KEY POINTS:
It's nice having Bob Harvey around. Up against his wilder schemes, my occasional rushes of blood to the head come off as positively sensible.
Three years ago he created a bit of a flurry by calling for an Auckland embassy to be established in Wellington, complete with an
ambassadorial lord mayor and a team of Auckland's "brightest" who would promote and reflect the country's "most stylish and exciting city" to those in power.
This brainwave never took off. But it has continued to flicker away in the Waitakere City Mayor's brain until yesterday, when he popped up before the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Auckland Governance to tackle the subject from another angle.
His view was that if the lord mayor wouldn't - or couldn't - go to the mountain, then we should move the mountain north instead by reversing history and restoring the capital back to its rightful place on the shores of the sparkling Waitemata.
Auckland, he said, was already "the de facto capital of New Zealand", and when we get a single leader, that leader "should act like that's the case".
Then again, why bother with play-acting?
"I think there's a case for the capital to be moved to Auckland. A quarter of the population lives here, it's the economic powerhouse of the country, it's the Pacific capital of the world."
Mayor Bob must have been brushing up on his history. Governor William Hobson made a strikingly similar case to his London masters in the early 1840s in advocating the shift of the capital from the Bay of Islands to Auckland. He wrote that having lived in the Bay of Islands and visited Banks Peninsula and Port Nicholson (Wellington), "I do not hesitate to state my opinion that the neighbourhood of Auckland combines advantages for a very extensive and prosperous settlement not to be found in any other part of this colony".
The shift occurred in 1842 but by 1865 the parliamentarians and bureaucrats had had enough, calling in a bunch of independent Australian commissioners to recommend somewhere else - anywhere else it seems.
Nelson, Dunedin, Havelock and Picton were all considered before Wellington got the nod. Apparently it was considered more central. It might also have been because we Aucklanders didn't go out of our way to be welcoming.
Starting a waterfront tradition of bad architecture that persists to this day, the jerry-built Parliament Building erected on Constitution Hill, near today's High Court, for the first 1854 session was soon dubbed the "Shedifice". The roof leaked, the wind whistled through the walls. There were a couple of fireplaces to huddle around, but no toilet. No wonder they looked elsewhere.
Auckland went on to prosper regardless, but it's unlikely, 150 years on, that Wellington would survive a reverse play. Government is now its major industry - perhaps its only one. The shift north of Parliament and all the hangers-on - bureaucratic and private - would leave it as little more than a North Island Picton, a terminal for ferries, fishing boats and refugees.
Of course, the influx of thousands of well-paid, well-heeled Wellingtonian migrants would have the merchants and property sharks of this town salivating with anticipation. Though it might have the traffic planners ripping out their hair. That's unless we ask the Wellington folk to bring their new electric trains with them.
If you're getting the impression I'm rather lukewarm about bringing the capital north, you could be right. We're already struggling to provide adequate infrastructure for those of us who already live here, without trying to squeeze the population of Wellington in as well.
But there is a halfway-house alternative. Let them keep the MPs and the title, but demand a more equitable share of the spoils that go with being the capital. Rehousing all those bureaucrats and MPs here would be a major pain, but a fair portion of the national patrimony that currently never leaves Wellington would be nice.
For example, instead of one Te Papa, funds would be shared among community-owned collections in Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and the like. The same goes for the other cultural institutions. We could spread the big bureaucracies around as well, so that the spin-off benefits are spread more evenly.
Call it replacing Wellington with a virtual capital, if you like. Or a rush of blood to the head. But with Mayor Bob around, it sounds rather reasonable to me.
