Over the next couple of months New Zealand councils will be releasing their Long Term Plan (LTP) consultation documents, so it’s timely to review Audit New Zealand’s advice on how to make these documents as effective as possible. In ‘Long-term plans: Our audits of...
One of the challenges of writing a concise, interesting resource management or Long Term Plan consultation document is that the starting point is a much larger, more detailed source of information. Councils need to transform the key elements of detailed analysis into...
Last week I edited a submission for a client (Ian McComb, of Small Time Developments Ltd) which includes some really good practices. That experience inspired the following checklist which you may find helpful if you are writing a submission on a council plan. (This...
Are community engagement plans magically whipped up by the communications advisers at your council, or do you have to come up with them yourself? Even if they are mainly done for you, subject matter experts can definitely add value to them. While there is no one...
Do a job badly enough and you won’t be asked to do it again. That’s a commonly held belief, but it doesn’t always work out that way. I took TERRIBLE photos during vox pop Wednesdays in my first year as a journalist at the Hamilton Press. No matter what settings I...
Meetings are not everyone’s cup of tea … especially when you’re not being paid to be there! So what does this mean for the collaborative governance processes which are now an important part of freshwater planning around New Zealand? There are people like my father who...