above.

Andrew Williams and his late night e-mails just get better and better.

His ipredict stock for becoming Mayor of Auckland has only one buyer at the moment. Someone is bidding $0.0001 per share.

I previously blogged on how North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams black-listed Whale Oil from bidding in a charity auction, removing his bids. This meant the auction went for $150 (and to the Mayor’s daughter) instead of the $1,000 or so Whale was willing to bid.

They obviously realised what a bad and indefensible look this was, so today the Herald reports:

Mr Williams said council members and staff had boosted the top bid by $1030 and three teenage cancer patients would accompany him today in the jet plane simulator.

The poor Councillors and staff – having to do a whip around to save face for the Mayor.

A more sensible approach would have been to raise the money beforehand, and simply outbid Whale Oil.

Mr Slater said he would pay the $1000, which included money sent in by readers of his blog, “in the spirit of the auction”.

Great for the charity.

I blogged on Monday about how Whale Oil was seeking donations so he could win a charity auction (for Westpac Rescue Helicopter) for the prize of 90 minutes in a flight simulator with North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams. Cameron is a relentless critic of Williams, for those who don’t know.

Now this was great for the charity. It pushes up the value of the auction. Cameron was willing to go up to US$1,000 or NZ$1,500 – all of which would go to charity. He said if he was outbid he would donate the money regardless which meant if someone outbid him, the Westpac Rescue Helicopter could end up with more than NZ$3,000.

But in a fit of cowardice, Andrew Williams conspired with Trade Me to disallow bids from Cameron (and it seems from several other bidders), and the auction closed for just $150.

I’m disgusted at Trade Me that they remove valid bids, just because Andrew Williams did not like the bidder. That undermines their integrity greatly. And they helped rip the charity off also.

Williams looks ridiculous also. If Slater had won, Williams could have turned it into great PR – look at what I’m prepared to do for charity. Or if he really could not face the possibility, he should have got somone to outbid Cameron.

Now as it happens the Mayor’s daughter won the auction it seems at $150. And this was after several bids for higher than that were removed. So it looks even worse that they appear to have fixed who would win.

Aaron Bhatnagar blogs:

Slater would be a legitimate bidder, though clearly not one Williams would have appreciated. However, it was for a charity, so there ought to have been an element of goodwill about this. It’s not at all uncommon charity auctions have elements of prank or comical outcomes, but because it’s for charity, you tend to take it all in good humour. After all, Rodney Hide allowed himself to get his head shaved by Williams for charity not long ago.

Which makes the actions hypocritical also.

UPDATE: A reader has commented that the person listing an auction can blacklist or remove bids themselves, without any input from Trade Me. If this is correct, then Trade Me are not to blame. The villain then is Worldflight who acted with Williams to lower the amount donated to charity. There goes the brand.

North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams is auctioning off spending an hour and a half with him in a flight simulator, to raise money for charity.

Naturally Whale Oil wants to win the auction, and he is fundraising to help him win. So any donations will both benefit the charity – Westpac Rescue Helicopter, and also means the Mayor and Whale get locked up together in a small enclosed cockpit. That has to be serious entertainment.

The bidding is currently at $200 and Whale has already raised $255 so his chances are looking good.

Whale Oil received this mystery fax. The sender though forgot the fax would identify it as coming from the North Shore City Council.

Homepaddock is getting spammed. She writes:

Dear Andrew Willliams,

You’ve emailed me again and given I wasn’t impressed with your first two missives I was going to ignore these two, too.

But I was at a National Party regional meeting in Dunedin on Friday and one of the electorate chairs mentioned that she’d got a couple of emails from you and wasn’t impressed either.

She was even less impressed after her polite response requesting you stop sending her unsolicited emails was met by a return message saying something like great to hear from you, we’ve had so much repsonse we’ll deal with yours when we have time.

We’ve worked out you must have got our addresses from the National Party website.

It’s public so any of us whose addresses are there might expect the odd unsolicited email. But our contact details are there because we’re volunteer office holders who members and supporters might wish to contact, not as an invitation for lobby groups to bombarb us with unwanted propaganda.

