Stop the Stadium has a new president and a new mission, with major changes to the organisation following its annual meeting yesterday.
Full story: Dave Witherow is the new StS president
Stop the Stadium to target councillors
Sort the System!
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Sort the System! 
The ODT article neglected to say that the AGM did not vote on the future of STS – if any. Should it be wound up? Should it continue with a change of constitution to become an organisation devoted to voting pro-stadium councillors out at the next local body elections? (which is our new President’s vision). An extraordinary general meeting will be held after the decision on costs is received and all members will be sent discussion documents on the options.
Meg55 is Meg Davidson, bitter ex committee member, who has been going frantic today on various websites trying to put the boot into STS. What she is saying here, I really don’t know. There is no question that the decision to remorph is up to the membership. This was made crystal clear at the AGM. At the AGM Meg Davidson, her partner, Peter Entwisle, Rosemary McQueen and her husband Malcolm McQueen, Anne Elliot and two friends came with the resolve to wind up STS. They failed, but now seem intent on revisiting this issue at a general meeting to try again. They got no traction at the AGM because the overwhelming feeling was to try and do something new to bring accountability to council. These ex committee members filibustered with petty utterances which the meeting took offence to and were bored with. All familiar territory to those who know them. Most unbecoming of those whom Anne Elliot regards as the ‘intelligentsia’ of STS.
I hope you will do me the courtesy of letting me reply – something that has not always been forthcoming on this site.
My point, Peter, was simply that although it was made crystal clear at the AGM it wasn’t mentioned at all in the ODT article. That’s the only point I was making.
We did not come to the AGM ‘with a resolve to wind up STS’, simply to announce our intention to move that at a future general meeting, according to the constitution. Surely we’re within our rights as members to do that, even if it ‘bores’ others as you say.
Those who read your comments can judge for themselves who is petty and filibustering.
I have been wondering since I read yesterday’s article about Stop the Stadium is targeting councillors – does that include Mayor Peter Chin as well?
Your close friend, Malcolm McQueen, desired to move at the outset of the AGM to wind up STS. There were clearly others, a majority, who wanted to do something different with STS after seeing what the members wanted to do. People are free now to hand in their resignations if they want STS to wind up. What you and your friends are doing is CAMPAIGNING for this, to scuttle STS, and to prevent others from pursuing an alternative option.
You are the person who went to the ODT last year about a personal e-mail from ONE committee member. You were offended by this e-mail and decided to do damage by dumping on STS as an organisation set up to stop the stadium. It is clear you and your friends are still approaching the ODT with your “concerns” in order to create trouble. The clear feeling at the meeting was that people wanted STS to continue. You are miffed by this because it did not fit your agenda as stated by Malcolm McQueen. Don’t pretend you are so “concerned” you want to stay in there to “help” us to wind up. You have allowed your own hurt, from being asked to resign from the committee last year, along with your friends because of major differences, to carry out a revengeful campaign which is now underway. You are brewing on your own hurt and not the wider good that may come from having a morphed STS. You and your friends, including Elizabeth Kerr have expressed your strong dislike for us by posting vengeful comments on another website. You note we have not responded on that site in kind.
A point about filibustering. While on the committee you and your girlfriends employed the constant tactic of raising points of order over trivial matters instead of getting on with the strategies to discuss to stop the stadium. Like at the AGM you like to pour over constitutions and rules instead of actually doing something. The majority of the committee got fed up with this. The final straw of course was your group’s private approach to some STS members for money to employ a planner, Boulder, at the plan change hearings. This was done after a majority on the committee decided that such a use of money (a $9000 estimate from Planit, another planner earlier approached) was a waste at this point and would achieve nothing. Subsequently we were proved right. If we had gone with this approach STS would have been behind financially at a very early stage in our campaign. It is time you and your girlfriends moved on, Meg.
