Electromagnetic Radiation Field peril to Public Health ignored in New Zealand government’s single minded rush to please Internationals

Deliberate state policy fast tracks industrial scale solar installations by plugging them into town electrical substations to take advantage of in-place national grid connections. This campaign is now revealed as having failed to take into consideration the consequent proven adverse effects on community health and safety.

This is surprising because the founding world authority on the effect of electromagnetic clusters on humans was New Zealander Dr Neil Cherry.

He was associated with the other world authority Professor Robert Becker researcher in electrophysiology and electro medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital of New York.

Professor Becker stated:-

“I have no doubt in my mind that, at the present time, the greatest polluting element in the earth’s environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields.”

Meanwhile an Australian study now concludes that Dr Neil Cherry discovered that electromagnetic radiation: -

“Caused DNA breakages, chromosome aberrations, increased oncogene activity in cells, altered brain activity, altered blood pressure and increased brain cancer at very low levels – much lower than those allowed by the Australian standard.”

The Australian study continues …….

“He also found that it impacts on the pineal gland in the brain, resulting in a reduction of melatonin – a vital part of many of the body’s biochemical systems, including the mediation of many hormone functions (including the control of weight) and a major scavenger of damaging free radicals.”

The Helensville power scheme planned to cover the town’s signature panorama vista (pictured in diagram above) is under planning review by the Auckland City Council.

The overseas-promoted generator installation scheme hugs the Helensville township so closely that residents note that the structural equipment actually intrudes into the town itself.

Further south the extent of the neighbourhood open array generating capacity campaign is revealed by the two international developers anticipating connecting up to the Greytown substation in order to pump into the national grid enough power for several cities in addition to the township of Greytown itself.

At issue is why the impact on human health of these immense electrical generating installations and their electromagnetic radiation fields is ignored?

This indifference is in contrast to the government-inspired urgency when for example the discovery of a sliver of asbestos on a building site triggers health and safety regulations requiring everyone on the site to vacate it immediately.

The government meanwhile intensifies the at-any-cost focus around its unifying rallying policy of being seen globally to eliminate carboniferous-derived energy.

There is a question. In this process has the government enshrined solar-derived power as the jewel in the international recognition crown it so intensely covets?

With New Zealand’s now recognised early work on identifying the damaging effects to human life of exposure to extensive clusters of electromagnetism there is another unanswered question.

It is why nobody in any official capacity explains the health and safety consequences.

If anyone in any capacity questions anyone at any level of official responsibility about this they are condescendingly dismissed as mere conspiracy theorists. There is no follow-up.

Yet for how long can the threat of electromagnetic radiation fields be so routinely brushed off?

Especially as there now emerges disclosures of the various schemes to position these vast arrays alongside town boundaries and in doing so endangering the neighbouring population densities.

Dr Neil Cherry eminent scientist identified electromagnetic equipment and cancer, cardiac link

The government sponsored experiment to position very large scale solar generating installations on the boundaries of towns in order to take advantage of their existing close-in substations runs counter to the warnings of a pioneering environmental health scientist about the danger to human health of the resulting electromagnetic radiation fields.

The scientist was Dr Neil Cherry now acknowledged as the global pioneer in researching and then publishing his discoveries centred on the threat to humans of exactly these types of large scale concentrations of electromagnetic radiation fields.

Dr Neil Cherry of Lincoln University was also a three term Environment Canterbury Councillor and an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

The two towns scheduled to have these electromagnetic installations the size of large-herd dairy farms affixed onto their boundaries are Helensville and Greytown.

Dr Cherry said that guidelines from international standard setters gave insufficient emphasis to the extent of the radiation effect on human health.

He insisted that any degree of radiation beyond threshold i.e. natural level was a threat to human health and this compounded with the intensity of it beyond this natural state. He described such radiation as “electronic smog.”

Children he identified as being notably vulnerable because of their undeveloped immune systems.

Dr Cherry’s applied research has re-surfaced in connection with the Helensville suburban solar installation and its radio frequencies.

The Auckland City Council which administers Helensville has sought developer assurance on ICNIRP “guidelines” on “maximum exposure levels”

The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection was specifically cited by Dr Cherry as having inadequate guidelines based on biased industry data.

His constant challenging of the conventional wisdom remains a landmark.

