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.
It’s election time: for mayor, council, local boards and licensing trusts. Until voting ends on October 11, Love this City is focusing on news, issues and personalities from the campaign trail. This week:
What’s the secret for getting the best from Mayor Wayne Brown?
“I find that as long as you’re prepared to flutter your eyelashes and let him think it was his idea, you can get Wayne Brown on your side.” That was the response of Christine Fletcher, one of two local ward councillors, when I asked the question at a candidates election meeting in Mt Albert on Wednesday.
Afterwards, I got hold of Brown and asked him if he was aware.
“That’s disgusting,” he said.
In the meeting, City Vision candidate Jon Turner said, “I don’t think I’ll be fluttering my lashes.”
Julie Fairey, the other councillor there, who is also seeking re-election, had a different approach. She recalled that she and Brown had won election to the governing body at the same time, in 2022. “I thought we would hate each other’s guts,” she said.
“I think he thought I was just my husband in disguise.” Fairey is married to former Cabinet minister Michael Wood. Like Turner, she belongs to City Vision, a ticket of Labour, Green and independent centre-left candidates like herself.
“The mayor has firm views, but he’s not closed-minded. There was one meeting quite early on where he told me he would fire me from the job he’d given me. But then he came back and said he’d mulled it over, and I was right. We don’t always agree, we don’t always disagree. But on the whole, I would say we’ve built a constructive working relationship.”
Fairey was one of the key councillors who persuaded the mayor to accept moderately higher rates rises, in order to reduce the scope of the cuts he wanted to libraries and other community services.
“No idea. My wife cooks so well!” Ross Bannan, C&R candidate for the Albert-Eden Local Board, at the meeting in Mt Albert, when asked to name the best noodle house in the area. A response came from the floor: “You should learn to cook!”
“Wayne Brown is not even shifting deckchairs on the Titanic, he’s playing with the cigarette butts.” Ted Johnston, independent candidate for mayor, at a meeting in Glen Eden.
“I’m not the woman my grandmother was.” Rob McNeil, Animal Justice candidate for mayor, at the same meeting, after explaining how his grandmother’s sense of social justice had inspired him.
“Will you guarantee to work for 100% of our rates to be spent in Rodney?” Moderator to the candidates at a meeting in Snells Beach.
In response: “We do benefit from things outside Rodney. I quite like being able to drive on roads when I go to the airport.” David Robb, independent candidate for the Rodney Local Board.
“Am I a get-it-done guy?” Craig Hansen, #LovePapakura candidate for the Papakura Local Board.
In response: “Yes, you are!” From the crowd, possibly his own whānau.
“For many, many people, this is the problem: ‘If I start the day by driving my kids to school, I will spend the rest of the day driving’. That’s one of the reasons why walking and cycling to school are so important.” Julie Fairey again, at a meeting in Balmoral.
“The council shouldn’t dictate what colour your fence should be.” Helena Roza, Act Local candidate for the North Shore ward and Devonport-Takapuna Local Board, in Milford. The council doesn’t dictate the colour of fences, although in special character areas like Devonport, it does require homeowners to maintain the style of the existing streetscape.
“I strongly support special character areas.” Roza, at the same meeting.
“Speed on the roads is a matter for local boards to decide. Absolutely. But it needs to be centrally controlled for overall consistency.” Redwan Islam, C&R candidate for Albert-Eden Local Board, in Pt Chevalier.
“This is the biggest conversation we need to have. How are we going to manage when there are places we already know we can’t live in any more?” Jessica Rose, seeking election for Future West as a ward councillor in Waitākere, in Glen Eden.
In response: “I don’t completely believe in climate change, and the GIS tool is completely wrong.” Jim Cornes, independent candidate for ward councillor in Waitākere. GIS is the council’s Geographic Information System: a “flood viewer” that allows people to see how floodwaters affect every part of the city, in detail.
“I will support the living wage [for council staff and contractors]. Workers cost very little. It’s managers that are the problem.” Eric Chuah, independent mayoral candidate, also in Glen Eden.
“I know you’re going to give back to the community and that. But what are you going to do for the young ones, in the homes, the ones who might need some help, the ones you don’t really know about?” Question from a teenage boy in Papakura.
In response, some candidates said things like, “Youth are the future of our country,” and, “It takes a village to raise a child.” But Laura Fourie for #LovePapakura told a story about a girl on an outdoors programme she was helping to run. The girl told her the programme was so wonderful, but when she got home she realised nothing had changed. “This hits hard,” said Fourie, in tears, looking at the boy who’d asked the question. “We have to confront this.”
“Our density rules have been designed to suit the rich and powerful. They’re sorted. Height limits are artificially held down in some of the best land for development in Auckland, so growth goes to the west and to South Auckland. It’s been a policy failure for decades. I work most days to try to fix it, for all of Auckland and especially for the west.” Shane Henderson, seeking re-election for Labour as a ward councillor in Waitākere, in Glen Eden.
“Laws are made to be broken. There’s no bigger example of this than what the Auckland Council does.” Matt Zwartz, independent candidate for Albert-Eden Local Board, in Pt Chevalier.
