Wednesday, 16 January 2019

How they voted. Wheelers Courner special 03 17th January 2019

Toyota a dream come true...


Judging by the heads it would appear that men, mainly elderly ones turned up at the opening of Toyota’s new spare parts division. I wonder how many of those present were rate payers, since the rate payers had parted with up to 400,000 dollars, to see Toyota’s dream come true. For reasons best known only to themselves the PNCC kept secret this act of generosity to the worlds second largest car manufacturing company which made a mare 20 billion dollar [US] profit last year.

Integrity means: Honesty, Soundness, wholeness, so says the dictionary...

Lets apply those definitions to the council behaviour regarding the gift to Toyota.

1. Was it discussed openly?...short answer NO, because it wasn’t discussed in public, in fact it was only discussed in secret when the public had been excluded...

2. Was it done with soundness? No it wasn’t because for reasons unknown, the council kept secret any knowledge that it had that Toyota was in fact in such a bad financial state that without the PNCC grant it couldn’t proceed with its upgrade.

3. Wholeness? well since the above two reasons failed to meet even a lowly rated measurement standard factor it would appear that wholeness was not considered worthy of consideration.

Here is what the Manawatu Standard had to say on the matter [thus far].


I have yet to hear back in regard to my request for information on which Councillors voted for this corporate welfare handout grant: And it would appear that they need a full twenty days to get their story fit for public knowledge.

Just as I wrote the above I recieved an email fron Council stating the following:


Good afternoon Peter
Further to you LGOIMA request please see below voting results from the decision on Toyota Grant
                                                                                                                                                                     
For:
The Mayor (Grant Smith) and Councillors Brent Barrett, Susan Baty, Rachel Bowen, Adrian Broad, Gabrielle Bundy-Cooke, Lew Findlay QSM, Leonie Hapeta, Jim Jefferies, Lorna Johnson, Duncan McCann, Bruno Petrenas and Tangi Utikere.
Against:
Councillor Karen Naylor.
Abstained:
Councillor Aleisha Rutherford.

Regards

Penny

So there they are...and how they voted...so you decide do these people have any ethical standards at all. It would seem that when the Mayor says jump...the only question asked is "How High"...

3 comments:

Fred Hirst said...

What we don't know, is what information were Councillors given (or not given)for them to believe they were making an informed decision to support this grant? Was there a concealed threat or 'chill factor' if the proposal wasn't supported? What was the justification for the public to be excluded from this discussion?
There is much more to this issue than has been revealed so far given the support by Councillors, whom we would least expect to approve this grant, to a corporation for which this amount is 'chump change'. This ratepayer money could have been spent to make a meaningful difference to members of our community in hardship.

Wheeler's Corner NZ said...

I received this by email from Alison:

Hi Peter - I'm not sure how writing a comment works. Last week I wrote something commenting on and asking why the Council hasn't yet installed a simple electronic system to track the voting record of individual councillors. The comment seemed to be lodged, but now I don't see it anywhere.


We shouldn't be having to request information about who did what, particularly given that the Stuff format undermines democracy because there is such little clear and comprehensive coverage of what stance each individual councillor takes on every issue. To help us out, with an electronic vote recording system a printout could be run-off and published in the newspaper each week. Then come elections we could have formed a real opinion about the cut of their cloth, rather than having not much else to go on but name recognition and the look of their face...


Cheers
Alison

dianne said...

Good on ferreting out the truth on this matter Peter. Dianne