This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
We’re not meant to know it yet, but the City Rail Link is scheduled to open this time next year. While 2026 was announced as the year some time ago, a more precise target date has never been publicly identified.
Many pundits have assumed this means the date will be late in the year. But that’s wrong.
The target date was inadvertently revealed at a meeting of Auckland Council’s transport, resilience and infrastructure committee on Thursday, when councillors Chris Darby and Andy Baker gave the game away. Darby is a council rep on the Auckland Transport board and Baker chairs the committee. Both are privy to confidential information about the opening date.
In a discussion about progress with the City Rail Link (CRL), Darby said, “This time next year, that project will be singing to Aucklanders.” Then he qualified it slightly. “About this time next year.”
Baker followed up with a slightly sheepish, “There you are, you heard the date here first.” Which confirmed it. Let’s call it autumn.
The reason for the reticence, KiwiRail executive Jo Reeves told me a while back, is that there are so many uncertainties they just can’t say for sure. They don’t want to give a date because if they can’t stick to it they’ll be criticised.
“In Sydney, they didn’t announce the opening date of the new Metro line until three weeks before the event,” she said, “and even then they had to change it.”
Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson has finally announced a decision she says she made “a long time ago”: she is not running for mayor.
Instead, she will join Mayor Wayne Brown on a Fix Auckland ticket, and they hope other candidates for council will want to join them.
Why the change of heart? Simpson has told many people how hard it is to work with Brown. She’s also been quite open in wishing the city had a mayor who was less of a grumpy guy and more of a champion.
By yesterday, she had found a different way to describe him.
“He’s a rough diamond,” she told media assembled for the announcement. “More rough than diamond, I suppose. I’m the diamond.”
Simpson spoke at length of her admiration for Brown’s achievements, especially in setting up the Auckland Future Fund, getting a better return from the port and driving a reduction of costs.
Both said they formed a complementary team. “Desley is interested in the arts, which I’m not,” said the mayor, “and I’m interested in infrastructure.”
Was that an example of one of the problems she’s been grappling with these past two-and-a-half years: that he’s patronising?
I asked Simpson that, and she said he was not patronising, but his language is not refined.
Brown then gave an example of his lack of interest in the arts: just recently he had voted against funding for Q Theatre.
“That was in a confidential session!” said Simpson, punching him lightly on the arm.
Brown said he would not be standing again after this election. “This will be my last term.”
While the CRL is on track for an autumn opening, controversies about how it’s being built will not go away. A new row is brewing over Maungawhau Station, formerly Mt Eden.
For years, the site has been a gigantic hole in the ground where two tracks from the west, two from the city and two from Newmarket all made their way in and out of tunnels. Those tunnels are now covered over, the station is close to completion, and so are some of the walkways connecting to nearby streets.
But the site itself has become a vast, barren landscape. And plans for what to do with it are under fire, for several reasons.
One is that buses on Mt Eden Rd will not detour off the road and stop at the station itself. Mayor Brown says the closest stop will be 250 metres away, which he thinks is much too far to expect people to walk in the rain.
I reckon he’s right about that.
Another is confusion about whether taxis and ride shares will be able to pull up to the station. Brown says they won’t. Auckland Transport executive Jane Small says they will.
It’s not clear whether that means all cabs, or only those serving passengers with mobility issues. Nor is it clear how close general traffic will be able to get for drop-offs and pick-ups. Brown wants there to be a drive-through capacity. Is he right?
Another issue is that the plan for the big wasteland is to sell it, piece by piece, for development over the next couple of decades. The council has budgeted to receive about $180 million for this. It’s a good plan, but it doesn’t seem to be under way yet.
Yesterday, Brown called that wasteland “Gaza-like”. It’s surely wrong to compare a construction site to a war zone stalked by famine and death, but he’s right to suggest the site needs an interim development plan. In a hurry. The possibility that the station will open next autumn in the middle of a sprawling mud patch is absurd.
Here’s an idea. Why not convert all the areas not scheduled for quick development into a pop-up park? Levelled and grassed, with playing fields, playgrounds, trees and other new planting. And with allotments hired out to the occupants of apartments on or near the site.
Come on, council, get it ready now so you can plant in the spring.
The lead agency for this site is Eke Panuku, which has been abolished in Brown’s big council restructure. That decision takes effect this month.