He remains one of the very few in authority to take to task the World Health Organisation and its assessment of the level of threats presented by electromagnetic fields which Dr Cherry said was lax.

He criticised the high level of “industry dominance” in institutions responsible for setting safety standards.

Dr Cherry insisted that electromagnetic fields and their radiation damage DNA and accelerate cell death rates.

They enhance he stated the rates of cancer, cardiac, reproductive and neurological disease and impact mortality in human populations.

The essential human hormone melatonin was particularly vulnerable, he insisted.

The only “safe” exposure level is zero, he concluded

Dr Cherry believed that the greater the output of the electromagnetic field the greater the radiation and thus the greater the cumulative threat to public health.

Had Dr Cherry lived now it seems unlikely that foreign developers would currently seek to use New Zealand towns as international test sites for low-cost large scale solar generation.

He believed that as the evidence for the dangerous cumulative effects of electromagnetic radiation increased, so did official acceptance and toleration of it also increase.

Neil Cherry died at 56. His expertise in numerous applied sciences allowed him to relate events in one field to repercussions in quite another.

His value today is that he coupled what was going on in science with what was going in the health of everyday people.

He was more renowned overseas than in New Zealand. He appeared before the European Parliament among others.

He campaigned to have electromagnetic radiation officially described for all district planning purposes as “a contaminant” on the grounds that it changed the composition of the air.

Dr Cherry pointed out that the human body is regulated by electrical impulses and was thus vulnerable to interference from nearby artificial electromagnetic radiation sources and the greater the extent of the radiation, the greater the danger to human health.

He stood for Parliament as an electorate candidate for the Labour Party.

Coy quip camouflages Ardern Appointment with Destiny

Winsomely deflecting the unspoken question posed on the nation’s independent free-to-air television TV3 morning talk show New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern declared spontaneously that she was aware of a rumour that she might resign and even move to “New Plymouth.”

Nobody dares to follow up this typically adept, humorous, and ironic trade mark diversion by doing a simple translation in which New York instead of New Plymouth is the actual destination.

Ironic because the New Zealand New Plymouth is the capital of the nation’s energy producing region and where the premier for the last five years has turned off the spigot on things like natural gas and oil.

Tremulously the mainstream media gingerly tip toes around the evidence that the prime minister is a putative candidate for the world’s most important bureaucratic job and which happens to be based in New York.

In her empathetic way the prime minister has joked about her early dreams to “save the world.”

She may soon be in the nominal position to accomplish it.

The current incumbent Antonio Guterres began his second and final four year term at the start of this year.

This means that the job becomes vacant at the end of 2026. No secretary general since Kurt Waldheim has sought to extend their job beyond the two four year terms.

What is Jacinda Ardern’s special appeal? Qualification?

It is her unrelenting priority given to climate. First foremost and always.

Ever since Boutros Boutros-Galli was vetoed for a second term because of the organisation’s failure to resolve violent conflicts in places like Africa and the Balkans the organisation has known it had to change its emphasis, change course.

This transformation was refined under Galli’s successor Ban Ki-moon who rearranged the organisation around environment in general and climate in particular.

This focus became even more concentrated, intense, under his successor, Antonio Guterres.

The original attempt by Jacinda Ardern’s mentor Helen Clark to secure the secretary-general post by using the New Zealand prime minister’s job as the leaping-off point came closer to fruition than most people realise with Ms Clark eventually heading the midfield in a list of highly qualified aspirants.

A problem for the former prime minister was that when she made her run it was still too early to identify the evolving consolidation around the new flagship cause and purpose.

In marketing terms it was a re-branding around a single product line.

The value became obvious when it allowed the gigantic global bureaucracy to skate over its shortcomings in matters of identifying plague and containing violent conflicts.

Ms Ardern from the outset hewed to climate as the identifying cause of our time.

She has refused to be distracted.

To helm the organisation a candidate needs to be nominated by their own country and this will be forthcoming regardless of the party in government at that time.

The key time frame is the cusp of 2026/27 when her ally Antonio Guterres ends his second term. She needs however to be up and running as a candidate quite some time before this to gain momentum.

The selection of the secretary general is the secular version of the papal election conclave. It only lacks the plume of smoke.

Does Ms Ardern follow Ms Clark and do an apprenticeship in New York similar to Ms Clark’s running the Development Programme?

