“Auckland is New Zealand’s only international city,” re-elected Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown said in his victory remarks to assembled media yesterday afternoon. It’s a theme he’s taken up more and more of late.
Brown said he was “determined to improve Auckland’s ability to lift the economy”. He meant the national economy and he was surely thinking that, bloody hell, someone has to do it.
He cited his Tech Alliance initiative, in which he is bringing together technology leaders in the city to develop a strategy for progress.
“And,” he said, “I’ll be using the fact I’m a well-known name in China and India.”
He’s nothing if not confident, and he’s often said that relationships are more city-to-city than country-to-country. Brown plans on leading more trade delegations.
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Speaking of India, his deputy Desley Simpson turned up dressed from top to toe in Indian dress, including a chartreuse kurta, pants, slippers and a bindi on her forehead. She’d come directly from Diwali. Brown didn’t go.
Brown’s big-picture thinking isn’t limited to technology and trade. On transport, he said he was determined to work with the Government to create a “sensible, rational transport plan” that did not include “motorways just for re-election purposes”.
That’s a dig at National’s Roads of National Significance. Brown has always argued that supercharging public transport and getting more freight onto rail are the keys to transport efficiency. Now he has to persuade the Government to cough up the cash.
Road cones provided an entertaining, attention-grabbing focus to his first mayoral campaign, but he has eyes on much bigger prizes in transport now.
And being mayor of a third of the country, he wants to make a difference. He’s also been arguing for a visitor levy, aka a bed tax, and he’s dead keen to talk the Government into that, too. Funds for city development have to come from somewhere.
Next year we have a general election and, as Brown likes to say, you have to win Auckland to win the country. Brown’s going to do his best to put the city high on the national agenda.
The mayor said in his speech that “what you see is what you get” with him, and there are “no surprises”.
I asked him if that was really true. Wouldn’t many of his supporters in 2022 be surprised, now, to discover he is such a strong advocate of housing density in the “city fringe” suburbs, clustered around improved public transport?
“If you didn’t think that’s what I’ve always believed,” he said, “you didn’t think properly.”
Brown will need support from councillors to progress his plans for the city, and on the whole the election has delivered good news for him.
Julie Fairey, who largely supports the new residential zoning plans, was re-elected with a big majority in Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa. Christine Fletcher, who opposes the plans, was also comfortably re-elected.
That’s the same one-each-way result the ward has always delivered, but it suggests fear of high-rise apartments around the five railway stations in the ward did not produce a backlash.
And Brown is probably very pleased to have a solid new supporter at the council. Victoria Short, from his Fix Auckland ticket, has overturned one of his great betes noir, Wayne Walker, in the Albany ward.
New councillors Bo Burns in Howick, Matt Winiata in Manurewa-Papakura and Sarah Paterson-Hamlin in Whau are likely to be broadly winnable to his programme, though each will want to influence him in various ways.
The final new councillor, John Gillon on North Shore, campaigned to undo many of Brown’s achievements, beating Brown’s candidate Danielle Grant in the process. Gillon is likely to join the straight-out “opposition” camp.
Perhaps the most intriguing showdown for Brown will come in Waitematā, which covers the city centre and the suburbs from Westmere to Parnell.
Brown has to get serious about the city centre this term, because its reputation affects the whole city. Sources say he knows this already.
But he’ll be dealing with strongly contrasting views on what to do. The local board used to be dominated by City Vision, the team of Labour, Greens and progressive independents. Then, last election, it was split, and not always functional. This election, though, City Vision has trounced its C&R opponents, winning five of the seven seats. That’s a clear vote for “urbanism”: fewer cars, more housing, more green spaces, more public transport and cycleways.
And yet the ward, with similar boundaries to the local board, has re-elected Mike Lee, who blames urbanism for many of the city centre’s woes.
It means there’s strong support on both sides of the debate, and it’s not just a central-city issue. Auckland gets judged on the merits or otherwise of Queen St, and making the city’s transport much more functional isn’t just about what gets built around the CRL.
If he can get transport right this term, Brown will have become a great mayor. The good news is that this is exactly what he wants to do. The difficult news is that no one’s ever done it.
There’s a statue outside the town hall of the last mayor who really tried. Sir Dove-Myer Robinson was undone by the Government. Brown can’t let that happen again.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.