June meeting of the Kapiti Historical Society

Monday, June 24 at 7.30 pm

• Kapiti Uniting Church Meeting Room (Enter via the main church door)
• 10 Weka Road, Raumati Beach
• All welcome — gold coin koha
• A light supper will follow the talk

Andy Oakley on: Cannons Creek to Waitangi — an Historical Collision

Businessman, author and motor racer, Andy Oakley talks about how history has impacted his life in such a way that it could be called nothing less than a collision.

Council media release :-

Annual dog registrations now open at the Kāpiti Coast District Council

 The Kāpiti Coast District Council’s Animal Management team is reminding the community that it’s dog registration time and registration packs have been sent out to dog owners in the post and via email.

Between now and 31 July, it’s easier than ever to register and pay for your canine companion. New for the 2019-2020 registration period, the Council’s hosting a series of dog registration pop-ups around Kāpiti where owners can register their dogs and receive new tags on the spot, as well as get more information about what registration costs cover and why they’re so important.

Dog owners can also register and pay through the Council’s online payment portal or in-person at any of Council’s service centres.

Owners who pay on time will go into a draw to win one of three registration refunds.

For a full dog fee schedule and a pop-up event schedule, see the Council website here

by Gill Ward and Elizabeth Coleman

The wonderful Fiona Farrell

It was an enormous pleasure to hear Fiona Farrell read at our May event. The Oxford Companion to NZ Literature describes her work thus: “In all forms [her work] is energetic and original, delighting in unexpected juxtapositions and sudden shifts of scene or mood. This unpredictability is matched by linguistic flair and variety”. We can testify to all this.

Who will forget listening to her unbearably sad poem Hamid Ameri’s Skull won’t stop growing, and then being consoled by the contrasting fun and joy of a love poem in which a woman was wooed with a load of firewood?    We continue to be delighted that guests from so far away (Fiona came from Dunedin) are prepared to attend Poets to the People for a reading.

Mark Pirie this month

Our poet for this month is Mark Pirie, who, as well as being a poet himself is a fabulous supporter of poetry and poets, especially in the Wellington region. He is a regular attendee at our events, and often reads at the open mic.  Mark has an enormous literary CV and we honour him for his contribution to poetry.

Come along and have a good time at Robert Harris on Sunday 30 June, 4 – 6pm and see and hear for yourself some fine words.

Have a go on the open mic

The open mic is very popular with 20 or more poets putting their names down each time. If you haven’t ever done so, do give it a go – you are guaranteed a very supportive audience that will love you for your courage. The list will close when we start proceedings, so if you want to read, please be on time and get your name on the board. We need to allow for time to support the café during the short break and also not squeeze out the guest reader.

Coming up

We have the year’s programme almost sewn up now and can tell you we are in for some more amazing visiting guests. Please mark them on your calendars for the last Sunday of each month.

NB: This year there’s no meeting in October as it clashes with Labour Weekend.

• June – Mark Pirie
• July – Trish Harris
• August – Kate Camp (NZ Poetry week!)
• September – Erik Kennedy

Remember that the Kapiti Coast District Libraries’ Poetry Competition 2019 is now open and the deadline is 30 June. The theme is TOGETHER.  For guidelines, and to enter, visit www.kapiticoast.govt.nz/libraries

This article from Thursday on the NZ Herald website gives details about what Jacinda and her minions have now come up with.

Obviously, the term “buy-back” is a misnomer: licensed firearms owners did not buy them from the government but from dealers, so strictly it is a gun “confiscation with or without compensation.”

The Government’s gun buyback scheme covers hundreds of types of guns as well as high capacity magazines and other parts, but excludes economic loss or losses for business interruption.

The last is no surprise: Jacinda and her cohort are ideologically opposed to private business and think anything of economic significance should be owned by the state — but the Treasury will have told her that there is no way her regime can afford to embark upon wholesale nationalizing of businesses.  It’s also probable that the Treasury told her the same thing about banning all guns.  So (at least for now) guns of the type that actually get used in crimes — and not the types she rushed to ban — are not affected.

Why are semi-automatic rifles of the type Jacinda & Co. banned rarely used in crimes, you ask? Essentially because they are heavy, unwieldy, difficult to conceal, have hard kick-back (recoil) and are likely to make you deaf without ear muffs.  (The Christchurch gunman was into weight training.)