The bubbling up of the camouflaged conjecture about the prime ministerial departure for places beginning with the word New is a conveniently ignored straw in the political wind.

Timing is everything in the high mountain tops of politics and bureaucracy and especially so if your ambition is to save the world.

The current muzzled speculation could point to a run starting toward the end of the Labour government current second term rather than during a third term.

An informed reason for the as yet publicly-unspecified speculation is that any candidacy by Ms Ardern is unlikely to be vetoed by the Security Council

This is because New Zealand has trodden a conspicuously non-aligned path.

Indeed there is cause for further speculation.

It is that if Ms Clark had actually succeeded in her bid to become secretary general and with her operational experience with China via for example her pioneering Free Trade Agreement then the present emergency in Europe, the real one, could have been averted.

Liability becomes Credit with Statistical Reclassifying

A categorisation overhaul in which the pasture-economy nation’s vast grasslands are included in the emissions equation would see New Zealand classified as carbon dioxide positive instead of carbon dioxide negative.

The agricultural nation until quite recently had an entire government agency known as Grasslands which existed to refine and define the role of the herb as the central factor in the export economy.

The absence of the Grasslands organisation and the subsequent dispersal of its official responsibility and emphasis meant that its role has been left open to any number of different interpretations especially political ones.

Unlike trees grasslands store most of their carbon underground in their roots and the soil. Which makes them more reliable “carbon sinks” than forests, according to a 2018 University of California study.

These factors are recognised for example in the United States where large scale grassland proprietors receive substantial offset incentives. Ranchers are rewarded for using their grasslands to retain carbon dioxide in the ground rather than in the atmosphere.

Also through photosynthesis grass absorbs sunlight to produce energy. Grass plants will take in the heat of the sun during the day and release it slowly at night, helping to moderate temperatures

In New Zealand the pressure is on farmers to eliminate grass, the basis of the nation’s pastoral export industry, in favour of pine forestry.

This carbon farming procedure is becoming dominated by foreign interests and when the carbon credits are eventually cashed they will simply be repatriated overseas. It is these credits earned in the earlier life of the tree that contain the value.

Politicians still want to believe that there resides in the internal transaction of this financial process of carbon “farming” an export-type benefit to the nation.

These offsetting deals are becoming increasingly complex.

This is especially in regard to leasing contract structures.

This means that they benefit the non-productive if highly rewarded service sectors of the economy such as legal.

Also the burgeoning carbon “farming” consultant industry taking advantage of the curious circumstance in which secondary farmland offers similar returns to the best pasture.

This sector internationally is also aware that New Zealand’s emissions trading program is the only one in the world that allows companies to offset 100 percent of their emissions through forestry.

In this flourishing category we may also include politicians and their captive officials who always say that all this is obligatory simply because of the nation’s carbon dioxide contribution is on a “per head” basis.

This oft-uttered belief is never challenged.

This is surprising given that New Zealand has one of the lowest populations per landmass ratios of any developed nation anywhere.

It is underpopulated, in other words.

In the past era of the global population explosion forecast emergency in the late 1960s carbon dioxide was said to be an offset to the widely predicted starvation anticipated for the world to endure around current times. The era we live in now.

Carbon dioxide remains at a tiny fraction of one percent of the world’s atmosphere.

It was seen at the time of this particular postulated catastrophe as increasing in life-giving significance as the compensating minor gas vital to plant growth and thus food.

In effect it was seen as an offsetting factor to the calamity prophesy, the global starvation one, of that time.

New Zealand’s contribution to international carbon dioxide levels is barely measureable.

A reorganisation of the statistical basis of this official calculation would transform it from a debit into a credit.

Also generating the negative rather than positive impression is officially statistically generated confusion in that emissions from the different greenhouse gases are shown in carbon dioxide equivalents officially under the formula framed (CO2-e) units.

The disestablishment in quite recent times of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research along with its Grasslands Division we can see now ushered in the predominance of those other scientists, the practitioners of the social and political versions whose sway over the productive economy grows daily.

Profits by foreign parent selling to local subsidiary still unseen by politicians

Transfer pricing is the main inducement for foreign companies to invest in New Zealand infrastructure. Hiding behind nominal “Kiwi” companies they have the opportunity to attain substantial profits simply through the foreign parent selling to the New Zealand subsidiary.