Responsibility now falls to senior council executive Barry Potter, and through him to the mayor himself. A joint working group involving all the relevant agencies will report to the council at the end of June on what to do at Maungawhau.
“I am very disappointed with what has been happening at Maungawhau,” Brown said on Thursday. “A lot of well-paid people are fiddling with this.”
He’s good at complaining, but this is a test of whether he really can fix things. Whether he has the ability to understand the problems, to bring people together to work them through, and to get a good, timely, affordable outcome.
Brown’s concerns are functional, not aesthetic, but both are important. The station should operate well and the area around it should be a splendid community asset. Perhaps his artsy sidekick Desley Simpson could try explaining this to him.
Meanwhile, Auckland Transport reports it has done more work on its proposals for the streets around the CRL’s Karanga-a-Hape Station.
The dispute here involves pedestrian-focused plans that gained strong public support but were then changed by AT, prompting an outcry. Executive Jane Small told the council on Thursday that AT had listened to everyone, and the latest version of the plan means the council’s Access for Everyone policy will be met.
This should mean a better environment for the thousands of pedestrians using the station. It should also mean vehicles that don’t need to be in the area will be prevented, or at least strongly discouraged, from using the backstreets as a rat run.
I asked Small for details, but she said she can’t reveal them yet, because the plans still have to go before the City Centre Advisory Board, the local board, the Karangahape Rd Business Association and other interested parties.
The public will find out in late June.
But she did say Cross St, which leads away from the station on Mercury Lane, will have wider footpaths, less parking and better lighting. Also, there was no decision yet on whether the bollards being installed on Mercury Lane will routinely be up, and she wasn’t able to say if nearby East St will keep its cycleway and not be available for rat running.
Hearings have been taking place this week over a resource consent application for a Hindu temple near Drury, in the far south of the city.
Although three-quarters of public submissions were in favour, the remaining quarter have been staunchly opposed. Historical echoes abound.
Indian New Zealanders have worked in and later owned market gardens in Pukekohe-Drury since 1911, and never without controversy. In 1925, the White New Zealand League was founded in Pukekohe to oppose the growth of Indian and Chinese horticulture in the area.
At the same time and well into the 1960s, racial segregation, aimed especially at Māori, was common in the town. The writer Robert Bartholemew has documented the way the cinema and swimming baths were racially segregated, and Māori were refused entry to many shops, had to stand for Pākehā on the bus and could not use public toilets.
Many were forced to live in hovels and manure sheds with no electricity, toilets or running water, and as a result, hundreds of children died of preventable diseases.
Back in the present day, one opponent of the temple wrote: “We need to keep our land without turning New Zealand into any other country.” It’s a sentence that could have been plucked straight from a White NZ League pamphlet 100 years ago.
Local councillor Andy Baker says, “I do detest people saying racist stuff, or any sort of bigotry towards any type of religious body. That’s just unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, he’s opposed to the temple. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a temple or a church of any other denomination, I don’t like it because we’ve tried hard, through the unitary plan, to protect the integrity of our rural land.”
But is that really true? The land owned by the temple community is part of what will become in the next few decades a metropolitan centre the size of Napier.
“For applicants to buy up bigger chunks of rural land and then try and put on an urban activity that’s going to put pressure on the roads and a heap of things, is just wrong to me,” Baker says.
But that’s what everyone new to the area has done. It’s how towns grow, when sprawl is allowed, which in this case it definitely is. New houses, roads, schools, factories and warehouses are springing up all across the land around Drury. New railway stations, a new hospital and a whole new four-lane highway are planned to follow.
Baker is right that all this growth will create problems. I’m much keener, myself, on more density in existing metro centres. But the sprawl is a reality, and the population it caters to will be, as it has long been, multicultural.
If some of the locals really do oppose development on rural land, a temple seems a strange thing to focus on.
In effect, they’re saying they’d prefer the temple go somewhere else. And that does sound, shall we say, historically familiar.
Still, there’s a good chance the commissioners at the consent hearing will support them, because the Resource Management Act leans that way.
It’s another example of why Ministry for the Environment chief executive James Palmer said, at a recent conference, that the RMA is “the biggest gift to Nimbys”.
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“He believed deeply that you should leave the land in a better state than you found it."