Brian Anderson The Western Front www.sunlive.co.nz

The Global Financial Crisis is a crisis of confidence and a growing distrust of the way money is being massaged and shared around the world. Inequities have become more obvious as new communication technology has allowed the news to be instant and is revealing the games that our leaders are playing and the increasing gap between rich and poor.

The worldwide protest movements have a common theme of people standing up for democratic ideals which they believe are being misused against them. Our democracies have relied on faith, believing the leaders we have elected will be acting in our best interests, but ‘news as it happens', and the social media have been revealing ugly pictures of self serving politicians and their fragile financial systems.

Low voter turnouts in elections is not apathy, but is a sign of the public's increasing lack of trust in their leaders and the system. People are using the new smart-phone technology to join together and these groups are watching and openly questioning the politicians. These new social media communities are being heard in every country, in New Zealand and certainly in Western Bay of Plenty.

Patterns of protest have changed. In Egypt, a regime is overthrown, the army takes over, but its right to rule indiscriminately is rejected and even Muslim extremists who might have moved into a power vacuum have been openly rebuffed. One night on BBC News, a reporter and crew were on a Syrian government sponsored tour when a man slipped a note into a cameraman's hands. It explained that the rest of the public and the dissenters were being held back by the army a block away and continued, ‘Don't worry. The cell phone is our weapon'.

The locals were in constant communication and though the government wanted to hide the truth, all would be revealed. Authorities in England were staggered by the seeming organisation and coordination of the riots across the country a few months ago. They couldn't find any leaders to blame. The public is claiming the new media and the new media is making the news.

The changes are evident in New Zealand. News clips here enjoy reporting the embarrassment of individuals who have caught themselves out on Facebook or Twitter, but more serious implementation of the new technology is not being recognised. A friend of mine today expressed disgust that his son, who had voted for the first time, had voted for the Greens. He exclaimed that his son knew nothing about politics, but he had made his decision by spending a week talking with his friends on his iphone. Rob Muldoon did not feel threatened when Labour proposed that the voting age be lowered to 18. He knew that then children up to the age of 21 followed their parents' voting patterns. Today, the 18 to 24 year olds are more likely to be voting with their peers for isolated causes.
As with much of our society today, everything for them is black, white or whatever. The increase in the Green vote is not because of its policy for forming a government. It boasted that it never had one. The young vote went for what one commentator called ‘sound bites'.

What is more of a worry locally is the total inability of Western Bay to address the problems of communication and consultation with the people. The council's new paper on consultation outlines how the council is cutting back on consultation to small groups of stakeholders and phone polling a handful of residents. I took a call on the weekend from an irate Katikati resident reporting that he felt there was some conspiracy in a telephone poll from the Western Bay District Council. As a person over 60, he was not allowed to take part in the survey. By coincidence, I had also been called and I was able to give him answers, but the answers I had did nothing to make either of us feel confident of our local body communication and consultation process.

When I was rung for the poll, when I was told that I was over 60 and my opinions were not wanted, I checked and found that the allocated number of people in the over 60s had already been exceeded and the extra opinions had been accepted because of the insistence of some very irate oldies. The other decade categories were about half to two thirds full, but they had not been able to contact a single person in the 18 to 29 year old age group. I asked how many were in each group and their problem started to come clear. Katikati has a strange demographic profile and the weightings for the survey were wrong. About 40 per cent of Katikati voters are over 60 and most of the 18 to 29 ‘residents' have left town for tertiary training or work. Most of the people I know of this age group don't have a line rental phone, they have a cell phone and could never have taken part in the survey.

With WBOPDistrict Council's recent increase in the number of confidential workshops and with the restrictive community consultation guidelines, the council is doing a fair imitation of the Syrian Government. Censorship of letters to the editor and claims of secrecy because of commercial sensitivity do not offer any confidence that the council even understands the new social media society, let alone the new local government requirements for transparency and accountability. It does not want to embrace the new technology, it is running from it. Since I started to write this week's column, I have had two more calls from irate residents complaining about the poll. It is about time council opened their meetings, opened the books and opened their minds.