The outstanding example of this was the takeover of New Zealand’s railways by a group led by Wisconsin Central Transportation Corporation.

The government impression at the time was that under the operator, Wisconsin Central, there would be attained substantial economies through the United States investor sharing its investment notably in rail ferries.

These and other similar investments were indeed sourced by the overseas company. Instead of being shared, as was popularly supposed at the time, they were in fact sold at considerable margin to the New Zealand company, the subsidiary.

The background to the transfer pricing opportunity was a wave of political emphasis at the time on privatisation.

Wisconsin Central played into the free market trend constantly stressing their fine aspirations for the now unrestricted nation and its people.

The transfer pricing infrastructure opportunity currently lies with the international companies and their New Zealand subsidiaries standing by to take a similarly loftily-expressed advantage of their close-in solar power installations planned for urban settlements and their national grid links.

There is nothing illegal in transfer pricing. It is unusual only in that those who should be aware of it are either ignorant about it. Or find it hard to discuss it.

Wisconsin Central excitement meant that the shares of the by now publicly traded New Zealand operation touched almost $10.

Five years later these “long hold” shares had dropped to 30cents.

Soon after this the state had to reacquire what it should never have disposed of which is its essential rail system.

The problems of Wisconsin Central and the New Zealand railways infrastructure amounted to the absence of follow up investment following the acquisition.

These deficiencies are said to be reflected in the continuing poor state of the permanent way, the rail lines.

There is some truth in this.

The subsequent public New Zealand retake up of rail ownership and management has grappled with this while doing its best to refurbish the most obvious signs of neglect such as the railway stations .

The lesson now is just that the lesson was not learned.

Possessed of a new belief, and one rooted in popular culture, the state is again, even more enthusiastically, handing over chunks of infrastructure, the electrical one this time, to foreign companies with local subsidiaries.

Experience again shows that transfer pricing, the captive and thus profitable trading between foreign companies and their local subsidiaries, again gets a foothold during an urban class modish clamour.

The privatisation one at the end of the last century was an example and the energy supply one is the current version.

Groundswell Unbowed hews to productivity which will combat Famine, Starvation

Once all-powerful farmer representatives must now sit on their organisational hands while they see the nation’s most important industry engulfed in the government’s evangelical-grade fervour designed to simultaneously cut back pastoral productivity while inflicting more tax on it

Federated Farmers knows that the level of official excitability is now so volatile that any discernible campaign to introduce topics such as balance of payments and export revenues will only act as an accelerant.

They know too that the government’s determination to portray New Zealand and thus itself universally as the shining city on the hill has become baked-in as its peak policy.

Farmer representative institutions know that they must not be seen to impede the passage of the carriers of this particular grail in its journey to the world wide approbation that the bearers have been led to believe is so very much within their grasp.

In their fear of inserting a stick into this ants nest of a belief system the farm hierarchy displays characteristics of those confronted by a determined bull. They remain motionless.

So does His Majesty’s Opposition the National Party.

It weaves its way around schemes such as the one to plant trees on tracts of fertile grazing land. This is for no other purpose than to provide counterweights for foreign polluters seeking a book keeping entry somewhere else to demonstrate their own purity of purpose.

It refrains from pointing out that if the nation has an energy crisis, then it is a contrived one.

It is caused by the official decision to restrict access among other things to the nation’s abundant natural gas, not so long ago acclaimed as the clean alternative to coal gas.

Another curiosity takes the form of the lingering adhesion to the drying out side of the old change spectrum weather equation.

In the event precipitation and inundation in the region have been the most sinister occurrences.

This does not impede the government’s determination to run its show-boating solar farms over the most easily accessible flat land including pasture flood plains.

New Zealand’s contribution to the trace gas carbon dioxide is sufficiently miniscule to be only just calculable in fractions of decimals.

The Guardian is a handbook of this self-regarding movement. It routinely predicts for the world a great famine and a pending era of starvation.

Yet in New Zealand nobody dare warn about the deliberate exacerbation of this scourge embodied in the government’s own consecrated priority policy.

There is silence on perils in this context of timbering over pasture land and then inflicting punitive taxation on ruminants grazing in the diminishing available pastures.

These are the pastures carrying the world’s food supplies, repositories of food “security” as the government likes to say.

In a nation in which the words “the science” are never far from the lips of any government politician or official seeking to establish for themselves an aura of piety there is another curiosity.

