There are claims being made that a huge money hungry monster is being unleashed into the Kaipara. It is said to have the nasty habit of stifling development and ripping the cash out of ratepayers’ pockets and squandering it on consultants and civil servants who oversee poorly planned civic amenities. It also creates large quantities of debt and belches out clouds of confusing financial data that threatens to turn into the acid rain of rate increases for many years to come.

This horrific beast has the deceptively harmless title of the new Proposed Kaipara District Plan and apparently has already devoured far more cash than originally planned. In the rush to get it through before the next election some influential residents (especially farmers) are complaining that there has not been enough time for their interests to be fairly taken into account and they are threatening political action to reverse this.

On the other hand, local politicians and bureaucrats appear unperturbed and astounded by such scare mongering accusations. To them, the new Proposed District Plan is an inspired piece of town and country planning. It contains visionary proposals that ensure any development gets rigorous scrutiny and determines the amount of compensation that mitigates the environmental and social impacts.

This point of view seems to see the Kaipara as part of a wider world that is under strain environmentally and future development needs to take this into account. The best people for the job will be of course highly trained professionals employed as consultants and civil servants. The rest of us might require specially designed pairs of 3D glasses to gain some perspective of the complexities as they arise in each case.

As the local body elections draw nearer the action is bound to heat up over this issue and I see that it could motivate a whole new crop of aspiring politicians to enter the ring, which will be good for democracy and hopefully the district.

Rural people are generally busy people as land, climate and harder living conditions make heavy demands on our time. It also takes a special kind of courage to gird your loins and take the flak for decisions you might or might not agree with. Weird things happen in committees and I often seen some people go through a personality change and begin to lose their rationality.

I heard about an interesting experiment recently where a group of psychology students was split in two; one lot became prisoners in cells and the other lot their jailers. The jailers had the ability to administer punishment and the prisoners had signed an agreement to accept it.

The experiment had to be terminated early due to some of the jailers being unable to control their urge to punish unreasonably. Afterwards, these people were astonished to see video evidence of themselves being so abusive and out of character. The lesson was quite clear, power can alter some people for the worst and I wish there was a sure fire way to discover who they are likely to be.

So far democracy has been the best way to weed out incompetence and character flaws. That is why debating issues and voting really matters. Obviously, when it comes to the District Plan, quite a number of folk here believe that somewhere in the Kaipara, Excalibur awaits trapped in stone — for new leadership to appear.