Politics again

Council Affairs number 3

The third issue was the major problem of sewerage. Consultants had been studying the area for some years and there were two proposals on the table. One was the usual process of cleaning up the sewage and pumping it into the sea, but the route was over a reef of broken rocks, which posed expensive engineering work.

 

The other proposal was to clean up the effluent in oxidation ponds and pump it onto the pine forests to the west of the town. This idea, which was to cost a little more than the other, caught the imagination of the local people and was adopted by a popular vote at a public meeting I chaired. 

The sewerage scheme was not completed until many years after we had left Paihia, but I regarded it as one of my achievements! 

In view of my position and responsibilities in the town, I did not work on the 1975 campaign, but supported our candidate, David Lange, behind the scenes. 

At the beginning of the year I had been introduced to the new Prime Minister, Bill Rowling, at Waitangi, after the school re-enactment of the signing of the Treaty. 

The following year I met him again, this time at a PPTA Conference in Wellington, where I was the Far North delegate. I remarked to him that he was looking better in health than eighteen months before. I suggested that being Leader of the Opposition was a less gruelling job than being PM. He disagreed: the PM, he said, had lots of officials to do his dirty work, whereas the Leader of the Opposition has to do it all himself.

 

In 1977, the centenary of the Abolition of the Provinces, and therefore the first establishment of smaller local bodies like counties and boroughs, we celebrated the hundred years since Bay of Islands County was formed.

 

We had a parade through the town, and some of us wore Victorian clothing and so on for the occasion, as these photos show: