Steps Towards 15 Minute Smart Cities in NZ

Council coercion - understand their methods, do not comply: stop the creep towards totalitarianism.

“Residents urged to check for recycling alerts!” Shouted my local newspaper headline a couple of years ago.

Strange, I thought, are our Council - which we are paying $millions to every year for next-to-zero services (not even a general rubbish collection - I kid you not!), not printing our one-page ‘collection calendars’ anymore? Not even in black and white?

Of course not. That’s another ‘Nudge’ from the Mindspace and Corporate Playbook: “It’s Free! It’s Easy!” to download the App, and sacrifice your personal data - address, social media profile, photos, DOB, job, income, etc etc. in exchange for an “oh so convenient” online facility. As Bob Moran’s genius so clearly illustrates:

So let me take you down this rabbit-hole for a few minutes to show what this actually looks like on a local level. Because, as we know, the future is local. And when we know the pitfalls on a local level that can overturn the methods used to make us comply with the tyranny, we can avoid the coercion and propaganda, and help others to, too.

***this post is slightly too long for an email but I needed to keep whole - please click on the title to read the whole thing, share and comment, thanks***

The idiocy of 15 min ‘smart’ cities in NZ

New Zealand doesn’t really lend itself to the UN/WEF 15 Minute ‘Smart’ City Agenda. We live in mostly rural, small and isolated settlements, with a sparse population over diverse landscapes. We’ve ‘grown up’ with agricultural vehicles and old cars - often multiple vehicles in one household - because public transport simply doesn’t really exist here. It’s not that it’s not wanted, it’s just unsustainable to run a bus service when there’s only one passenger and many kms between settlements. And what’s left of our railway infrastructure after its systematic dismantlement in the 1950s is only used for (diminishing amounts of) freight. Oh, and the odd quirky tourist adventure:

Remaining old tracks used by repurposed golf-buggies for sightseeing trips through isolated areas of New Zealand

To investigate just one element of this Kiwi phenomena of no-public-transport, see the controversy about the empty, time-consuming, expensive and unsafe train service between the (relatively urban) cities of Hamilton and Auckland - $millions invested, with very limited success for commuters. The PR works if you’re a pensioner of course; you get to travel free. Mindsets here are very much embedded in the Drive-Thru American’s car-centric way of life, even a 5 min walk is often avoided by my fellow Kiwis in favour of getting in their cars. But nonetheless (or maybe because of this lack of public transport?) the 15 min ‘smart’ cities agenda apparently seemed like a great idea for those in positions of power, and they are pressing ahead regardless. Including the ‘Managed Retreat’ that hopes to force the relocation of those living in coast areas, into these urban communities ghettos.

So how did this idea get off the ground in New Zealand, and where are we now? More importantly, how can we STOP IT?

How it started

I’ve written a post recently about the Waikato Wellbeing Launch event, the contrived, cringeworthy, scripted launch of the UN SDGs in our area, headed by a ‘flying visit’ from our PM at the time, Jacinda ‘Jackboot’ Ardern. You can read the summary of that Waikato Wellbeing event held on 14th Feb 2020, here:

Looking back, that was my colleagues’ indoctrination into the cult. The cult of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda, including the 15 Minute Cities project within New Zealand’s ‘Golden Triangle’ of industrial/retail hub. Of course it started long before then, but this was the most explicit ‘launch’.

This event - and many others like it - was heavily supported by all the usual inter/national suspects providing funding and freebies and ‘networking opportunities’ for participants. The University of Waikato based nearby probably supplied the required academic support in ways that - as I’ve published about here - control the narrative.

Of course all those participants were ‘by invitation only’ (I probably got invited by mistake!) - politicians, public sector managers, Mayors, PPP CEOs and entrepreneurs. As I wrote about in my SubStack post linked above, any dissent from the narrative from ‘us experts’ was quickly sidestepped and silenced during the rare ‘Q&A’. It was a slick operation, surrounded by legacy media cameras and corporate shills; selfies were taken and glossy brochures were flipped-through over the delectable catering and prosecco flutes. Boosting people’s egos is such an easy way to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Antenno App and Datacom

To get back to the recycling calendar issue, we are encouraged by our council (through expensive adverts in the legacy media that help keep them afloat) to download the Antenno App, owned by Datacom Ltd, an Australasian BigTech firm, specialising in cloud-based data collection and surveillance. These kinds of Apps for public services we can equate to a self-service till at a supermarket, or a digital reader in the local library: these Apps take real jobs away from real people and put AI and cloud data in control. So no. No thanks.

But there are powerful global forces driving these companies’ actions, as the Datacom website explains:

Councils hold a vast range of data on licences and permits (for example, food, swimming pools, trade waste, outdoor dining), applications for development approval, property attributes, parking, valuations, requests for services and rating information, events, library services, geospatial, and assets (roads, pipes, sewerage, parks, community halls).

But currently, this data is often hard to access. It may be locked up in legacy (ageing) systems, making integration a time-consuming and expensive proposition.

If data was unlocked, it could be linked to other available data obtained on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, for example, such as information about real estate, travel, police, fire and health services, schools, social media sources, and the environment. (my emphasis)

So, this sector is growing like a turbo cancer. No wonder they need all these 5G towers everywhere as you can see from this diagram of a neighbourhood they serve exploit:

Above and Below Quote: from their website:

Our customers span industries from international cloud and telco providers right through to government departments, enterprise companies, major banks, other financial organisations, and a range of IT service providers. (my emphasis)

So they are going to link this App to our bank/credit facilities? In terms of the Antenno App, I suspect their business model simplified goes a bit like this: parts of the ‘smart city ecosystem’ like Councils, pay a subscription that encourages (or rather ‘nudges’) ratepayers to download their ‘Free’ App so that residents can find out when our recycling service is due, report a burst watermain, complain about dumped rubbish, pay a bill, etc. Councils are contractually obliged to promote the App through all its outputs.

Seems oh so convenient, right?

But when we read the T&Cs of the App, we learn that (unsurprisingly) our privacy isn’t totally protected. Datacom reserve the right to collect and store all kinds of information, even three months after you decide to delete it…eg:

Intrigued by this manipulation of my fellow Kiwis by our own Council, I dug further.

Follow the Money

Initially I suspected Council was receiving ‘kickbacks’ from Datacom, for promoting the use of their services and allowing the harvesting of their ratepayers’ personal data. After all, NZ councils have serious levels of increasing debt.

I was wrong.

I was assured by our Council (Ref CRLG00003/24) that Datacom are only a creditor, not a provider to council funds. OK then, how MUCH of a creditor?

Firstly, there is a cost of the ‘free’ App that no ratepayer asked for or needs - not insignificant at $1615.15 + GST per month ($22k p/a). Then there’s the other services that Datacom provide, ambiguously defined (because, yup, you guessed it, ‘commercially sensitive’ in this OIA response (Ref CRLG00047/24) as ‘Roading’, ‘Community’, IT and ‘Waters’.

So that’s a total of $1.2million per annum (that we know of) that goes from our rates, to Datacom, so that Datacom can use our personal data to enforce the surveillance, propaganda, censorship and control mechanisms, that progress the unethical, unsustainable and illogical, Globocap 15 Minute Cities Agenda. That’s cameras for facial recognition and regos, water meter calculations, location and photo data and so on. And this is just one of many councils throughout Australia and New Zealand. (more on that in another post)

Q: How much money is this company making from harvesting and sharing personal information from millions of everyday Kiwis?

• I don’t remember voting for this type of BigTech control?

• I don’t remember our councillors or Mayor asking whether we wanted this BigTech control?

• I don’t remember agreeing to pay this hard-earned, tax-paid income going to these BigTech companies that are exploiting us without our informed consent?

