WAIHEKE COUNCIL NOT BOARD

An island is a place apart in body and mind. Islanders are people who choose to separate themselves from the madding crowd and live apart. And they want to be masters and mistresses of their own fate. Waihekeans do not want to be dictated to by It That Must Be Obeyed--The Empire Over The Water. We could live harmoniously with a community like ours, but Mr Yellowjacket has stomped mercilessly on that. We have been lumped in with the CBD. It has been the 1989 takeover all over again, this time with hobnailed, steel-toed boots, and Kalashnikovs at the ready. The city-siders, the bods who can never get into their heads and hearts what the island is all about, have cemented in their takeover.

But there is a candle at the end of Hide Tunnel. His legislation makes a division between regional and local decisions, and says that the only decisions that are not to be made locally are regional ones. And when John Carter etc., talk about regional it is plain that what they mean is Bombay to Wellsford. So for us there is nothing regional. EVERYTHING is local--the island, and its setting, which is the Hauraki Gulf, not Bombay to Wellsford. So ALL decision-making should be in our hands. Nothing should be decided by the Super-silly.

Therefore the Waiheke Local Board, which under the new regime replaces the Waiheke Community Board in October, should be where the democratic buck rests. Not on some bureaucratic city desk where democracy gets slaughtered and diced.

So we must fight tooth and nail to turn that candle into a bonfire. Which means that to get what we want--Waiheke deciding for Waiheke--we must do everything we can to make the Waiheke Local Board, in effect, the Waiheke Council. Anything less must be resisted to the hilt. Therefore anyone who stands for the Local Board who does not want that, and who will not say so explicitly, will really be saying that we should be under the Super-silly boot--and therefore should be ignored on the ballot-paper.