The demise of the first floor

I would imagine if anyone wanted to rent space in an upstairs location in the Masterton CBD, for whatever reason, the choices would be wide-ranging. Casting my gaze skywards it seems that there are a large number of vacant spaces in areas that were once considered prestigious.

Has our aging population lost the will to walk up stairs or is there just too much available space at ground level that is reasonably priced and more convenient?

So let me take you back in time. I can remember McKenzie’s department store being built; the vast upper floors were for stock. Back then goods had, by law, to be accessed via the New Zealand Railways and if they didn’t lose them on the way then it still took an inordinate amount of time from order to arrival. Hence the upper reaches were set aside for storage and a large goods lift was installed. Today the imposing brick and reinforced concrete building houses Newbold’s appliance store at street level and I suspect that with trucks now bringing goods to your door a day after you’ve ordered them the first and second floors will be relatively bare.

On the first floor over the road from Newbold’s there used to be a reception lounge known as the National Club Rooms. With attractive wood-panelled walls, commercial kitchen and a generous stage, the hall was regularly used for wedding receptions.

The WFCA, now Mastermall, had a sweeping stairway up to a huge lending library on the first floor. Down the road apiece meat exporters Thomas Borthwick and Sons had their New Zealand head office above the Regent Theatre with busy managerial and clerical staff spread over two floors.

A new post office was built in 1962 on the corner of Queen Street and Lincoln Road and given its centre-town location its two upper floors were most sought after. Today I gather they’re all but empty.

The government in its wisdom built the Departmental Building in Chapel Street. I was at the opening hosted by the Prime Minister of the day Robert Muldoon. He told the enthusiastic gathering that government departments were spread all over town and they were now going to be centralised in this splendid new multi-storey building. And so they were, for a while, then somehow what was left of them got spread back around the town again. Plenty of space up there for rent now I gather, if you’re interested.

Not long after that a new three-storey building was constructed for the Social Welfare Department - now WINZ - and its upper floors are now only getting partial usage.

Sometimes we pull down buildings that have upper echelons and replace them with single storey tin sheds that expose the wire netting and building paper in their ceilings. They demolished the rock solid old Cosy Theatre though it had begun a new life as the Pioneer Bar and Lounge. The celebrated lounge bar was on the first floor which later gave way to an equally popular restaurant called The Crofters Arms.

There was a first floor balcony on the front of the building overlooking Queen Street and this was used from time to time to spout speeches from, usually in a humorous vein. On one occasion I vividly recall the marvellous local raconteur, the late Evan Jaine, haranguing a much amused crowd from this veranda with an exceedingly funny monologue.

Back then of course Queen Street was regularly crowded.

There were other upstairs restaurants, one above Austin’s corner - now The Flight Centre - which allowed diners a wonderful view over the town centre. This premise has been empty for years. An even better vista was gained from the Elizabethan Room Restaurant on the first floor of the Horseshoe building in Northern Queen Street. The premise still houses a restaurant, but you walk in off the carpark.

At the Town Hall the district council will allow you to pay your rates at ground level, but entice you upstairs for all other services. The councillors however have abandoned their first floor council chambers and now meet downstairs in the Cody Lounge.

Even our public hospital, originally constructed on varying levels, was replaced with a facility built on the ground floor only.

Multi-storey buildings in cities like Auckland and Wellington are there because the terrain beneath them is so valuable that the developers need to use the air space above to gain enough rental income to cover the value of the land below. Sadly in small provincial towns the value of the land in the central business districts is comparatively low and unlikely to rise.

I’ve really only scratched the surface with some examples, but the likelihood of the Otis Elevator Company ever opening a branch in the Wairarapa is exceedingly slim.

“They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbours away from her, and deface her with buildings and their refuse” – Sitting Bull

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The good, the bad and the ugly

I was amused at the way the anti-1080 brigade ducked for cover when one of their cowardly collaborators sought to blackmail our significant baby formula industry sending the government into a tailspin. The holier-than-thou protest group were quick to distance themselves from the unknown perpetrator. No doubt many of these folk are sincere and genuine about their protestations despite the 2011 report of the Commissioner the Environment that found 1080 is the safest treatment we have – all things considered – for dealing with the threat to our native birds by rats, stoats, possums and other pests. 

Unfortunately “other pests” may include deer and in many cases it’s the hunting fraternity from whence much of the antagonism ferments.

I had an experience with the mob mentality back in 2002 when the manager of the Wairarapa division of the Greater Wellington Regional Council, some senior members of his biosecurity department, a vet from Agriquality and I faced up to an angry assemblage in the Upper Hutt Town Hall. Many attendees were deer hunters opposing the council’s intention to drop 1080 pellets by helicopter in the dense bush surrounding Upper Hutt.