It is that none of these people know, or even if they do know, are still too frightened to impart the fact that carbon dioxide is essential scientifically to plant growth.

Rogue farmer organisations notably Groundswell remain unimpressed by abstract government contentions centred on the fashionable academic notion of “modelling.”

One reason is that still fresh in their memory is the unnecessary official hysteria during the Covid era triggered by these very “modelling” exercises and their wild inaccuracy.

In order to by-pass the delicate and staged tap dancing of the National Party or Federated Farmers, Groundswell deals direct by taking its rural productivity case to where the votes are which is in the cities.

The government has imbued its narrowly self-serving cause as a noble endeavour of totemic global proportions.

Rouble’s new oil exchange currency status is just the start warns international banker

After being surprised by the Sino Soviet military alliance, the West must now accept the reality of Sino Soviet manoeuvring to establish a joint reserve currency challenging the USD.

This is the conclusion of leading Middle East banker Meguerditch Bouldoukian the former deputy governor of the Bank of Lebanon and the world authority on correspondent banking the system under which trading banks cooperate with one another internationally.

In an interview with MSC Newswire he observed that since the end of the Cold War the West had seen “what it wanted to see,” and believed “what it wanted to believe” instead of confronting realities.

This had been characterised by its shared imperative to signal its moral superiority to the Sino-Soviet bloc by for example weakening its own competitive structure in its pursuit of environmental “perfection.” This policy vastly empowered the bloc through the transfer to it of Western currency.

This enabled Russia to lay the groundwork for its underpinning ambition which is to use its relatively new status as a leading global energy resource to “supplant the petro dollar system and with it the reserve currency system too.”

Anyone doubting this said Mr Bouldoukian only had to experience the fact that access to Russian oil and gas is now readily available to buyers “only too willing to settle in currencies other than US dollars.”

“Russia by itself even after its empowerment by the West as a petro state simply does not have the clout to follow this through.

“But in combination with the yuan this possibility of a reserve currency does now take on the outline of a reality.”

United States foreign policy following World War II was to split China off from Russia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall had induced however in Western leadership and especially in the United States and the EU an ‘’illusory and even euphoric” sense that the threat “singly or together” from the old bloc had evaporated.

Even now the threat posed by the two countries working in harmony to challenge the international banking system and its underlying correspondent banking network was being routinely shrugged off, he noted.

Can such a combination replace the US dollar in the international payments system and will the US dollar remain dominant worldwide?

A rival reserve currency Mr Bouldoukian stressed must be capable of being used:-

 - For the settlement of international commercial transactions

 - For financial transactions short & long term borrowings on the one side and for investments and savings purposes on the other:

 - As a reserve currency for central banks and other international financial institutions

Mr Bouldoukian noted that Russia’s economic reforms started in the early 1990s and were inspired by the model of securities regulation that originated in the USA but in practical terms these were decoupled from the actual US model.

It was now that Russia’s economy started to depend heavily on fossil fuel exports, the prices of which determined the value of everything else in Russia.

This over-reliance on fossil exports was always dangerous. “But as we have seen the naiveté of the West played very much into Russia’s hands and continues to do so to this day.”

Russia’s ability to squeeze every advantage out of the West’s blindness has meant “and this has to be acknowledged” that the rouble is a now leading currency for the world energy trade, he stated.

The United States he noted had failed to understand that the German proclaimed high moral purpose in letting Russia take over the role of its own nuclear and traditional power sources merely disguised a recurrence of Germany’s always-present vulnerability to political extremism.

Germany now became near-dependent on Russia for all its raw materials and did so under the camouflage of being seen to do good in the eyes of the United States and EU political class, Mr Bouldoukian added.

In order to avoid a Sino-Soviet alternate reserve currency he urged Western leaders to beware of implementing the ostentatious “high minded ideals” of this class and instead focus on the now manifest economic threat being posed by the formation of the rival reserve currency.

An example now of the imminence of this threat to global banking he insisted was that the rival reserve currency was already undergoing market testing and positioning.

Russia is directing a development project with BRICS nations dedicated to its cherished reserve currency strategy, warned Mr Bouldoukian.

Helensville and Greytown Hold Line against Solar Tsunami while elected stay gagged

Solar power station coverage of dairy pasture is a policy win-win for the government. The first win is for its renewables scheme. The second is by eliminating the cows blamed for creating half New Zealand’s greenhouse gases.

