Port of Auckland increase Port Rail Shuttle Services

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Now running 16 services a week

 

From Voxy

Ports of Auckland increases freight rail service

Tuesday, 2 September, 2014 – 12:29

 

Working with KiwiRail, Ports of Auckland has doubled the rail services between its Waitematā seaport and Wiri Intermodal Freight Hub.

The increased service starts this week and will bring the port to the doorstep of importers and exporters in South Auckland, potentially reducing the number of trucks coming into the seaport and opening up more space to handle growing volumes.

Ports of Auckland General Manager Commercial Relationships Craig Sain said, “This is just the beginning. With our developments in Palmerston North and Wiri, we’re on our way to make more effective and increased use of rail to improve our service offering.”

“Containers moved by rail was up by 64% in 2013/14, but it is still a small percentage of the total containers coming through the port. We’d like to see this number grow over the coming years,” he said.

In 2010, with the opening of the Wiri Intermodal Freight Hub, KiwiRail ran four services of 23 wagons a week in each direction. Over time, this number increased to eight services and starting today there will be sixteen services a week.

“There is ample capacity on the line to the Port to increase services further and we will continue to work with KiwiRail to get the most out of the line,” Mr Sain said.

KiwiRail General Manager Sales – Freight Alan Piper said, “Ports of Auckland’s drive to increasingly move freight by rail to its Wiri inland port has seen a rapid increase in growth of daily services this year. This is a great example of KiwiRail working closely with its customers and provide flexible growth capacity to enable more use of rail to transport goods around the country.”

The Wiri Intermodal Freight Hub is operated by CONLINXX, a subsidiary of Ports of Auckland and offer greater efficiencies and flexibility for exporters and importers who are able to drop off and pick up containers without having to negotiate the Auckland motorways.

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Source: http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/ports-auckland-increases-freight-rail-service/5/200972

 

Something I will keep in the back of my mind as I head up to Town Hall on Thursday and will be bringing up the Manukau South Link at the time.

 

Unitary Plan Hearings Under-Way

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Day One Begins

 

From Auckland Council

Hearings on shaping Auckland’s development underway

 

New Zealand’s largest planning review gets underway in Auckland today with an Independent Hearings Panel beginning its deliberations on Auckland Council’s  Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan.

The hearing is before Environment Court judge, David Kirkpatrick who chairs the Panel, and seven panel members. There are also 15 mediators and facilitators who will help resolve issues through expert conference and mediation.

The Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan sets the rules about how the Auckland region will develop over decades, including what can be built and where, and how to protect the environment and Auckland’s built and cultural heritage.

More than 9500 submissions were made on the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan.  The Panel will consider the views of submitters – plus a further 3500 submitters who have responded to the original submissions – over 74 topics.

Judge Kirkpatrick said the hearing is the biggest ever in New Zealand planning history because it involves the Regional Policy Statement and both the Regional and District Plan documents all wrapped up  in one document.

“There’s been a huge number of submissions and a high level of public participation – and that’s a good thing for such an important document,” said Judge Kirkpatrick.

He said the requirements of the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act made this hearing different from the traditional adversarial planning hearing. The Act has a requirement that the Panel use pre-hearing processes and mediation to help identify the most appropriate planning position for the Auckland region.

“So there’s a large level of the ‘Good of the Auckland region’ objective here rather than simply saying which side wins and which side loses,” said Judge Kirkpatrick.

“With the complex issues involved we have to have a very clear high-level regard for the sustainable management of the resources of the whole Auckland region. If we adopted a solely technical approach to our task we would ‘miss the wood for the trees’.”

He said the Panel is working to an extremely tight timeframe to complete its report to Auckland Council by July 2016 on changes it thinks should be made to the plan.

The Panel will be working through a process ‘from the general to the particular’.  It will start with the Regional Policy Statement issues such as rural/urban growth, residential and industrial growth and higher level transport issues. It will then deal with the more specific rule-based issues and then move on to the site-specific changes.

“It’s important that we have integration between the higher-level objectives and strategy of the plan and the methods on the ground,” said Judge Kirkpatrick.

“We could compromise a policy very easily by simply by having exceptions to the rules which give away its validity.”

Judge Kirkpatrick said the Panel is endeavouring where possible to come to decisions on issues when the Panel hears from submitters.

“It’s better that we do it when we hear from people, but we acknowledge that as we go through we are likely to have to go back and reconsider some of the things we have decided.

“We need to make sure that our decision-making has been consistent throughout and that the recommendations we are making to Council produce an integrated set of planning provisions.”

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The Hearings’ Order Paper

 

The Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel website can be found here: http://www.aupihp.govt.nz/

 

Talking Auckland will keep a roving update from the Hearings Panel as relevant information comes to hand

 

August ’14 – NZ blogs sitemeter ranking

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Up a few places last month to 38th with the blog breaking its record in most views ever.

Ken's avatarOpen Parachute

 
Hager
Bloggers in the thick of election campaign? Image Credit: Against the Current

PLEASE NOTE: Sitemeter is playing up again making it impossible to automatically get the stats using the normal process. I have done a manual work around but it was still impossible to get the stats for a number of blogs that I list below. Maybe more bloggers will shift to StatCounter or other counter.