A Mr John Burrett, an Upper Hutt lawyer, was involved with the group and had called the meeting and demanded that we front up and face the music.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience. Mr Burrett and his associates were not shy to express their vehemence towards us, shouting and gesticulating wildly. Any claims we wanted to make were overshadowed by the baying of an audience with little interest in anything but their own point of view. At the conclusion of the meeting we went outside to discover that the tyres on one of the regional council vehicles had been slashed.

A couple of weeks later I chaired a meeting in the committee room of the regional council headquarters in Wellington to which we invited Mr. Burrett and his anti-1080 colleagues plus territorial local authority councillors and officers and presented some well researched evidence which showed that 1080 was safe and reliable in the circumstances in which we intended to apply it. We flew in a scientist from Christchurch who gave a dispassionate and balanced opinion which we thought would have allayed all concerns.

Mr. Burrett spoke forcefully at the meeting and was obviously not placated.

I then invited Mr. Burrett to come to Masterton and talk with the Rural Services and Wairarapa Committee to see if we could reach some amicable arrangement, but by now he was in full flight. He was a formidable foe with a strong command of the English language and he delivered his opinions in an impressive barristorial intonation. He threatened to take out an injunction against the regional council in the High Court, and inferred that incarceration was hardly punishment enough for people of our ilk. I suspect public floggings and the odd hanging would be about the only options open to mollify him.

At a subsequent meeting the regional council did offer very reasonable alternatives to the original plan they had devised to rid the bush of pests. They increased the ground baiting area and reduced the territory intended for the aerial 1080 drop at considerable extra cost. The protagonists reluctantly agreed to this compromise which they conceded was an improvement on the original intentions.

In fact it was and it wasn’t. The Medical Officer of Health was not impressed. The alternative to aerial 1080 drops is cyanide ground baiting. Cyanide is one of the deadliest of poisons - to date 1080 has killed no one.

During the ground baiting operation the regional council staff unearthed a lockable underground bunker that appeared to have been readied for a long stay resident. The Upper Hutt police were alerted and covert inquiries conducted.

Incredibly it was determined that the very same Mr Burrett, along with his stepson and his nephew, had built the hideaway intending to kidnap and conceal a prominent Wellington businessman, Mr Bill Trotter, and demand a ransom.

So you see ransom demands are not a new weapon in the anti-1080 arsenal.

The last I saw of Mr Burrett was on the TV news, dressed in unflattering prison issue apparel, sporting a heavily bandaged arm due to injuries caused by a police dog during his apprehension by the gendarmerie.

From memory he was jailed for seven years and was then to be deported.

Mr Burrett was originally from the UK and British newspapers contacted some of his acquaintances in his hometown in Kent who spoke rather unfavourably of him. He had left England under a considerable cloud and a previous workmate said that that he hoped the injuries inflicted on him by the police dog “were not too trivial.”

The word picture painted strongly inferred that he was not universally admired.

But here is the irony. If the original aerial 1080 operation had gone ahead as planned, the area around the bunker would have been out of bounds and the secret hiding place would never have been discovered.

It’s absolutely conclusive. There is a God.

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.” – Alan Bennett 

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An institution to be proud of

Mischievous rumours circulate from time to time about how the Wairarapa hospital is going to close. I hear these more often than I’m comfortable with and of course they are ridiculous. The Wairarapa simply couldn’t operate as a healthy modern society without its own hospital unless its citizens were all allocated Martin Jetpacks - and even then there would insurmountable complications.

Those heady days when we all put our hands around the hospital to “save” it was more about perception than substance. It was a great opportunity to show community solidarity on a balmy summers evening, but no government would ever consider closing a public hospital in an area as widespread as the Wairarapa.

Another ridiculous claim that you often hear or read about in letters or texts to the editor is that the hospital is being taken over by the Hutt Valley District Health Board. Again nothing could be further from the truth. We and the Hutt do share the one CEO, but the Wairarapa hospital has a separate in-house manager and its own fiercely independent district health board.

The Wairarapa DHB has seven elected board members. These include three doctors, a practising nurse, two ex-nurses and a butcher. There’s an odd man out here and I can’t for the life of me think who that might be. In health forums where we are unknown to our colleagues and have to make formal introductions I usually describe myself as an ex-surgeon and then lamely admit that I have only ever operated on beef, lamb and pork.

The government appoints four other board members, often to fill a skills gap. One of these is usually the chairman and our appointees include an ex-chief executive of a governmental science organisation, an accountant and a Maori gentleman. We originally had two of the latter, but one resigned to pursue life in a more public arena and we are expecting the announcement of a new appointee, rumoured to be a well-qualified Maori lady, imminently.

A few years ago the Health Department encouraged us to make closer linkages with our neighbours to the south in an endeavour to streamline services and contain costs. These relationships already existed of course, but are now more formalised and we meet regularly with the boards of Hutt Valley and Capital and Coast to discuss how we can continually improve the health outcomes of our respective communities.

Our compact 92 bed hospital in Te Ore Ore Road, in round figures, employs 200 nurses and 40 doctors. This may seem a lot, but this sort of staffing is required to keep a hospital open in a 24 hours a day, seven days a week, environment.