The halve-the-herd cry is routinely on the lips of activists unconcerned by the fact that the dairy industry is the nation’s chief export earner.

Tourism was the runner-up man foreign currency earner until Covid restricted world travel. Its recovery is now threatened by solar carpeting such heritage areas as Helensville and Greytown.

Concerned residents in the threatened towns are worried about the idealised artists impressions of these power stations which portray shoulder-high panels widely separated and with sheep grazing on the ample verdant pasture beneath.

Their research (pictured above) shows a quite different picture of the mechanical structural configuration relative to its surroundings.

The standard bearer for the resistance is the township of Helensville which has quite literally been under siege since the end of 2021 when the extent to which it was to be surrounded by a solar site began to leak out.

The point man for the entire resistance movement is Marco Scuderi

Mr Scuderi is a globally-recognised shipwright and yacht designer-builder who had no previous role in politics local or national.

So where exactly are the people elected and indeed paid to put a brake on exactly this type of state-backed disruption?

There is more. Suppression of public debate is through the government guiding the coverage of the topic in the mainstream media it does not directly control. This is achieved operationally through the Public Interest Journalism subsidy allocation system.

Greytown residents having discovered that a 500 acre solar power site was to be tacked onto its southern edges then proceeded to discover that another 500 acre generating plant had been tacked onto the other side of the town electricity substation – this time heading in the general direction of Martinborough another tourist town and famed for its vineyards.

The fact that New Zealand is embarking on its first generation of industrial capacity solar power stations is another camouflaged issue.

This because in this first flush of government-sponsored zeal there is no taking into consideration the negative aftermath of these plants installed a generation ago in the United States and which are described alarmingly in Michael Moore’s film Planet of the Humans.

With thousands of acres of dairy land in Waikato and Taupo designated for solar development the loss of export revenue set against the cost of importing all the solar equipment is an issue. Also sidestepped is the degree to which energy supply has been compromised by the political decision to turn off natural gas for instance.

There are substantially over 100 large scale solar site applications pending in New Zealand and this energy Klondike has much to do with planning regulations that make no distinction at all between pastoral farming and solar farming.

The government has set a solar forced march. It is underlined by the government’s disquieting willingness to dismantle the Covid immigration barriers for those able to accelerate the pace.

Neither is it too fussed about the people it tramples on in its swift advance.

Still, there must be surprise that the sternest resistance has come from places such as Helensville and Greytown both heritage grade retirement destinations.

Real World Candidate to bring New Zealand’s City of Dreams back to Earth by pursuing the practical

Ray Chung’s moment of truth came when he discovered that in its move to new premises the Wellington City Council took the opportunity to abandon its recently acquired furnishings in favour of entirely new fittings.

It was now that he began casting around for other such lavish and unnecessary expenditure and it was now that he discovered that far from being an exception the furnishings replacement was a routine example.

It was now too that he discovered that expenditure in all its forms was far from being based on necessity. Instead it was formulated on the basis of the ruminations of focus groups.

Far from representing a consensus of the citizenry and ratepayers Ray Chung now discovered that these focus groups were anything but representational. That in fact they were comprised of activists for niche and voguish special interests.

One of these was cycling. Now he delved into what had been allocated to this special interest group in terms of special concessions, notably dedicated cycle paths.

He took the trouble to inspect the cycleway user counters and found an immense divergence between the exaggerated original estimates of the usage of these cycle paths and the numbers actually revealed by the traffic counters.

The more he dug into projects, expenditure, and outcomes the more he discovered a basis of focus group driven direction and abstraction.

The city’s current operating slogan-in-chief Let’s Get Wellington Moving encapsulates this, he believes.

What does it mean exactly? He asks. In what direction? Upward? Sideways? Downward?

“There is nothing specific about Let’s Get Wellington Moving beyond a fluffy impression that something is happening somewhere, sometime.”

While this feel-good focus and “reimagining” is in full flow there are some known specifics bearing down on the city. Among these is that rates are projected to increase by another 50% over the next three years.

Ray Chung believes that Wellington governance has become suffused with abstraction just because so many people in charge have emerged from backgrounds in policy and political science and other such esoteric callings in which theory is rarely tested against reality.

