Richard Moore's Straight Talk Columns

Council's terminal velocity a killer

3/8/2010

ET TU, Brute?

That must be the Julius Caesar-like feeling a Tauranga businessman has towards the city council after closing the doors on his high-profile shop.

Des Oborn has pulled the pin on the Copy Corner, blaming council roadworks in and around the civic centre block for making it impossible to continue to fight to stay open.

The roadworks are a pain and if I were a retailer there I'd be spitting tacks at the council's decision to put the enlarged bus centre in Willow St.

Parking is impossible, the ticketing vultures hover with evil relish, and the large wire fences are an eyesore. The councillors who voted for the terminus there were told what would happen to nearby retailers but they either didn't care or were too locked into the plan with the lure of a large New Zealand Transit Authority handout to listen to business people and be prepared to change their minds.

``We know what's best, we'll do as we like,'' they would have thought as they held out their hands and still demanded rates from the businesses they were about to do over.

In these nasty financial times it's all okay if you are a bureaucrat or an elected official on public pay, but when you are a retailer struggling to survive even the smallest thing can send you under and cost real workers jobs.

The closure of Copy Corner has cost four full-time positions and more businesses and jobs are likely to go as other shops succumb during downtown's preventable death phase.

It goes to show that many Tauranga City councillors do not understand how tough life is for retailers.

But why should that matter to them. It's not as if they listen to what people say anyway.

As the great bard Will Shakespeare said ``Blush, blush, thou lump of cruel deformity."

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I know the North Koreans are a pack of starving nuclear-wannabes who have a penchant for sinking South Korean naval ships but now they've shown themselves up to be really bad sports as well.

During the World Cup the North Korean soccer team lost all three of their games and now have had to face the music. Actually, music isn't quite the word, it's more like abuse.

The players and coach were subjected to a public six-hour barrage of criticism at a hall in Pyongyang for ``betraying'' the communist nation's ideological struggle and there are reports of the coach's life being threatened by the little muppet who runs the place, Kim Jong-Il.

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From the If Only NZ Courts Were This Tough files comes a followup to the case of one Matthew Clemmens, 21, an American baseball fan. Clemmens - better known as Chuck to his mates - was the trailer-trash chap who deliberately vomited on an off-duty cop and his daughter at a baseball game.

In New Zealand the copper and gal would have been blamed and Clemmens would have got away with his disgusting act, but in the Good ol' US of A he was banged away for up to three months in jail.

Not only that but he got two years' probation and 50 hours of community service.

Maybe we should send our judges on how-to-sentence-crims courses in America?

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Chris Carter's bumbled plot against Labour leader Phil Goff had all the makings of a great movie, but instead of Kill Phil we got to see Carry On Coup instead.

Carter is obviously in need of something a little more than a hug from his partner - he needs to be given a medical.

He has been in the gun over expenses, taking an unauthorised venture to foreign climes - and now the botched revolt.

Coming up soon is his expulsion from the Labour Party over his idiocy. Ah well, guess you'll have plenty of time for another overseas trip Chris.

Shame you'll have to fund it yourself. Ooops, no, hang on - if he does fall on his sword Carter is expected to get a $1200 weekly pension and discounts on flights. So even after they go they're still sucking the life out of us aren't they?

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Now you don't tend to hear a lot out of the vampiric lands of Romania but this one is a beauty.

Being filled with peasant farmers tilling the fields with garlic around their necks, Romania is not regarded as having the sharpest tools in the shed.

Certainly not the 35-year-old guy who tried to repair a family heirloom - a metal soil tamper with a lovely shiny brass bottom.

He started up the blowtorch to fix the metal handle but it was only when he flew, mortally wounded, over the neighbour's fence he realised that the World War II shell his father had been banging hard on the ground for 70 years was still in perfect working order.''