If you’re going to send us spam the least you can do is include an unsubscribe option so our requests to be removed from your mailing list aren’t met with another unwanted message.

Yours sincerely

Ele

Luckily for Mayor Williams, he can only be prosecuted for commercial spam.  However it does breach the terms and conditions of North Shore City’s ISP, as Whale points out.

Just read this article and laugh and cry:

The spat comes comes as Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey is trying to act as a peacemaker and bring all the mayors together for a meeting on Wednesday with Mr Hide.

“It’s hugely important that the mayors are united in a common voice,” Mr Harvey said.

But his peacemaking efforts have been criticised after he emailed colleagues to suggest some leading figures in the governance debate, such as Warehouse boss Stephen Tindall, Deloitte chairman Nick Main and Committee for Auckland chairman Sir Ron Carter, take part in the meting.

Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee replied: “Sound likes elitist bullshit to me Bob.”

Mr Lee said it was the “hair-brained (sic) scheming of those amateurs” which encouraged the failed mayoral coup of 2006 that would have consigned the ARC to the political scrapheap.

Mr Harvey has since agreed not to invite the businessmen to the meeting, which may have to be moved from North Shore City Council’s headquarters to have any chance of getting Mr Banks to attend.

So the Chair and the Mayors can’t even agree on who to invite to a meeting, and where to have it.

Mr Williams is convinced Mr Banks is part of a right-wing smear campaign that includes Mr Bhatnagar, Mr Banks’ former press secretary Cameron Brewer, who now heads the Newmarket Business Association, and the right-wing blog Whaleoil run by Cameron Slater – son of Citizens & Ratepayers president John Slater, and a friend of Mr Banks.

Banks accidentially sent a text to Williams:

“I leave this to Whaleoil. TV3 are running this lunitic (sic) tonight?”

It was hardly a difficult guess that Whale would be responding to Mayor Williams latest outburst.

To me this just sums up why we need reform – no more squabbling Mayors all about patch protection.

The Herald on Sunday editorial says:

The plan announced on Monday sensibly ditched the commission’s recommendation for six local councils – a recipe for more of the same paralysis – and provided for between 20 and 30 local boards, with between 125 and 150 members, to ensure that community voices are heard.

Apart from the Mayors losing their jobs, almost everyone seems to be saying that decision was the right one.

The HoS is concerned about lack of powers for the local boards. I think the ability to propose an additional rate for additional local facilities or services will turn out to be quite powerful.

What is more worrying is the composition of the council itself. It is a blizzard of confusing numbers but the proposal is for 20 councillors elected from 12 wards (which, for no good reason, will coincide with neither the community boards’ bailiwicks, nor Parliamentary electorates) and eight councillors elected at large. The mayor, too, would be elected by the voters of the region.

Again there seems to be a consensus that all the Councillors should be from wards. Hopefully the Select Committee will be able to make recommendations on this issue.

Talking of super city issues, one has to giggle at this story:

North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams accused Rodney Hide of lying about having met local Mayors – claiming he met John Banks only. Rodney’s response:

But Mr Hide said he spoke to other Mayors the day the Royal Commission released its report, a day when Williams was in the South Island.

“Andrew Williams wasn’t there when the Royal Commission released their report, and I don’t know why, so we did our best,” he told NZPA.

Williams seems exceptionally skilled at making himself look foolish.

The Herald rates the chances of potential contenders for the Mayoralty of Auckland (assuming the Government adopts the key recommendations):

They are:

1. John Banks – the front runner
2. Len Brown – good to very good
3. Mike Lee – good
4. Bob Harvey – average to good
5. Paul Holmes – average
6. Peter Leitch – poor to average
7. Andrew Williams – poor
8. Judith Tizard – poor
9. Blair Strang – dead on arrival

I have not read the full report yet. It will be interesting if the vote for the Mayor is FPP or STV.

North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams has objected to Whale Oil referring to him as “mental” and demanded he stop doing so, or he will tell Cameron’s father on him.

The Mayor should know that if you want to get Cameron to stop, you don’t threaten him with his father – you threaten to tell his mother!!!