Rayward Chung’s lineage stretches back to the gold rush era. One of nine children he grew up in a tiny street and a tinier house, which is still there, in the capital’s old inner city.

He went to university and became an engineer and specialised in advanced electronics and it was in this capacity that he worked for multinational companies notably in Europe.

It was in this role that he observed how all expenditure had to be justified and then the return on this expenditure was continuously monitored and evaluated.

He believes that an underpinning problem in Wellington is revealed by the local government elected councillors being referred to as “politicians.” This gives their “underperforming” game away, he points out.

“They are not supposed to be working for political parties. They are elected to work on behalf of all their citizens regardless of their political stripe.”

It is this political classification that he is convinced leads to the focus group syndrome in which there is a constant placating often with “frivolous” expenditure of noisy special interest groups.

He is especially irked since he announced his candidacy by the number of times he has been asked by commentators about his “vision” for the capital.

He replies that he has no vision. Merely an insight into what works and what does not work.

For example his working life in countries such as Germany and Switzerland demonstrated to him how these highly populated nations feature comparatively small cities where the population lives contentedly with close access to things like green parks, public transport, and shops and restaurants.

Many believe that Wellington’s susceptibility to things like visions and ideals stems from parliament where these are the transactional bread and butter ingredients.

Ray Chung wants to insulate the Wellington City Council from political posturing and force it into the real world in which it must confront for example the fact that 30 percent of the capital’s drinking water leaks from its conduit pipes before it reaches its ratepayer consumers.

Firewalling the Wellington City Council from its nearby neighbour the New Zealand Parliament does pose problems. Councillors look with envy at the perks and platoons of “communication” advisers available down the road to their central government counterparts.

“Pet projects belong In Parliament,” concludes Ray Chung. “The City Council is not there to be exciting. It is there to fix pipes and slips. Spin begins down the road….. at Parliament.

Dairy and Wine tourist towns offer close-in substation plug-ins for larger scale power projects in New Zealand

Helensville is often considered the premier heritage town of New Zealand’s North Island. At the end of last year its citizens were shocked and amazed to discover that a massive industrialised solar plant was to be built on the outskirts of the town, and was even planned to make an incursion into the township itself.

Helensville is a prosperous coastal retirement and leisure destination near Auckland and is celebrated for its cafés, boutiques, and art galleries.

Some suspected that Helensville had been selected for the colossal power site because New Zealand’s Labour government with its aspirational best-in-class determination to be on the “right side of history” wanted to use the town to prove that the privileged would assume their fair share of climatic sacrifices.

Then some months later, at the end of August, residents living on the southern boundaries of Greytown began to learn unofficially that a similar scale solar plant was to be built quite literally in their backyard too.

If Helensville is Auckland’s heritage town, then Greytown is the capital, Wellington’s, heritage destination.

The two are at the centre of their district’s wine and dairy areas. They have near identical populations.

Helensville has a population of 2,787. Greytown has 2,420.

So what was the attraction of these townships to the foreign solar power developers?

The incentive was a nearby sub station and the easy flat land and main road access.

This was the common thread. The immense economies provided by these in-place national grid plug-ins cancelled out the elimination of dairy land, and the compromising of heritage value.

Worries about things like glare, electrically-stimulated high temperatures, porosity of shallow water tables, and the chemical composition of the solar panel structures and their disposal are preoccupations of the Helensville community opposition to the power plant.

And now Greytown’s opposition too.

Ratepayers in both heritage townships are daily are learning about hardware such as inverters.

These inverters buffer the electrical currents and make the thrumming noise emitted by these high voltage plants and which at 15 ft high will be dotted among the solar arrays.

Inverted also describes the official location policy of such high voltage plants.

Elsewhere around the world these sprawling plant are in remote and in low productivity areas.

In sparsely populated New Zealand in contrast a pattern is now discernible in which they are installed on highly fertile productive ground hugging tourist-grade townships.

The Greytown international solar developer specifically proclaims the value of “larger scale” projects.

In both the Helensville and the Greytown solar projects the foreign developers have used a town planning compliance opportunity centred on farming.

This means that the usual consents can be by-passed on the simple grounds that these farms will continue to farm.

But this time as solar farms.  The type of farming in a legal sense is interpreted in that it is changed in much the same way as if the farmers had switched from cattle and sheep to ostrich farming, for example.