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10 Wednesday <strong>January</strong> <strong>30</strong> <strong>2019</strong><br />
Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi<br />
Our People<br />
SELWYN TIMES<br />
ECan chair not frightened by time<br />
•From page 9<br />
So the role for me has been one<br />
of managing the council back<br />
to full democracy, which will<br />
take place in October. A thing I<br />
have been keen to do is see that<br />
climate change becomes front<br />
and central of ECan’s thinking.<br />
That has come about with the<br />
newly-elected people who arrived<br />
on council in 2016, they have<br />
made a huge difference.<br />
What did you learn from your<br />
travelling experiences?<br />
I feel sometimes that all the<br />
roads I have travelled have led<br />
to this point. So I have a huge<br />
amount of experience of the<br />
world at large and of different<br />
kinds of people and how to deal<br />
with them. I find all the skills I<br />
learnt while travelling fit me very<br />
well for the role of managing<br />
a great number of people who<br />
have very different and distinct<br />
interests. It is really about people.<br />
A Maori proverb that helps to<br />
describe me politically is – He<br />
aha te mea nui o te ao He tangata,<br />
he tangata, he tangata. What is<br />
the most important thing in the<br />
world? It is the people, it is the<br />
people, it is the people. People are<br />
the same everywhere all around<br />
the world, it doesn’t matter if<br />
you meet an Indian on the banks<br />
of the Amazon River or an<br />
TALENT: Steve Lowndes has a love of art, especially painting.<br />
American senator, we all laugh,<br />
we all cry, we all smile. It’s the<br />
universality of people. We are all<br />
the same species.<br />
How does living in England<br />
compare to living in New<br />
Zealand?<br />
I have been here for 40 years,<br />
my immediate family in England<br />
has died, I have a few cousins<br />
left, I write to them. England<br />
is about the same size, but the<br />
population of New Zealand is<br />
what the population of England<br />
was at the time of Henry VIII.<br />
Now you have to imagine the<br />
same land mass, with nearly 60<br />
million people. It is nothing like<br />
New Zealand. Last week, Sue and<br />
I went to Jackson’s Bay, down<br />
south. We stayed in a bach which<br />
had no power, no connectivity.<br />
When you walked to the beach,<br />
there are no other houses, and<br />
there is an absolutely stunning<br />
empty landscape of mountains,<br />
oceans, beaches. You would<br />
have to go a long way in Britain<br />
to find that, maybe in the north<br />
of Scotland. It’s a completely<br />
different experience living<br />
here. It is one where we relate<br />
very much to the land. At the<br />
moment with Brexit, the English<br />
have got themselves into a cleft<br />
stick. They have this incredibly<br />
binary situation to deal with,<br />
half of them think they should<br />
stay in the common market and<br />
fight and the other half thinks<br />
they should flee. Human beings<br />
always have that decision, when<br />
confronted with a situation, fight<br />
or flight. It’s such a basic division<br />
in our minds, I think that is<br />
basically what is happening<br />
with Brexit. So, I don’t envy the<br />
English at all. I can’t even begin<br />
to contemplate how I feel about<br />
England anymore, because it<br />
seems to belong to another era.<br />
In the future when climate<br />
change really begins to kick in,<br />
New Zealand is wonderfully<br />
placed to survive the worst<br />
effects. We are surrounded by<br />
ocean which takes away the<br />
worst effects of heat, we can feed<br />
ourselves, Australia can’t, Europe<br />
can’t, 90 per cent of the world’s<br />
population lives in the Northern<br />
Hemisphere.<br />
Tell me about your<br />
family?<br />
Julian, my son, works for<br />
Skope, a Christchurch company<br />
that makes refrigerators. He<br />
manages their operations in<br />
Australia. He has a son, who is<br />
6-months-old. Alicia works for<br />
an advertising agency called The<br />
Monkeys, living in Melbourne<br />
but she is going to come back<br />
to New Zealand. She managed<br />
to buy a third of a house in<br />
Auckland in Pt Chevalier she’s<br />
going to come back next month.<br />
I am looking forward to her<br />
coming back. My partner Sue’s<br />
daughter Evie also lives in Pt<br />
Chevalier, so those two are very<br />
close.<br />
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