Sandra Coney QSO

Best for the West

Current, three-term Regional Council representative for Waitakere, six years as Parks Chair. Will bring experience and understanding of Waitakere to Auckland Council. 

Will work with your Local Boards to keep the local voice heard in the “super city”. Wants a thriving region, which values its superb environment, harbours and coast, while building on its unique heritage. Will work for  public ownership of public assets, more jobs locally, transport where and when you need it, CCOs accountable to ratepayers, council costs under control. Will promote the West’s unique identity and culture.

Track record includes greatly expanding regional parks. Started cheap bach holidays  on parks for  families. Achieved modernised rail system. Has stuck up for local communities from Hobsonville to Huia.

 Continues the heritage of her father, Tom Pearce, a great lover of the West Coast. Family’s been at Piha for over 70 years.

 

Top 5 Issues

1. Local democracy - Keeping the local voice alive in a new large regional organisation. I will work with the two Local Boards to make sure we work as a team to get the best for Waitakere. The Local Boards are the eyes and ears of the community, and are the conduit for raising issues with Auckland Council. I will also work with local communities as I have for the past 9 years to make sure local communities define their futures.
   
   With my 9 years on the Auckland Regional Council, I also know how to work at the regional level, and I can bring that advantage to a role in the Auckland Council.
2. Making sure the public interest is foremost on Auckland Council. With a whole raft of govt-appointed CCOs with boards, it will be important they work within not against policies set by elected members. They will have to be monitored closely to see they don't start setting up their own empires and costly bureaucracies. I will also completely support public ownership of public assets such as parks, water, wastewater, art galleries and so on. While I was on the ARC we brought the Port company into 100% public ownership and I will continue to support that.
3. Looking after the environment. With the pace of development and poor practices in the past, Auckland has a big job to claw back the damage done in the past. We have to look after our waterways, harbours, lakes and beaches; we need clean air, and to reduce pollution.
   We have huge pest issues, from hard-to-control feral pigs in the Waitakeres, possum numbers creeping up, pest fish in some of our formerly pristine lakes, and rampant plant pest growth which threatens our native forests and wetlands. We need to tackle these collectively as agencies and communities to ensure we pass onto a grandchildren a healthy region.
4. Economic prosperity. Waitakere needs to provide more local jobs and the ARC has recently provided for that with Westgate and Hobsonville extensions of the MUL. The new Auckland Council will need to lead the way but it is important Waitakere benefits from regional projects, initiatives and events.
5. More parks! This has been one of my main missions on ARC. We need to buy for the future and to protect our fabulous coast. There is more pressure from growing sports and we need to encourage people into the outdoors and a healthy lifestyle. Parks are a real asset and our regional parks are one of the ways we make Auckland unique.
   
   If you want to know more about this go to www.piha.co.nz/bestwest

Personal Profile

I have lived in Auckland all my life, and my family has been based at Piha since my father fell in love with it aged 14, in 1927. Fortunately, when he met my mother, she did too. With the income from classes in short-hand typing my mother taught at Nightschool, they purchased several blocks of land containing some magnificent never-milled forest (and was cheap in the 1930s). In 1993, an arsonist who was operating in the area set fire to the ARC parkland next door and we lost a large area of our coastal. Since then, my partner Peter and I have been reforesting the area - fighting the gorse, growing plants from eco-sourced seeds, and generally caring for our land. We have made huge progress and enjoy this work very much. It's tough, hot and dirty, but you can hear the crashing surf, and the voices of surfers talking to each other drift up, the birds are coming back, the sunsets are magnificent, and back home we will have a big hot meal and share a bottle of wine.

Peter works in human rights in developing countries. My two sons are aged 47 and 40. The older has an art business and the younger works for a produce company.

I was educated at Auckland Girls' Grammar School and Auckland University where I studied latin, english, anthropology and history. I have written over 16 books on women's history, history of New Zealand, and women's health. I have worked as a free lance journalist, won various national awards for investigative journlism and for 16 years was weekly columnist for the Sunday-Star Times. For quite some years, I was NZ news correspondent for the UK medical journal The Lancet.

My latest book was a history of the Piha Surf Life Saving Club for their 75th called Piha Guardians of the Iron Sands. I did this as a voluntary contribution to the club and was chuffed that they awarded me a Special Service Award. My current writing projects are a monograph about an early painter on the West Coast of Auckland and a collective biography of the men from the Piha State Sawmill who went to WW1.

I have a long background in consumer matters in health including women's health. With Phillida Bunkle I co-wrote the Metro article that led to the Cervical Cancer Inquiry. Resulting from that was the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner, informed consent as a legal right, overhauls of ethcs, and the stablishment of the National Cervical Screening Programmes. With Phillida I cofounded the group Fertility Action which continues as Women's Health Action.