If you’re in an isthmus suburb like Mt Eden or Remuera, the issue is residential zoning. But the rest of the city doesn’t care so much about that. If you’re in Warkworth or Pukekohe, it’s rates. In Henderson and Muriwai and Milford, it’s flood management. In the central city, it’s about business, in Whangaparāoa, it’s what about our ferry, and in Avondale, it’s where the hell is our swimming pool?
And in Papakura, it’s rubbish. The council is about to open a consultation period for a six-month trial of fortnightly kerbside rubbish collection, and a lot of people are absolutely losing it.
Saving the weekly rubbish pickup is the number one issue for the Papakura Action Team, headed up by councillor Daniel Newman, who notes he was the only councillor from South Auckland to vote against the trial.
It’s also a hot topic for the C&R team on isthmus Auckland: “weekly rubbish collections” is one of their three key slogans, even though they aren’t standing candidates in the suburbs chosen for the fortnightly trials.
Illegal dumping is a big problem in some parts of the city, especially in semi-rural areas, although the relationship household rubbish has to broken furniture, car tyres and industrial waste is not always obvious. Still, nobody wants rubbish strewn around the streets and filling up the gullies and streams.
The council’s fortnightly trial has several goals. It wants to help us reduce waste: something most people probably understand we need to do. Aucklanders send over a million tonnes of waste to landfills each year.
It wants to reduce the cost of rubbish collection, which will help keep rates under control. Everyone’s into that.
And it wants to learn if incentives work. Participants in the trial will get a remission on their rates and be in line for other financial help.
The consultation period will run from October 13 to October 31. If approved, the trial itself will take place in Te Atatū, Panmure and Clendon Park (which is in the Manurewa-Papakura ward), starting in late February 2026.
Rubbish collections will move from weekly to fortnightly, while weekly food scraps and fortnightly recycling services will remain unchanged.
Frankly, it’s hard to see what’s not to like about this. The council has been taking a good look at what we throw out: about half of it, it says, could be recycled or reprocessed. Will fortnightly collection encourage us to do that?
The trial is in suburbs where households tend to be larger, so it will be a good tough test for local Auckland conditions. Fortnightly rubbish collection already works well in 18 other towns and cities, including Hamilton and Tauranga, where the waste destined for landfills has indeed reduced by about half.
Households that can’t manage will be able to get larger bins or extra bins at no cost, although that won’t kick in for a month after the trial starts. They want people to try first.
The consultation really will be open. “No decision on a trial has been made yet – this is your opportunity to tell us what you think. We want to understand how households feel about the idea of a fortnightly rubbish collection trial,” says Justine Haves, the council’s general manager of waste solutions.
And it’s not sudden. If there’s to be a citywide change, it won’t be before 2028 (just in time for a fuss at the next election!).
Isn’t this exactly what the council should be doing? Identifying agreed social and environmental goals, while cutting costs, then consulting, then trialling with support, and then deciding if it works?
Papakura Action says nope. It believes “keep the weekly collection” is a good vote-magnet.
And C&R spokesman David Hay told me, “We do not support two-weekly collection and do not agree with wasting money on a trial.”
Speaking of rubbish and rates, C&R has a billboard that proposes “Lower Rates, Cleaner Roads, Weekly Rubbish”.
Weekly rubbish we’ve covered. Hay clarified to me that “lower rates” doesn’t mean lowering the rates. It’s a call for lower rates rises.
And “cleaner roads”, he said, refers to “overgrown berms, dumped rubbish, weeds and silt in kerbs etc”.
Every candidate I’ve ever asked agrees that more should be done about illegally dumped rubbish and efficient drainage. But the Auckland Council stopped mowing the berms in 2013, to save money and to bring the old Auckland City Council area into line with the rest of the Super City. Hay didn’t say if they propose to bring that back.
The anti-vaccine organisation Voices for Freedom is active in local body elections across different parts of New Zealand.
In Auckland, one member standing for election is Kevin Murphy, a VFF “co-ordinator”, who has called the official Covid response a “pervading evil inherent within our system”. Murphy is running under the Westwards ticket, a new group with candidates for ward councillor in Whau as well as Waitākere, and full slates for the Waitākere Ranges and Henderson-Massey local boards.
Given this, I asked Westwards’ head councillor, Ken Turner, who is standing for re-election in Waitākere, if the ticket was associated with VFF.
“I am Westwards,” he said. “And no.”
Turner signed a letter to the Prime Minister in May last year calling on the Government not to support World Health Organisation pandemic treaty reforms. Those reforms were designed to strengthen international pandemic response planning.
The letter came from “Council Watch NZ”, a group of elected local-body officials organised by Voices for Freedom. Turner signed in his capacity as an “Auckland City Councillor”.
I asked him about this. He agreed the letter was organised by VFF, but said he was not a member. “Although I was pleased to sign the letter,” he added.
