I have lived on the island in Schooner Bay for 46 years with my husband, Peter Edmonds. We brought up three daughters there and we started off with no road access and lived like pioneers for many years. Now we have good access and poor internet, but I wouldn’t live anywhere else at this point in time.
I decided to stand for the local board because I felt I needed to take a turn. After working for 40 years in the community as a volunteer, paid worker, and running our own business, I think I have a pretty good idea of what the needs of this community are. We have an ageing population, more new families coming back to live, and our Māori population is coming home. This creates unique issues that need to be addressed for the health and wellbeing of our community.
Our environment needs a lot of work and if we want to preserve what we have here, we need to find ways to deal with the issues – rats and feral cats, weeds, our moana/sea, our birds, and all the little critters we can’t see. Environmental restoration is an ongoing process and I do believe it can be done even more, but not to the detriment of those living here. By this I mean the changing of regulations because of improvements made. This is shown in the rules, i.e. resource consent regulations.
My big dream is to see this island working together more at different levels so we can retain what we have. Working together to help the environment, working together to provide our own food, working together to deal with our changing population. We have seen pockets of this happening already with The Aotea Family Support Group, Aotea Army helping people who are ageing and struggling, the food resilience project, the Oruawharo environment group, the various clubs and sports groups etc. All the community groups that make living here so much easier and better. The world is changing and it is time to be more creative about how we live together. Maybe we can look at new ways.
I know bureaucracy is rampant and I know uncontrolled regulation is rampant. There is a sense of laziness in the bureaucracy that needs addressing. Six people coming from Auckland to respond to a complaint, invoices being charged extra because contractors can’t be bothered with the little person. All this gets in the way of us moving forward positively.
I don’t profess to have any answers. I am on a steep learning curve already by standing for the Local Board, but I love learning and that is the challenge. I just hope the legislation and policies are not so onerous that they can’t be challenged. My mission, should I be elected, is to find change.
Over the last two elections we have had awesome people on our local board and they have had the heart of the island and have done a tremendous job. If I am elected, I hope I can help find ways so that we can continue living here and continue improving things so that we can remain proud of being part of this community.
Aotea/Great Barrier Island is unique and there are some hard decisions to be made to maintain what we have, but the wellbeing of our local people has to be considered with every decision – whether it be transport, freight, the environment, funding, roads, unitary planning, resource consents, and on and on to everything pertaining to this island.
Listen: Aotea / Great Barrier Island Local Board hopeful Fenella Christian, along with fellow hopeful Ben Assado, speaks to Kathy Cumming on Aotea FM.