The police made clear on their website that they were not ready to have a flood of rifles coming into their stations, and are still not.  But it seems that they have come up with other notions on that.

The hundreds of people they raided over the last three months was to do with terrorizing Jacinda & Co.’s political opponents — and that was rather counterproductive in today’s instant social media age, you might think.

[The plan] will also include a $300 payment for gun owners who wish to modify their illegal gun into a legal one, for example changing a shotgun cartridge capacity from seven to five.

What difference should it make if a shotgun has a cartridge capacity of five rather than seven? So a terrorist can only only shoot five people before having to reload?

…setting prices too low risks discouraging gun owners from handing in their firearms.

Spot on.

The list also includes gun parts — including magazines, silencers, open sights and custom triggers — with a different price setting: 70 per cent of the base price for new or used, and 25 per cent of the base price for poor condition.

The amount to be compensated for a new or near new gun itself is 95% of the new price, so why only 70% for the parts?  Do they not really want the parts?

The scheme does not include compensation for illegal firearms handed in by people without a valid firearms licence, sparking questions about how much safer it will make communities.

Again, spot on.  If the government was serious about this, it would offer “compensation with no questions asked.”  But those semi-automatic rifles in the black market or likely to go there will remain; and if the gangs pay more for them than the government does…

Nash said those firearms will still be illegal and he expected police to crack down on the owners of those guns.

The problem though, Mr Nash, is that the police don’t know who has them.  The Christchurch gunman bought his with an ‘A’ category licence of which there are nearly 250,000 holders, and if Tarrant did, then lots of others will have, too.

If the police start systematically raiding every one of the 250,000 licence holders, that is going to destroy your government’s electoral popularity — and since many of the victims are likely to be National Party members or supporters, the National Party might just reverse its stance on this issue.

An owner of a firearm not covered by the police list can pay a $120 fee and apply for separate valuation.

How nice of you to offer that, Mr Nash… not.

Appeals can also be made to the District or High Court.

There are sure to be plenty of these, including class actions.  Can the courts handle yet more avoidable litigation on top of all the trumped-up, politically-motivated charges? Oh, that’s right; Mr Little said yesterday that the Jacinda government is going to pay for lots more judges, too.

The firearms and parts will then become property of the Crown and will be destroyed.

Naturally: it would not be a good look for the Jacinda government to be seen reselling them, even to friendly governments.

A total of 672 firearms have been handed into police so far, with a further 4815 declared for surrender via the online form.

Weren’t we told that there are an estimated 15,000 of the gun types Jacinda & Co. rushed to ban out there?  Those figures are a third of that.  Hmm.  Jacinda wants to be able to proclaim — in another photo-op in front of a pile of guns — that she has now made everyone safe; she’ll be denied that photo-op if up to 10,000 such guns are out there.

Of course in reality, by creating a black market she has actually made people less safe.

As mentioned previously, we intend to put in an OIA to the police covering various aspects of the whole issue.

A picture of the works for the revamped Mahara Place taken yesterday.   The noise was quite substantial.

The Council’s pop-up library, which is currently housed in the Mahara Gallery, will be closed on Thursday and Friday (27 and 28 June) while the books and furniture are transferred into the new building occupying the space where Artel was.

The library will be open for business on Monday 1 July at 10 am. “More information will be available on the Council’s website shortly.”

Which seems fitting for the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  From today, the days start getting longer again 🙂 but not warmer again for a while. 🙁

Signed J. Waldegrave.  This looks like it was painted quite some time ago.

Today we rang Vodafone to tell them that fibre had been laid along our street and to please connect us up to it.

That done, we also asked for a better deal on our phone and internet — and they gave us one, a reduction of about $38 a month — into the deal they gave us free calls to all landlines in the country!

Now, if only the KCDC would behave the same way!  But you’ll have to vote for a new set of councilors who have a platform of reducing the wastage on and by the bureaucracy — you won’t get that if you vote for the existing lot.

Photos by Roger Brent Smith who says: “beautiful kingfishers are back at the Waikanae River estuary.  They are best seen at the outlet channel from the Waimanu Lagoons around late-afternoon when the tide is low. They’re not “tame”, but are used to people passing by, so will allow you to get quite close if you move quietly and slowly.”