The hospital performs exceptionally well. The Ministry of Health sets targets for all of New Zealand hospitals and the Wairarapa Hospital invariably meets its targets or exceeds them.

Recently the new Minister of Health Jonathan Coleman, himself an ex general practitioner congratulated our team on the number of elective surgeries performed. For the last October, November, December quarter the target set was 443 elective surgical discharges whereas 55 more were performed - reaching almost 500.

The Wairarapa DHB’s other targets were either improved or remained stable.

The Achilles’ heel for the board is reigning in costs. We are looking at a deficit in excess of $2 million this financial year and this is unacceptable to the ministry. Also exacerbating our financial difficulties and not generally known is that although governments boast to the electorate when they build a new hospital, the actual cost of the hospital comes out of the population-based Ministry of Health funding.

Wairarapa’s new hospital is going to take decades to pay off and is therefore a constant burden on our income stream.

However the recent census has exposed that the Wairarapa has grown at a far greater rate than was initially forecast and in the upcoming financial year our funding will increase by $5 million.

Some of this income will be used for capital works that have been held over, but a break-even situation does look possible for the 2015-2016 years.

No need to put our hands around the hospital then, but you might like to put your hands together for the dedicated staff whose skills and endeavour have led the Minister of Health to concede that ours is one of the best performing hospitals in the country.

“My father invented a cure for which there was no known disease. My mother caught the cure and died of it.” - Victor Borge

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So just how bad is the problem?

There is a school of thought, albeit quite small I would imagine, who believe Barack Hussein Obama is a closet Muslim. There will be more than a modicum of paranoia among this disparate group although they apparently do have a champion in the form of billionaire property developer Donald Trump.

The fact that Obama is reluctant to march in an army of foot soldiers to defeat the Islamic State militants adds fuel to their fire as they claim this is because he is empathetic to his own kind.

So the US President would have been delighted when his Secretary of State John Kerry, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week said: “Despite Isis and the visible killings you see, and how horrific they are, we are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and the world than normally; less deaths, less violent deaths today, than throughout the last century.”

Kerry claimed that social media had highlighted the issues to such a degree that citizens of the western world are more afraid than they need to be.

So apparently we can slumber in peace.

But that’s not how the citizens of this country saw it when John Key announced that he was sending non-combatant troops to Iraq with some combatant troops alongside to protect them. Although a slim majority of New Zealanders agreed with this decision, many feared there would be reprisals.

The main stream media waded in on the side of the left as usual. After their comment that Andrew Little’s outburst “cut the cr*p” was “bold and forceful” John Key’s “get some guts and join the right side” was described as “inappropriate and ill-directed.”

And when a van innocently caught fire in a Westfield shopping mall in Auckland, shoppers fled the building fearing the worst. The panic ensued because Isis had put out a call to its worldwide sympathisers to attack malls in general and Westfield-branded ones in particular as they believe these are Jewish-owned.

I’m anecdotally told that already in this country shopping centres are experiencing a decrease in patronage, but don’t want to highlight this in case it causes a domino effect.

Kerry’s soothing comments however were counteracted by America’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who declared 2014 the deadliest year for global terrorism ever recorded.

Testifying on Capitol Hill he catalogued the growing terror-fuelled violence in stark terms. “When the final accounting is done,” he said, “2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years that such data has been compiled.” Also speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee he offered statistics that would appear to challenge the Obama administration official’s claims that America and the world were safer places today.

Clapper said that in the first nine months alone of 2014 preliminary data from a University of Maryland research unit shows nearly 13,000 attacks killed 31,000 people.

Back then to sleepless nights.

The discrepancy in the two claims made to the Senate Armed Services Committee occurs because wars kill tens of thousands of people whereas terrorism kills a lesser number, but more brutally, and if carefully staged, can strike fear into the hearts of millions.

The Isis terrorists are masters at staging that brutality.

The Islamic State militants have something up their sleeve that is virtually undefeatable. They sincerely believe that death is going to propel them to a paradise that offers indescribable rewards of carnal desire.

Meanwhile children are being raped and forced into military service and women are being sold into slavery.

Their god must be very forgiving.

Unfortunately the jihadists know they can pretty well do what they like because the world is reluctant to unite against them. We are now part of a sixty nation coalition that refuses to attack Isil where it primarily lives, in Syria.

In her about-to-be released book ISIS - the State of Terror Jessica Stern writes that the Sunni-Muslim-based jihadists want a ground war, they want to fight and die and see this as an apocalyptic battle against Christians and their other perceived enemy, the Shi’ite Muslims.

So there’s good news and there’s bad news. I desperately want to believe John Kerry’s palliative assessment of the situation, but his optimism may be misguided and in the long run remembered as being a bit like Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous declaration in 1939: “Peace for our time”.

“Nature has left this tincture in the blood; that all men would be tyrants if they could.” -Daniel Defoe

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