REPLY TO JOHN COLLINGS' LETTER TO MARKETPLACE

In a letter to Waiheke Marketplace published on the 30th of September John Collings asked why anyone should vote for me in the local body elections at the end of 2010 for a seat on the Waiheke Community Board, because I had led the application to the Local Government Commission to shift the Hauraki Gulf Island from under the council in Auckland city to being with Thames-Coromandel District Council, and in his view that exercise was huge waste of time and money. He added up some imaginary figures and arrived at a total of $100,000.

In his lettere he made a string of errors and baseless assumptions. First, there will not be a Waiheke Community Board after 1 November 2010. Under the new legislation there will be a Waiheke Local Board. Second, he made assumptions about costs, then treated them as facts. Third, he obviously does not like democracy and the democratic process, which equally obviously means any opinion that he does not agree with. Fourth, democracy costs money; that is a fact of life. Fifth, Auckland City Council wastes more money before breakfast than his outside guesstimate. Sixth, if he had done some homework, he would know that Thames-Coromandel is provably a much better council than a city empire to the west, especially for a village-rural community like ours. Seventh, I made a solemn, statutory promise to do my best for this community. Trying, with the support of the statutory number of Waihekeans required to validate the application, is one of the actions that has kept that promise. Eighth, I hope that someone as incapable of logical thought as that letter demonstrates will not be standing. Ninth, he is assuming that I will be standing again.

If you ever studied logic, John, you show no evidence of it. For in logic there is a fundamental dictum: 'If, if and only if the premise is true and the reasoning is true will the conclusion be true.' To be true, a view must be founded on true premises and arrived at by true reasoning. Otherwise it will certainly be false.

Your letter, like the opposing petition to the Thames-Coromandel initiative that you cooked up with Mervyn Bennett, was devoid of any research worthy of the name, and equally devoid of true reasoning. Therefore the consequence was false premises and a shonky path from them, so the conclusions could not possibly be true. Your letter, like your Thames-Coromandel opposition, was misleading, manipulative, lacking in facts, logical reasoning and true conclusions.

You should also realise that some of the costs you complained about were due to the cardboard opposition created by you and Mervyn, which makes your complaints rather hypocritical.

It is instructive, and should be instructive to the pair of you, that it was necessary to write your letter to Marketplace due to the fact that the paper run by Mervyn, which was founded on his world-view, could not survive on Waiheke, lost money, and folded--and lost a good deal more money, if the island grapevine is correct, than the amount that you rail about in your letter. People in glass houses should not chuck rocks.

But if you and Mervyn are so against me I must be doing something right. Thank you both for your effusive inverted praise...