Posts by Matthew Poole
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Mt Smart is only 10 minutes walk from Penrose Station - haven't you people got legs?
10 minutes? YFR! It's 1.5km, which would equate to a walking speed of 9km/h. That's a moderate jog, not any kind of walk.
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slarty, how long did it take to build the upgraded national transmission system through the Waikato? Oh, that's right, it hasn't even been started yet!
Can we build things on time, to budget? Sure we can. Once we've spent years studying it to death, planning for every last eventuality, and getting tripped up on the odd taniwha. The issue isn't with the actual construction, it's with getting construction commenced in the first place. The Eden Park upgrade is running on a pretty tight timeline, and it's only an upgrade . Starting a stadium from scratch, accounting for the fact that it's on reclaimed land in a seismically-active area, in a culturally-sensitive area, would be cutting things so fine that you could read a legal document through it without difficulty. Greece started planning for the Olympics nearly a decade before they opened, and still they got right down to the wire. We were only going to have five years to build, from scratch, the largest stadium in the country using a totally novel idea.
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a new station at Morice Road was proposed for Mt Smart.
Once the Onehunga branch line is completed, and it's certainly looking very "done" at the moment, moving large volumes of people by train for events at Mt Smart becomes very do-able indeed. The line runs within 500m of the stadium, largely through mixed-zone residential/light industrial. Smacking a station at Maurice Road would be a very easy, clever move.
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the Opera House - after all, that was only delivered 10 years late at 14 times the cost
When the end goal is to have the Opera House, does it matter if it's horribly late and terribly over-budget? No, it doesn't. With the waterfront stadium, though, the end goal (pardon the pun) was to have a venue for RWC 2011. If it's late, it doesn't matter how spectacular it is, how great the area around it is, it's still too bloody late. It has to be ready right on schedule, preferably before, and history in this country is not conducive to attempting any such thing on such a tight deadline.
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Gareth, the two largest constituent cities in Greater Auckland are south of the Bridge. The second-largest is south of Mt Smart, with the stadium being on the south side of the largest. That alone gives it centrality to the population that North Harbour severely lacks, especially when you look at where North Harbour resides inside North Shore City. North Harbour is also totally disconnected from the airport, which makes for a total nightmare for people coming in from other cities.
Another consideration is the delicacy of the connection to the rest of Auckland. If something significant happens in the precincts of the Bridge, traffic turns to custard in a matter of minutes before taking hours to clear. There's a single alternative route and it's woefully inadequate for handling the traffic volumes that the primary route takes, never mind being a horribly long detour.
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Perhaps we should have ordered up that waterfront stadium after all.
No shit. It was always a good idea.
Except that NZ's chronic inability to build anything of significance on schedule meant that it would've been finished around 2013. We'd have been a global laughing stock. It would also have seen massive cost overruns, as the drop in the value of the dollar has pushed up prices for cement and steel inordinately. It might have been a really great stadium, but I have zero faith in it having been built in time, or for anything vaguely resembling the budgeted cost.
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This may be sacrilege but is it compulsary to hold BDO in Auckland?
Pretty much, yes. In a word: population. A quarter of the country's population live in the same city. Trying to shift venue would require massive logistical coordination to get the same number of punters through the gates. Trains, planes, automobiles... The other choices would be Wellington or Christchurch. Christchurch is pretty much ruled out by the fact that it's on an island populated by fewer people than Greater Auckland. That leaves Wellington, with roughly 1/4 the population and correspondingly fewer places to try and accommodate invading hordes.
As for North Harbour, transport would be the main problem. Mt Smart is walking distance from Penrose train station, well-served by buses, close to three motorways from all directions, and generally accessible. All North Harbour has going for it is the busway, and that's not going to cut it for 40-something-thousand people. Sorry, but it's not. The North Shore is effectively accessible by two roads from the rest of Auckland, and they wouldn't cope with the numbers associated with BDO.
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Was simply thikning that being the head (and no idea about job sharing, there is only one DG?) of one of the "big three" could "outrank" being number three in the "big one".
Given that the WTO arose from the ashes of the ITO, and the ITO was intended to be a part of the UN, one would consider that the UN "outranks" the WTO. There're also the respective focuses, with the WTO being much narrower in its purview than the UN.
It's a somewhat theoretical argument, given that they're both supranational bodies that accredit ambassadors, but I think most would consider the UN to be of much greater international import than the WTO.
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but if it's over what those people whom you might refer to as wingnuts view as unforgivable corruption, then it's the proper thing to do, even if it won't make him popular.
"Mr Garrett told NewstalkZB it would have been hypocritical for him to do so, given he had little time for Helen Clark and what she stood for."
That speaks to a disagreement with her policies, not her actions. It also comes across as infantile and petty, not as principled. Many of the other Members in that Chamber have vocalised their opinions on Helen's past behaviour, and characterised her as corrupt, but they still rose above their partisan perspectives to applaud what is probably the highest office that will ever be attained by a New Zealander, unless she happens to become a future Secretary General of the UN. She didn't get the post through whatever "corrupt" actions she may have taken while PM, she got it through being a singularly impressive politician with enormous international credibility and experience.
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Mind you, it has been fun watching all the various libertarian ACToids out there slowly wake up and realise their party has been subject to a Bolshevik takeover by the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
Links? I want to see the proof that ACToids are actually capable of such a degree of introspection.