Gordon Takes On Parker For Mayor

Local businesswoman Liz Gordon has announced that she will stand as an independent Mayoral candidate in this year’s local body elections.

Dr Gordon is an ex-University lecturer who spent six years in Parliament between 1996 and 2002, where she chaired the Education and Science Committee for a term. Since then she has set up and runs two small businesses in the field of research, evaluation and training, spent four years on the Massey University Council including a stint as Pro-Chancellor, and has recently completed a law qualification. She is involved in a number of community organisations and currently edits the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies.

“Like many citizens”, she said, “I feel that the Council has done a dreadful job during the current term. It’s priorities are all wrong. Council policy appears to be run by its senior managers, not by the elected representatives”.

She says that she is standing for three principles: leadership, democracy and community.

“Mr Parker would make a better events manager than a Mayor”, she said. “He often does not seem to understand the social, economic or legal implications of Council decisions”.

Dr Gordon said that there were numerous reasons why the Mayor needed to be challenged for his position.

“Let me cite a few. The first was the debacle that saw Council rents for the most vulnerable put up by 24 percent, a decision that was successfully challenged in court. Many of us were sure the Council was breaching the law from day one, and so it proved. I am proud of my involvement in that struggle. But as a ratepayer, the ultimate half million dollar cost of putting it right does not please me at all.

“Then there was the deal that saw the Council purchase, without consultation, $17 million in inner city property from Dodgy Dave Henderson, who then failed to pay GST on the transaction! As a result our Council is now locked into an ongoing relationship with a person who is a tax avoider, is no stranger to the receiver and whose empire appears to be in economic tatters.

“Then there is ongoing saga of the deal with the University to lend it the money to build a music school on the Arts Centre land, despite massive opposition based on the size of the building, its use, its boring façade and the effects on the immediate environment.

Dr. Gordon said that cutbacks to community organisations were also of concern. “My rates keep going up over the rate of inflation and yet many services I care for are cutting back due to reduced funding”.

She cites the treatment of Council early childhood services as a current cause of concern. “At first it was just a book transfer where the Council set the rentals for early childhood centres at market rents, and fully subsidised these. That is fair enough – it is good accounting practice. But then some Council manager, mesmerised by all that book value, felt that the centres should be paying ‘real’ rentals, and so submitted a plan to reduce the subsidy.

“It is sheer madness based on illusory values”, she said. “All you have to do is drive down any Christchurch commercial street to see that there are hundreds of properties up for grabs because no-one can afford market rentals. The reality is that if the early childhood centres vacated their premises now, the Council would have terrible trouble finding alternative tenants. So the whole market rents thing is just a convenient illusion, but is being used as a big stick with which to extract money from these essential services”.

Dr. Gordon is setting up a website and blog within the next week.

ENDS

© Scoop Media