Personal Data Exploited

Finally, I was told as part of that same Official Information Act response, that there are three contracts currently with Datacom:

Antenno Covid Implementation {oh dear} & Antenno Implementation Guide {implementation of what?}

Both the above were withheld because (and that’s why PPPs are so useful to our tyrannical governments, globally) the details are ‘commercially sensitive’. Indeed.

The third contract, although redacted, did include some insightful information about the data harvesting storage and ownership:

What are these ‘reasonable purposes’ for use of any content that citizens allow Datacom to use as a result of using the App? Who defines that phrase and what conflicts of interest do they hold?

And when the sh*t hits the fan, and the (broken) privacy laws are breached and our data is exploited for God-knows-what, who is liable for any consequences…?

I don’t suppose lack of liability should be a surprise to anyone at this stage of the psyops war on us citizens, but it’s worth highlighting to those still using these Apps. Please STOP NOW! That includes the NZ Manage MyHealth App which harvests your clinical records and the same in the NHS, more on that from Deb at UKColumn here. These BigTech and impact investment firms do not deserve your personal information, and they certainly don’t deserve it when they use it against us.

I’ve written before about the harvesting of Metadata that feeds the impact investment machinery like Legatum. For example, see one of my posts here, or for more indepth research in this area, I highly recommend the work of Alison Hawver McDowell at a Wrench in the Gears for all stuff uncovering Tech Empire Building and Transhumanism.

And after that reality check, let’s look finally at who signed this agreement with our Council:

It’s no surprise that Mark Matijevic, Datacom’s Director, is a long-term big fan of Smart Cities.

And in this 2019 article about his company’s plans to take over the world, Mark Matijevic said:

“One of my whole dreams for this was to create an ecosystem for a smart city. The key issue with most of the solutions in the market at the moment is they have no connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, social media, any of those nice things because they were built twenty years ago. With our solution [Antenno] it is built with that in mind.” Matijevic said Datascape has around 30,000 APIs (application programming interfaces) right now allowing it to integrate with all sorts of other systems and be the centre-piece of a smart city. One council customer, for instance, is installing sensors on its bins so they can request to be emptied. “Smart cites have been around for a while and there are lots of sensors out there, but none of them truly connect to the ERP, which is truly where everything is auditable, maintained and linked to all the other parts of the system.” (my emphasis)

Be under no illusion. This is more sinister than a bin being able to tell a contractor that it needs emptying. This is about the Internet of Things becoming a reality and controlling our everyday freedoms.

Summing up

We don’t trust our Governments, so why would we trust our Councils? Some excellent progress has been made in standing up against this local bureaucracy in Australia, New Zealand and the UK for example, that has been captured by the globalist agendas - maybe some of them, unwittingly.

Here’s a graphic I created to show the steps I’ve written about here, from the erosion of our democratic rights, through these Council Apps to progress a totalitarian ‘Smart’ city - it’s a work in progress:

In conclusion, these BigTech companies like Datacom have captured our local Councils and are exploiting our money and data for their own nefarious purposes. The NZ Nudge Unit are working hard to manipulate our behaviours - ignoring the root cause of any problems, like lack recycling provision in NZ. Their actions in turn, feeds the evil UN/WHO Agenda 2030, including the nonsensical ‘15 min Smart Cities’ agenda.

How to stop it? Simple! Delete the App. Encourage others to do the same. Let’s go back to making ‘phone calls to our council, let’s even go see our councillors face-to-face (some of them are lovely people)! Let’s have hard copy recycle calendars that we stuck on our fridge doors - was there anything wrong with any of that? Let’s stop snitching on our neighbours and encourage more community love and cooperation.

Do you have the Council App Antenno owned by Datacom or something similar in your area? Please comment below and let’s widen the conversation and learn more about the methods of coercion from councils. Let’s take back control of the councils that we fund.