Oh, goodness me. Peter, to put any extraordinary motions (meaning, for example to wind up a society or change its aims) to the members of an organisation one must advertise ones intentions. This is so all members who might have an interest in the nature of the society have the opportunity of having a say. This is why the motion that Dave Witherow proposed at the AGM could not be put. This is why Malcolm wanted the motion that he is proposing as an option for the future of the society to be notified along with Dave’s at the special meeting that will be called after the costs decision is made (whose outcome might make this discussion entirely unnecessary).
It’s time to stop attacking personalities – both within & outside StS. In fact there never was a time when personalities should have come under attack and perhaps that StS inveighed as much as did against its own members & the councillors is the reason that StS failed in the one and only aim that united all 1500 members.
Rosemary
Dave did not put any motion forward at the AGM. Your husband Malcolm could have expressed his intentions of wanting to wind up STS without standing and holding the floor for such a long time. Malcolm was deliberately filibustering with you feeding him comments. You may recall a person in the audience pointed this out about him taking the floor for so long.
I have not attacked personalities in the above post, merely recalled some past history which puts your collective actions in perspective. You will also note my comment above where I point out that we have not entered the’ What if’ website as we find it too abusive and indeed defamatory. Readers, if they can be bothered, can trawl through the site to see for themselves. One of the nastiest commentators has been Elizabeth Kerr, co author of the site who often gets her facts completely wrong. What is her history on other committees?
United comment? The only disunity has been disgruntled ex committee members like yourself and a few friends like Polly Mason and Sue Adams. Note we have had only six resignations one of which was Elizabeth Kerr.
Peter, do feel free to comment at What if? Stadium of Dunedin… your friendly community blog at a computer near you.
Peter, I’m sorry to have to engage you point by point on this sustained personal attack. You are fighting an enemy that simply isn’t there. Your diatribe more than anything reinforces the tendency of the STS executive to play the man, not the ball. This is the very reason I’m not keen to see STS continue as an anti-councillor group.
1. Malcolm McQueen did not ‘desire to move at the outset of the AGM to wind up STS’. At the start of the meeting he alerted the chair that in the General Business part of the agenda he intended to FORESHADOW his intention to call a general meeting at a later date to discuss a motion to wind STS up. The constitution does not allow resolutions to be made at a general meeting unless they are on the agenda for that meeting, and no agenda of any sort had been notified prior to the AGM.
2. “What you and your friends are doing is ‘campaigning’” … I am not sure what you mean by campaigning, but whatever it is, there isn’t any prohibition against it under the constitution. If ten members call for a general meeting to vote on any motion, the executive must call the meeting and name the business to be transacted.
3. Our plan, according to you, to ‘scuttle STS and prevent others from pursuing an alternative course of action’. The constitution provides for a democratic process that does not prevent members doing anything, providing they get a two-thirds majority at a general meeting. If you want to change the constitution and ‘morph’ STS, you need that majority. If we want to wind up STS, we need the majority.
4. I did not ‘go to’ the ODT last year with a personal email.
5. The email you refer to was from one committee member but it was circulated to the whole committee. It was one of many such emails circulated in this way which could only be described as hate mail. I asked Bev Butler as chair several times to stop the harassment but she did nothing. On the morning I resigned she told me it was not her job to stop the emails. I also received abusive and defamatory emails from you around this time.
6. I have NEVER ‘approached the ODT’ for any reason relating to STS.
7. “The clear feeling at the meeting was that people wanted STS to continue”. It may have been but since it was not put to the vote we don’t know.
8. “Don’t pretend you are so “concerned” you want to stay in there to “help” us to wind up.” I’m not pretending anything. Why you have put those words into my mouth is a mystery to me. I have not uttered those words.