Turner and the Westwards candidates in Waitākere have stayed away from most of the usual meet-the-candidates events. Turner told me he didn’t think the meetings were useful. Instead, they’ve been going to their own supporters’ events, where they don’t make speeches or get cross-examined, he said, but mingle over a cup of tea.
Murphy is not the only VFF co-ordinator standing for a local board. Others include Emma Ryburn-Phengsavath in Kaipātiki, Pete Marshall in Waitematā and Darag Rennie in Hibiscus and Bays.
None of them has declared their VFF affiliation in the official candidate information available to voters, or in any of the other election material I’ve seen, or in the meet-the-candidate events where I’ve heard them speak. According to other media reports, this is not unusual for VFF candidates standing in several parts of the country. The strategy seems to be to present themselves as “concerned ratepayers”.
In Albany last month, I asked Rennie why he didn’t disclose his VFF involvement. Doesn’t being in such a values-driven organisation define his political engagement? He said he didn’t need to disclose it, and I should read his book.
But Rennie does talk about climate change. He advocates for “climate realism”, saying the climate-related policies of the council cause “wasteful spending that could be eliminated”.
In Whangaparāoa, he described the United Nations’ climate efforts as being like “hoping to win Lotto without a ticket”. In Albany, he said “academics and scientists” he agreed with had been “silenced”.
Mayoral candidate and councillor Kerrin Leoni turned up to that candidates meeting in Papakura this week, only to be told she couldn’t speak.
The meeting was for ward and local board candidates, and it ran really well, even with 18 of them onstage. Strictly limited one-minute speeches does the trick, if any meeting organisers are reading this.
At one point, the moderator declared he could “feel a bit of tension in the air”. That was an understatement: there was a polite but very firmly expressed row simmering away over supposed plans to sell the local parks, although no one was planning that, or even legally could. Still, it’s on Facebook and people are reading it.
And #LovePapakura candidate Joseph Allan made a seething-but-sorrowful reference to “personal attacks online, not just to me, and not just to my political colleagues, but to my family. This is not on.”
So the moderator suggested, “I think it’s time for a waiata, eh?” And he led the room in Tutira Mai, with everyone joining most enthusiastically with the “Aue” bits.
Then it was back to, “We have never proposed to sell the parks and anyone who says so is being misindedigenous,” as local board member Brent Catchpole put it.
But at the end, despite appeals by local councillor Daniel Newman and others, the organisers said they couldn’t allow Leoni to speak. Leauanae Zeprina Fale explained that they hadn’t invited mayoral candidates, and she believed the rules prevented her from giving the mic to Leoni because it would be unfair to the others.
For the record, there are no such rules. Fairness is important, but at that very moment it was quite probable that other mayoral candidates were speaking in other meetings in other parts of the city.
It was a 90-minute drive from the city centre to Papakura in peak traffic on Wednesday evening. Leoni didn’t make a fuss, but she must have had a few “Aues!” roiling around inside.
The next night in Mt Albert, councillor Christine Fletcher proposed that the Government should legislate to have the enormous community trust Entrust placed under council control. That would allow the council to put the assets into the Auckland Future Fund, earning an ongoing dividend for the city.
This contradicts the position of C&R, the centre-right grouping Fletcher belongs to, and aligns closely with the centre-left City Vision’s view.
Entrust used to be called the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust and was formed during the electricity reforms of the 1990s. It owns the majority of Vector shares and is in turn owned by 368,000 power customers in Auckland’s centre, east and south.
C&R has always controlled the Entrust board, winning every election with a promise to pay an annual dividend to those customers, who are the shareholders. The 2025 dividend of $364 has just been paid.
Under its trust deed, Entrust assets will be transferred to the local government authority in 2073.
City Vision believes the funds should be used to build community assets, rather than paid into customers’ pockets. That’s essentially the whole point of the AFF, so Fletcher’s proposal, if adopted, would mean City Vision policy became reality.
Paul Chalmers, at the meeting as a City Vision candidate for the Albert-Eden Local Board, said he was “very pleased to hear it”.
Entrust assets are worth $2.76 billion, according to the 2024 annual report. That’s more than twice the funds already in the AFF.
C&R’s David Hay has confirmed that Fletcher has long held this view but says the matter is “not on C&R agenda at present time”.
A reader was using the Safeswim app earlier this year, which provides information on water quality and other matters at Auckland’s beaches. Highly recommended, by the way.
He noticed the Karanga Plaza pool, in Wynyard Quarter, was labelled “Karanga Plaza Harbour Pool (Brownie’s Pool)”, so he asked the council a couple of questions: “Has the council formally adopted this name? Is it appropriate for a council site to be renamed with a nickname of a current and campaigning elected politician?”
No and no, were the answers.
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” responded a council staffer. “This was an oversight on our part and has now been corrected. We really appreciate you raising this, and we’ve reviewed our internal processes to help prevent similar issues in the future.”
Quite right. The mayor might call it Brownie’s Pool, but that’s not its name. Calling a civic amenity after a local politician is common enough, but the council decides, not the individual. There’s a process to go through, and it’s more usually done once the person in question is no longer with us.
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