About John
Candidate Statement
I am standing for Mayor to be involved in the debates around Hamilton's future. With my skills and abilities, analysing Council wrongdoing as a councillor is a better place for me than attending ceremonies as Mayor.
I am advocating for a simple city rather than a 'Smart City'.
The 'Smart City' tries to manage a city's people. A simple city will instead work for the people and respect their rights.
My vision for a simple city includes: clear and fair rules; transparent planning and contracting processes; making the bureaucracy less complicated and less expensive; focusing on core infrastructure, responsible maintenance, and robust systems; recruiting and retaining competent staff rather than becoming reliant on fickle and intrusive technology.
I am asking Hamilton City to vote harder this election.
If you want a better Hamilton, rank multiple candidates for both your ward councillors and Mayor to prevent your vote being wasted.
Candidate Profile Questions
1. What would be your top three priorities for Council the next three years?
1. Stopping the installation of new speed humps, raised platforms, and other “traffic calming” measures on major roads. Work towards removing or rehabilitating the worst examples of these installations on major roads.
2. Removal of road surveillance cameras and “Smart City” sensors which target people. These types of surveillance systems can be used to monitor, manage, and monetise people. As mentioned in the Access Hamilton Strategy, Council is considering using technology for automated revenue demands and to change travel behaviours (“congestion charges” and “zero emissions zones”). This agenda needs to be stopped.
3. A change in institutional culture within Hamilton City Council. Creating an institutional culture where the Council no longer assumes that ratepayers and intergenerational debt will keep paying for their wrongdoing, mistakes, or wasteful spending. Simplicity, affordability, transparency, respecting rights, prudent spending, and good stewardship would become the priorities within the reformed institutional culture.
2. What is your aspiration for Hamilton Kirikiriroa?
It would be a Hamilton where people can freely move around their City on smooth, widely-adaptable, and functional roads. It would be a City without intrusive, involuntary surveillance trying to monitor and manage people.
Interactions with City Council would be simple and straightforward. People would know what to expect, costs would be predicable, and rules would be fair.
Hamilton City Council would assess every decision according to the Bill of Rights. Council would respect the privacy and self-determination of people. The City Council would engage in genuine consultation. Council staff would provide objective and balanced information. Council would deliver robust and functional infrastructure that meets the community’s actual needs. The City Council would respect the people within the community and not drive them into debt.
Hamilton City Council would be respected by people as a reliable provider of critical infrastructure and for good stewardship of the City’s common property.
3. How do you think Council could best use opportunities to meet the key challenges we are facing?
Simplifying council operations and processes provides an opportunity to reduce council costs and reduce complications for people in our City. Clear and fair rules will provide benefits to both Council staff and the wider community.
Instilling a culture of respecting peoples’ rights within Council operations will reduce the amount of Council activities which are considered as intrusive, extravagant, convoluted, or unjust.
Improving contract negotiation practices should lower infrastructure and information technology costs. There could be opportunities to form multi-council consortia to access bulk purchasing discounts and reduce costs.
Hamilton needs to encourage more community-led and community-funded initiatives to run the City’s cultural activities. Community groups need to be less dependent on Council funding and Council management. Such activities are best run by communities of interest and voluntary associations. It is unjust to fund such cultural activities by imposing more intergenerational debt on the City’s residents and homeowners.
4. If there was one thing you could change about Hamilton Kirikiriroa immediately, what would it be?
Increased accountability and transparency.
Bad decisions, wasteful spending, mismanagement, and increasing debt levels are downstream of institutional systems where critical information is withheld, criticism is suppressed, decisions are made behind closed doors, and decision-makers are shielded from effective accountability.
For cases such as the V8 races, Claudelands Event Centre, and the Peacockes urban expansion, I believe that increased accountability and transparency at the time would have resulted in better decisions and less debt burden being imposed on our City.
Council staff must start producing more balanced and objective documents about proposed changes or schemes. Promotional documents which hide or downplay the potential disadvantages are unacceptable in my view. Generally, I think accountability needs to take the form of reversing any financial or policy gains which were obtained by deception.
It is important for councillors to practice critical thinking and ensure that ‘evidence-based policy-making’ is not ‘policy-based evidence-making’ in disguise.
5. What qualities would you bring to Council that will help our city thrive?
My education has primarily been in science, with degrees which have covered mainly biology and chemistry. After completing a PhD, I have worked on various scientific projects.
During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, I lectured engineering students in materials science at the University.
I bring research skill and capabilities for critical thinking. I can handle large quantities of information. Having a more traditional approach to science, I strive for objectivity when assessing situations.
I can analyse complex problems and not panic in a crisis. I can be fair, reasonable, practical, and use common sense, while bringing a willingness to strongly challenge the local government bureaucracy at multiple levels.
I believe in leading by example instead of coercion, with a willingness to let others exercise their rights to self-determination. I oppose the authorities using punishment and coercion to impose their political agendas on people’s private lives and relatively harmless activities.
6. Where can voters go to learn more about you?
Website: johnforhamilton.substack.com/