9. “You have allowed your own hurt…to carry out a revengeful campaign.” The way I was treated by the committee last year was very hurtful, that I do not deny. To construe all my actions since then as ‘revengeful’ (sic), however, is a construction that I disagree with. As an ordinary member I applaud the work STS has done which forward its sole aim of stopping the stadium and have supported those actions. I have questioned the committee’s confrontational style because I believed it was behind STS’s lack of headway in swaying councillors. I have tried to rise above personalities and to concentrate on the organisation’s goal of stopping the stadium. It appears, however, that the committee has not.
10. “…the wider good that may come from having a morphed STS” .If I thought any wider good would come from STS ‘morphing’ into an anti-councillor group I would support it.
11. “… have expressed your strong dislike for us by posting vengeful comments” My comments have not been ‘vengeful’. They reflect dislike not for members of the committee, but for attitudes and behaviour which I believe are detrimental to STS. This has rarely been expressed publicly until now because despite what you maintain I did not want to destabilise STS while it had a chance of stopping the stadium.
12. “Filibustering” at committee meetings. We are going back nine months here. It’s old history. Constitutions, rules and meeting procedure are there to ensure the fair transaction of business. If anyone raised points of order at committee meetings it was for that reason. The ‘rest of the committee’ perhaps would have been better to abide by the rules.
13. The ‘final straw’ – the private initiative of some of us to hire a planner. This was taken quite independently of STS and did not entail STS funds. It is the right of STS members to use their own money any way they like. It’s outrageous this was thought to be enough of a betrayal to force executive members to resign.
Please, Peter, can we all move on now. Unless of course you have some hard evidence you want to bring forward.
Being at the AGM I did not see evidence of a plan to target personalities / counsellors by means of any nasty personal attacks.
But there IS an intent to hold personalities / counsellors accountable at the ballot box for what they did. This is very much different from orchestrating a witch hunt, as I am sure all will agree.
A number of Dunedin counsellors & Mayor cynically steamed ahead with plans they knew were unpopular. Q: Why would they – how could they – dare this???
A: Because they thought they could repent at leisure and bygones will be bygones come the election.
Preventing the re-election of these ACCOUNTABLE INDIVIDUALS would be a good STS achievement. But failing to do so will mean a total failure of the STS.
I think Peter A must mean ‘pore’ not ‘pour.’
I note that Peter’s posting is entirely from his own unique perspective. I certainly feel no hurt, hence feel no urge to seek vengeance on anyone. All I ask for is rational debate, not debate based on mistaken beliefs however firmly they are held.
One fresh mistaken belief is that I have contacted the ODT. I have approached no-one. The ODT rang me and I had a conversation that was entirely neutral and represented my non-vengeful thoughts.
I did not attend the AGM unfortunately. However, the distinct impression I get from the above e-mails is of a bunch of petulant two-year-olds fighting over buckets and spades in a sandpit. Personally, I do not give a toss about who did what to whom and the injuries imagined-or-not suffered by the likes of Meg, Entwhistle, Elizabeth and Co. That is ancient history and I just wish they would shut up and pull together with everyone else. Are they really so malicious that they are willing to destroy an organisation in order to push a personal barrow? Let the majority listen to all the ideas and democratically decide where we go from here. GROW UP!
Pat
“Let the majority listen to all the ideas and democratically decide where we go from here.”
Great idea Pat. I will be happy to do that.
Anne Elliot,
It would seem prudent – IF procedures and the wellbeing of the organisation you belong to etc. is something you care passionately about – to forego the opportunity to report to the ODT on a members-only AGM if they phone you.
Journalists are not friends, no matter how much we feel it would help to get stuff off our chest.
PeteR
Phew, hasn’t this stirred up a hornet’s nest of self justification! As I said all the evidence of a nasty, vengeful campaign is contained on the ‘What if’ website. We have never entered into it for that reason. The site is fine when it is actually debating something, without being personal, but it inevitably veers on to this track when there is some news about STS where a dig can be made. And these are people who claim to be anti stadium!I Note the comment by David on What if who provides rational comments and useful information when he recently described the site as descending into vengefulness and hatred after particularly nasty comments about Bev that were, of course, allowed to be posted by Elizabeth Kerr and Paul le Comte. I note Calvin Oaten’s comments along the same lines. These are two people who are able to debate without getting personal.
