Home fires burning in Edge wars

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Oh dear. What a disappointment Greg Innes turns out to be. Just look at him. This is the chief executive of The Edge, aka Alexander the Great, according to my colleague Brian Rudman; the man who once circulated a searingly vicious letter in which he called me mean-spirited and irrelevant - among other things. All over some perfectly reasonable little review I wrote of some musical.

Now look at him. He's lounging on the window seat of the comfortable kid-battered Mt Albert home he and his wife, Virginia, share with their small tribe of four. He's drinking green tea and eating shortbread and looking as though butter cookies wouldn't melt in his mouth.

His 10-year-old daughter, Claudia, wanders in from time to time to snuggle up to him and to give me the eye. There's a guinea pig hutch and a trampoline in the back garden, a serious audiophile's stereo system in the lounge, a large dolls' house in the hall.

The whole set-up is endearingly scuffed around the edges and happily domestic. As a set on the stage of one of the theatres in Innes' Edge empire, it would do just nicely for a play about happy family life.

"I'm always keen to present Greg Innes, the human being," he says later, grinning away.

Well, I always knew he had a sense of fun. Many months after that stinker of a letter, he sent me a laminated magazine cover on a stand. The cover line announced that Phantom of the Opera had been voted best entertainment of 1987. He wrote that I might like to display it in a prominent position in the office.

I once saw him take off his shoes and lie on a boardroom table while the comedian Pinky Agnew posed next to him for a photograph.

Today, initially, he seems set on being disappointingly serious, and very gracious. Although calling The Edge - made up of the Aotea Centre, the Auckland Town Hall and the Civic Theatre - his empire might well send him back to his keyboard.

Innes is not altogether impressed at being likened to Alexander the Great. Even when I disingenuously suggest that it could be taken as a compliment. Old Alex was, I tell him, considered to be one of the most outstanding commanders ever.

But Innes knows his history. And probably knows that Rudman wrote: "He started with the little kingdom of the Aotea Centre ... stealthily annexed first the Town Hall and subsequently the Civic Theatre".

Empire, says Innes, "has connotations of omnipotence, and I'm anything but omnipotent". He is most certainly "not an empire builder. If we make progress and if we get bigger business and if we take a larger role, it's only because there's a good logic for doing it".

He's not using the royal "we". We is the board; the board is Innes' boss. As are the stakeholders in The Edge - the ratepayers of Auckland.

Innes takes seriously the Aotea Centre's responsibility to provide a venue which showcases community art and culture.

What he is taking even more seriously is Sky City's bid to take over the management of The Edge, and the competition from Sky City in what is hotting up to be Auckland City's convention wars. A council report identifies two proposals, out of nine received, under consideration: a $77 million plan by the Aotea Centre board of management to build a convention centre beside the Aotea Centre; and Sky City's plan to more than double its convention space at a cost of up to $61.5 million.

Innes is going to have to draw on all of his tactical skills for this particular battle - one which will be fought in boardrooms and, says Innes, in the hearts and minds of Aucklanders. This battle's weapons will be the tools of the lobbyist.

I NNES' are well-honed. They've had to be. He came to the job in 1994 after a 14-year stint in Australia, where he was the chief executive of the Australian Entertainment Industry Employers Association.

When he arrived at the Aotea Centre it was an organisation beset with cost over-runs. The community had not entirely taken the centre to its heart: we liked to call it very rude names.

Still, Innes wanted a challenge - he also wanted to move his family back to the Auckland, where he grew up.

This was a man who, in the early 70s, had survived a stint in the kitchen of Tony's Original Steak & Seafood Restaurant.

Back then it was part-owned by one John Banks. "He was the owner. I was just working in the kitchen stirring the bolognese."

He's still stirring the bolognese. The difference is that he now does it in public. Because - despite his insistence that "I'm operating on a mandate from the board. This is not G. Innes on his white charger" - he is the public face of The Edge.

When I ask him whether he's been doing a spot of lobbying lately, he says, "Yeah. Too right. We're talking to everyone that we can talk to."

Are you supposed to be lobbying? "Well, put it this way. Nothing constrains us in terms of publicising our proposal. But we are constrained from directly approaching politicians by the terms of the council's expression of interest."

But you have approached them by email? "I haven't had a direct conversation with any councillor on this issue for some considerable period of time. We did send emails to politicians in relation to the Sky City proposal to manage The Edge."

Urging them to write to this paper? "I said, yeah, that's an option you've got to express those concerns. I think the Sky City management is a separate issue from the convention centre."

Now that's good.

What he also is, these days, is pretty near unruffleable.

"Well, I've got older [he's 49]. And being a parent is an incredibly sobering experience ... There are many things that I would rather do and many things that are more productive than having a stoush. But finally if having a stoush is necessary, then there's not much point running away from it."

Alexander, I tell him, always led the attack in person. Now that does make him roar with laughter: "Well, if you're the leader of the organisation, that's part of the deal, isn't it?"

He gives me a ride back to the city, through the Mt Albert he loves because it's "unpretentious", in his seen-better-days 1991 Mazda Sentia.

I'm reading him bits of the letter he sent me. We're both laughing and he's pretending to be surprised: "Did I say that?" and "Did I really say that?"

One last thing about Alexander: he was also known for his remarkable charisma.