No stats could be found for these blogs:

Blog
Works in progress
Weakly Whirled News
Two Minutes Sport
Wysiwygpurple’s Blog
Stats Chat
Social Media and the 2014 General Election
Love your work
Today is my birthday
This Mum Rocks
Sportsfreak
Infectious thoughts
Science Behind the Curtain
Grumpollie
Louis’ Outlook
West City Darts
Woodleigh Nursery
Kyle MacDonald
A conservative perspective
Save our schools NZ

There are now over 300 blogs on the list, although I am weeding out those which are no longer active or…

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Back Tomorrow

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After a nice long weekend in Tauranga (I come back up to Auckland) this afternoon and one heck of a £%$” storm with Dirty Politics also over the weekend, Talking Auckland will be back full steam tomorrow with your Auckland issues and commentary.

Coming up this week:
1) The Southern Initiative finally gets going
2) The continuation of the Auckland Commuter Journey Series
3) If I can land it, a chat with Auckland Development Chair and Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse on the first look at the 10 Spatial Priorities and what they might mean for Auckland.
4) If Auckland Transport come back by Thursday the Manukau South Link and where we go from there

Poll of Polls update – 31 August 2014

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Anything but a fizzer?
Who and what? Read on

jononatusch's avatarOccasionally Erudite Publications

The latest One News Colmar Brunton poll has just been released, and there’s some interesting results there.

National drop 2%, down to 48%. That’s on top of the 2% they dropped in the mid-August Colmar Brunton poll.

On the left, Labour increased 2% to 28%, while the Greens went up 1% to 12%. That’s a 5% narrowing of the gap by a Labour/Greens alliance. Given the continued floundering by National in the wake of Dirty Politics, and the confident performance by David Cunliffe in the first televised leaders’ debate (which wasn’t covered by the polling window), Labour might be in line for a continued lift in subsequent polling.

For the minor parties, NZ First is up 1% to 6%, providing a clear buffer above the 5% threshold. And there’s a good results for the Conservatives, up 0.8% to 3.2%, although it’s still nowhere near the threshold.

Internet Mana slumps badly, down…

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Enemies without and enemies within

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Read the last paragraph. Dog eat dog and an empire coming to its violent end after the first implosion during the Len Brown saga…

jononatusch's avatarOccasionally Erudite Publications

Yesterday, when the news of Judith Collins’ resignation broke, I asked where the Cameron Slater email had come from. It hadn’t been released by Whaledump, and it hadn’t featured in Dirty Politics. Instead, it had been sent to the Prime Minister’s office.

John Key clarified yesterday that the email was not sent anonymously. Instead, the email came from a person who was known to the PM’s office, but the identity of that person was not going to be released.

Well, we don’t know just whose hands the incriminating email passed through on its way through the Beehive to John Key and his staff, but according to the Sunday Star-Times this morning, the source of the email was Cathy Odgers aka Cactus Kate, Cameron Slater’s partner in crime:

Knowing Fairfax was investigating the hacked emails, it is believed Odgers (known by the blog name Cactus Kate) went through her own emails…

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Cameron Slater – lies, or the art of puffery?

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Follow Jono and his blog. Insightful and to the point.

jononatusch's avatarOccasionally Erudite Publications

Cameron Slater’s email to Carrick Graham, Mark possibly-Hochin and one mystery identity may have sunk Judith Collins’ political career, but Slater is standing steadfastly by her. Reading a pre-prepared statement yesterday, and taking a few media questions, he denied that Collins had done what the email said she’d done.

So was he lying in the email? Apparently not. According to Slater, he was exaggerating the truth:

“Embellished is a good word. It’s better than a lie, isn’t it?”

It’s worth looking at precisely what Slater wrote about Judith Collins’ involvement in the conspiracy to undermine then-SFO director Adam Feeley:

“I also spoke at length with the Minister responsible today (Judith Collins). She is gunning for Feeley. Any information that we can provide her on his background is appreciated. I have outlined for her a coming blog post about the massive staff turnover and she has added that to the review of…

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Four Southern Initiative Projects

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I am putting together some Southern Initiative posts reflecting on some good news finally for this project after four years of flak including of me.

Four projects are under way covering different aspects of The Southern Initiative, those projects cover:
1) Social Infrastructure (enabling communities to participate in the Digital World)
2) Land Use Planning x2: The Otara-Papatoetoe Area Plan which is working through the motions before implementation next year, and the Spatial Priorities project the Auckland Development Committee will be working through. Manukau City Centre is one of those bigger Spatial Priorities that would be carried out
3) Physical Infrastructure from both NZTA and Auckland Transport

I will run these along side the Auckland Commute series that I have been running as I prepare to tie this all up.

More next week but good to see the Southern Initiative finally getting underway and some positive news

Serious questions for Jared Savage & the NZ Herald

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Well that whacks the Herald around a bit. But also shines the light of a few things quietly suspected as well

jononatusch's avatarOccasionally Erudite Publications

So, further to the Cameron Slater email that felled Judith Collins, there’s a particular line in the email that’s rather troubling:

I am maintaining daily communications with Jared Savage at the Herald and he is passing information directly to me that the Herald can’t run and so are feeding me to run on the blog.

Perhaps Jared Savage might like to explain what precisely he as a journalist was doing feeding information to Cameron Slater that Savage couldn’t publish himself. If the NZ Herald can’t use certain information in a story, it’s presumably because they’re worried about the legal consequences. So why would a reputable journalist then pass that information on to a blogger to use?

Let’s look at the Len Brown sex scandal story. It wasn’t something any mainstream media outlet was going to touch. Until it was all over the Whaleoil site, which meant that it was now…

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