You have approached the ODT and been more than willing to talk about internal matters. See ODT reports.
The private initiative to do your own thing re the plan change hearing was not objected to if you wanted to waste your own money. We objected because you went behind our backs and asked people from the membership. That is money asked for your private initiative, donations which could have been more wisely spent when they were really needed.
I find all this mildly amusing; if only you lot had put this much energy into ‘stopping the stadium’!
To think that only a couple of days ago Pat McCarty was complaining about the poor spelling, juvenile and non-constructive comments of stadium supporters on this website providing her with a source of amusement! Brilliant!!
Peter. You really must take a break, think about happier things. It’s Spring after all.
Anne
Unconvincing rebuttal. In today’s paper you say Dave Witherow’s mission seems to be getting Bev Butler on council. Firstly, she is far from convinced that the council is the place she wants to be. You seem to have some psychic knowledge of her future intentions of which she doesn’t have herself. Secondly, if your hunch was correct, so what? Also why would a “new STS” want to put all its eggs in one candidate? You clearly don’t want this to happen. Fair enough, but why make this point in the context of what has just happened at the AGM with your move to close STS down? Your comment in the ODT is clearly a personal one where you are saying “I don’t want this to happen”.
BTW I was looking in your direction when Bev announced at the AGM she was not seeking nomination. Meg looked surprised and I saw you mouth, YEEEEES. Not vengeful in some way?
Don’t worry about me Elizabeth. I’d worry more about your own part in this sorry stadium saga and how bad karma rebounds on one when they go too far.
Watch this Peter, enjoy spring.
http://www.ch9.co.nz/node/12506
WOW! And I thought I had it hard for twenty odd years bringing up three children. I am now exhausted, so will take my frazzled old self off to bed. JEEZ!
I agree with you Calvin. It was all getting ridiculously childish and does none of us any credit.
Put the magnifying glass to yourself, Elizabeth. Actions speak louder than words.
Hi Matty,
Did I hit a nerve?
Pat
Indeed, the one that revels in the ironically bad-timing of your comment a few days ago:
“..’supporters’ of ‘Farry’s Playground’…are barely able to cobble together letters that are cogent, literate and without many spelling errors. As such, they are unintentionally humorous but cannot expect to be taken seriously as informed comment.”
Fortunately STS members, past and present, make their views known with a high level of intelligence, maturity, and clarity – see above!!
I think we have hit a few nerves on this thread, Pat.
Hi Pete,
It is always a pleasure to communicate with someone who is sane. Alas, I seem to have rattled an obsessive, frequent writer’s cage.
There seems to be a few malcontents with huge planks on their shoulders. Their daily rantings can only mean they must sit for hours on end, festering over their PC’s, awaiting any opportunity to fire pot shots at any STS supporter who ventures to put his/her head above the parapet. Fortunately, their ammunition isn’t all that good.
Instead of getting their knickers in a twist when they think their dignity is being pricked, maybe they should go outside for some fresh air, chill out and lighten up a bit.
Pat
Hi Pat
Couldn’t agree more. It is a sad indictment on people who can’t acknowledge that other people have VOLUNTEERED their OWN time and money for a cause, trying to do their best, using all avenues possible, to fight an injustice like the stadium. The malcontents you refer to have done their ‘anti stadium’ bit by slagging us on websites and bitching around our small town. I thought it was rather churlish for Malcolm McQueen at the AGM to slag our efforts. He even put down the town hall meeting, where 1800 attended, as a wasted effort. Trying telling that to the people who attended and to our prominent speakers. We thought that meeting was going to be a turning point against the stadium as filling the town hall for such a meeting was unprecedented. Unfortunately it was not, but the point is we TRIED.