Maurice Williamson during a meeting of Auckland Council. Photo / Michael Craig
Maurice Williamson during a meeting of Auckland Council. Photo / Michael Craig
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Council elections are now under way, with postal ballot forms starting to arrive next week.
The mayoralty, 20 ward councillor roles and positions on 21 local boards are up for election.
Candidate meetings are now being held all over the city.
Maurice Williamson knows how to do politics. Start with a joke. In front of a packed room at the Howick Bowling Club last Saturday afternoon, he began his presentation with a slide of climate activist Greta Thunberg.
With the slogan: “All guitars to be electric by 2030.”
Williamson is a former minister in the Bolger, Shipley and Key governments and these days he’s a Howick ward councillor.
He’s seeking re-election, although not in the way most other candidates are. At that event, they all lined up along the front, sitting behind a row of tables. They gave their speeches and answered questions from the moderator and the floor, as is normal with these things.
Williamson was above all that, quite literally. He sat on a raised podium, behind them and to the side, silently watching over proceedings. When that part of the afternoon was over, he rose to give a 45-minute PowerPoint talk on the council’s new housing density proposals. Starting with Greta, for the lols.
The messages were clear. First: the plan is ridiculous and will ruin Howick. Second: this analysis was not his own and not contestable, as you might expect from a politician asking for your vote. It was presented as an impartial and authoritative overview.
And third: in this two-seat ward, you’re voting for Williamson and one other.
Your man Maurice is very good at politics.
It seems perverse, but politics is the problem with elections. I don’t mean the clash of political ideas, the contesting visions for what we want for our local neighbourhoods, our city, our country. It’s great when that happens and we need more of it.
We also need all the probing of competence and experience and personality we can get. Some people are not fit to be politicians, although strangely, some of them get elected anyway.
I do recommend election meetings during this council campaign, even if you find yourself in an audience that’s overwhelmingly elderly, Pākehā and well dressed. This is not a criticism; I think it’s great they turn up. But it is true that political meetings in many places have become the time-honoured cultural practice of a single demographic.
Could that be broadened? Many candidates trawl the weekend markets: why don’t they set up debates? How about a mayoral rumble outside Eden Park on Saturday, ahead of the All Blacks showdown with the Springboks?
You can learn heaps when politicians, real and wannabe, confront each other in public. In Howick one audience member wanted to know who supported Mayor Wayne Brown. I thought that was an excellent question: answering it had the potential to reveal a lot about their allegiances, their ability to work co-operatively, even their basic knowledge of the council and the mayor’s programme.
“I couldn’t tell you what he does,” said one aspirant. Hmm.
“I support whoever the mayor is,” said another. “Especially for rates to drop.”
Assuming Brown is re-elected, that would be difficult to put into practice. While the mayor has overseen $600 million worth of “value for money” cuts in council spending, he has also held firmly to a policy of moderate rates rises every year.
Council candidate contest or Historical Village Easter Fair Extravaganza? Fun times in Howick.
Back to the problem with politics in election campaigns. Most candidates produce “political statements” that are so bland they’re indistinguishable. Far too many look for ways to tell people what they want to hear.
And some councillors and local board members pretend to be outsiders. Instead of explaining why they, the council, did something, they attack it. Instead of taking responsibility for their own roles and decisions, they pretend they weren’t there.
Mayoral candidate Kerrin Leoni told the Howick crowd, “I was one of the councillors who put my hand up and said, ‘How did the rates get this high? How did we get to 20%?’”
Leoni sits on the council’s Revenue Committee. It’s her job to know about the rates and what’s in the budget.
Presumably, she does know we don’t have a 20% rates increase. Residential rates rose this year by an average 5.8%. It’s a cumulative 20% over three years, but she didn’t say that.
At the same meeting, one member of the local board declared, “They spend $5 billion every year and where does the money go? I can’t tell you.”
Why not? He gets frequent reports and briefings. All the council’s financial statements are public. It’s his job to know, too. He’s standing for councillor.
(The council’s budget is closer to $10b, of which about half is capital spending and the other half operational.)
He also said, “Transport is absolutely broken.” Another member of the local board later used exactly the same phrase, and she’s also standing for councillor.
You drive on good roads to get to Howick. Stretching east from Pakuranga, the ward is home to the largest transport project in the city, apart from the CRL, with the massive new Eastern Busway under construction.
Of course Howick has transport problems. The whole city does. But it’s not like nothing is being done.
People who know better could assure voters that this election isn’t just an exercise in rage and frustration. They could explain the $40b, 10-year capital-works budget. Invite voters to choose who’s best to make policy and oversee an enormous and very real programme to develop the city.
Absolutist complaints, by people who know the true story is a mix of good and bad, do a lot of damage. Why do so many people lack confidence and trust in the council? One reason is that elected officials keep telling them “everything’s broken” and “nothing’s being done”.
Even when they’ve been elected to fix it and are helping to run it.
Kerrin Leoni speaking during a council meeting. Photo / Jason Oxenham
One of the common themes that comes up in election meetings, from the public and some candidates, is, “Why should I pay for it?”
Sometimes, it’s because the complainant doesn’t use the service. There’s a candidate in Papakura who wants to stop spending on children’s playgrounds. In Howick, one woman read out a list of “ridiculous” spending that included community events, cultural activities, sports, playgrounds and other services for the young, the elderly and families.
A candidate objected several times to “vanity projects”, which he did not name, although “the green little bins” and “all the cycleways” seemed to be a big part of the problem.
For the record, the Howick Local Board spent $31.1m last year on contestable grants in the community. In addition to the “ridiculous” spending, they included the local Coastguard, the local Business Improvement District and environmental projects.
It’s probably not hard for most people to grasp why people without kids help pay for playgrounds and people without a boat help pay for the Coastguard. The reason we all pay for rubbish removal, however it’s organised, and cycleways, whether or not we own a bicycle, is the same.
Meanwhile, I believe Maurice Williamson is wrong about the new housing density rules. They won’t ruin Howick: if adopted, the ward will still have less density than most others.
But the veteran politician remains entertaining to the end. In the first line of his election flier, he tells voters he’s been a “Member of Parliament and a Cabinet Minister for 30 years (1987-2027)”.
Give that man an electric guitar. Lasting all the way to 2027 is an incredible achievement, in more ways than one. It would be, if true, 40 years.
