BRIEFCASE: How the AA can save Wellington, and more

For a long time it was believed that the only living survivors on the planet after a nuclear war would be cockroaches. That is not entirely true.

There would also be parking wardens and perhaps also Cleveland’s Castro brothers. Now the Automobile Association, at long last you might think, has decided it will fight the frivolous fines imposed by parking attendants and it's going to start with the “dying capital city”. 

Taking on parking wardens has always been close to my heart. During the reign of Mayor Blumsky I acted for a senior police officer who objected to the new coupon parking scheme. We found it had been unlawfully introduced and that the signage was equally unlawful.

It was a headline-grabbing win that cost the city’s ratepayers, myself included, a deal of money to fix. But the point is we bloodied the parking authorities and the bloody councillors who empower them. It was, if you like, for the Greater Good.

It is truly welcome news that the AA is going to fight potentially hundreds of frivolous cases against the parking warden madness, which is also helping to kill the dying city’s inner city business.

Many regard parking wardens as “only doing their job”, which is the same excuse that could be said for death camp commandants and North Korean torturers.

With some imagination, largely lacking in Wellington’s brain-dead council chamber where the time-servers sit, they could also earmark wardens for paintball shooting or some other recreational activity that could reinvigorate the inner city with some healthy sport.

However, the city's bike-riding mayor hates vehicles and will do anything to rid the city of them. There is some merit to that with appropriate planning, but it is driven by Green-envy rather than grey matter.

Anyone who bikes to the airport to meet Hillary Clinton, rather than expending the same energy on having the airport actually fly to places that people want to go rather than Auckland and Sydney, would be very helpful for the region and may lift the city from its apparent death bed.

Just how the AA scheme evolves will be interesting to see. Michael Reed QC used to represent the association, as I recall, and whether he can remove himself from his pet dog practice to protect motorists is an open question.

Accident prone president

John Marshall QC, former NZLS president, assumed the role as chairman of the Transport Accident Investigation Commission in 2010 after his term at the helm of the Law Society.

Since then he has truly had his hands full with one serious accident after another: the Rena grounding, the Carterton balloon tragedy, the Fox Glacier plane crash and the sinking of the Easy Rider in Fouveau Strait.

It must surely have crossed his mind to step aside in the safety interests of all of us. 

Disappearing law firms

As small firms continue to emerge on the local scene, the latest being Hamilton’s Davidson Twaddle Isaac, with former lawyers from Harkness Henry and McCaw Lewis Chapman, along with Wellington’s employment boutique Dundas Street Law, formed buy Susan Hornsby-Geluk, Dale Lloyd Law in Queenstown and the expansion of Wellington practice Greenwood Roche Chisnall and Hamilton’s Tomkins Wake into Auckland.

A dire warning for the demise of up to 8000 firms internationally has been sounded by British banker and professionals services consultant John Llewellyn-Lloyd when he spoke to a law conference this week.

He predicted the merger or disappearance based on the fact that there are just too many firms – 20 times more law firms than accounting firms, for instance.

John Bowie is publisher of LawFuel