Living in the Western Bay of Plenty we received the 150-word election blurbs in the local media for both Tauranga City Council and Western Bay of Plenty District Council.
Now that the results are out it seemed a useful time to review the promises/statements of the successful candidates. Tauranga City has a Mayor and 10 Councillors, Western Bay, a Mayor and 11 Councillors.
One seat on Tauranga Council (at the time of writing this post) was too close to call and awaits the final count of special votes, so we will add both candidates for the purpose of this exercise.
While the word ‘environment’ occurred a number of times in the 24 statements there was one curious absence.
Not a single elected person (or either of the two potentials) used the word ‘climate’ in their statement.
If there was a ‘climate emergency’ and it was the most important thing that your Council should be acting on, and you thought that the voters would agree with that position as a sure vote winner, then why would you not mention it?
Could it be that those elected did not feel that way? Could it be that they thought mentioning ‘climate’ or ‘climate emergency’ might be toxic?
I have no way of knowing what was in the minds of those 23 aspiring politicians as they wrote their pitch to the voters but it is abundantly clear that the ‘climate emergency’ is not important enough in the minds of these local body politicians to waste one of their precious 150 words on it.
It will be interesting to see if there is any move by either Council to join the Bay of Plenty Regional Council who declared a climate emergency in the previous term. Unfortunately, the incumbent who led that charge on Regional Council was re-elected.
If not, it is clearly a non-emergency and I guess we just call 105?