Does Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown's method of running the city hold lessons for Parliament? Photo / Sylvie Whinray
THE FACTS
Ready for some purple politics? Could be a lot of fun.
Last week I wrote about National and Labour both being stuck in the middle. Too scared of the bond markets, voters and each other to offer the real change we need for a more prosperous and resilient economy and society, even as voters despair at their failure to act.
And, I said, the problem is becoming acute. Not just because of the growing crises in health, education, infrastructure and the climate. But because far-right forces are stepping in with their own promises.
They’re not scared of proposing solutions and many people find them convincing. Witness Nigel Farage, whose Reform Party now has a commanding lead in all the opinion polls in Britain. Witness Donald Trump.
Purple politics is provoking a bit of chatter in democracies around the world. It doesn’t mean lots of sexually explicit swearing, though we’ve had a bit of that. It’s the politics that happen when the red team and the blue team meet in the middle.
The politics that should happen when major parties find themselves potentially captured by minor parties demanding policies that horrify most of us. Purple politics does already happen, but only very occasionally. Why not more often?
It should have been used, for example, to prevent the rollback of anti-smoking programmes, which was a commitment in National’s coalition agreement with NZ First.
Purple politics requires the coalition agreement process to evolve. This shouldn’t be too hard: it’s evolved several times already. But now it has to evolve again. What used to be a general top-level commitment became, in 2023, two long lists of specific commitments, like the smoking reform, many of which should have no place in any government programme.
They’re not critical to the economy and sometimes harm it; they serve no public interest and sometimes undermine it. They simply represent a reward for a sector of the economy on which one of the parties wants to bestow its favours.
And they do real harm to the credibility of our democratic processes and the parties involved.
Next time, the big parties have to get better at resisting that sort of nonsense.
Then after the negotiations and we have a government, why don’t the parties get better at reaching across the aisle, in cases warranted by the public good?
They could do it with causes where there’s already a wide consensus, not only in Parliament but in the country.
The Government is reviewing the Arms Act, for example, but only because National allowed Act to put it in their election deal. Why?
Policies like that would be easy to shoot down, so to speak, if National allied with Labour to oppose them. The country would thank them for it and think the better of them for it.
But purple politics should also apply with proposals that are unpopular but necessary. Arguably, this is even more important.
We’d have a more functional democracy at central and local government level, with less distrust, if there had been a consensus approach to water reform. Instead, we got bitter and largely pointless division.
I suspect that in retrospect Labour and perhaps National would agree with this.
Auckland would have a more functional transport system and a more respected transport planning sector, if there had been consensus in Parliament on what infrastructure to build.
And the exception that proves the rule? Residential zoning, often demonised as density.
In 2021, the two main parties did reach a consensus on housing. But the Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) of that consensus lacked sense and were extremely unpopular, and National abandoned the deal before the 2023 election.
The Government has now introduced new rules that focus urban density around transport hubs and town centres. Auckland Council has embraced this approach and the council election results suggest the public largely does too.
The key people promoting it in Auckland are the mayor, who is independent, the council’s planning committee chairman Richard Hills, who is Labour, and National’s RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. Consensus is in the air.
The lesson of MDRS is not that consensus is too fickle and flawed to become a reliable strategy. It is that you have to build on a good foundation.
This isn’t a pipe dream and the evidence for that comes from the council itself.
Auckland Council has operated for five straight terms, under three different mayors, on the basis of coalition-building. It’s not perfect, not at all, but this approach has produced stable government, relatively low rates rises and some very good long-term planning.
The Making Space for Water programme, which builds flood resilience, is in a cluster of world-leading urban responses to climate change. Public transport has been modernised, although there should be much more to come. The downtown waterfront, from the harbour bridge to the Britomart precinct, has been impressively rejuvenated.
All these achievements have been possible because they’re based on a broad coalition of support.
At first blush, the Mayor of Auckland shouldn’t be able to get anything done. As I reported last week, Brown probably has only four votes on the new council he can fully rely on, out of 21, and one of them is his own. Twice that number of councillors are likely to vote regularly against him.
But the nine or so councillors in the middle are largely committed to making things work and making progress. Some are on the left, others on the right. Over the last term, they worked hard with Brown and his core group to find consensus positions on rates, transport planning, facilities management, community services and other elements of council budgets.
No one gets everything they want, and the mayor likes to say he compromises more than everyone else. But most of them get enough.
It doesn’t mean Auckland is “fixed”, as Brown suggested he would do in 2022, and nor will it be “fixed” when he retires in 2028. But the process is functional and the city benefits. Auckland isn’t stuck. On transport, water, urban development and more, it’s moving forward.
Could Parliament benefit – become less paralysed by problems that seem too big to fix – if it operated more like Auckland Council?
Not necessarily. We also need some deliberative democracy. This is the approach where a randomly selected group of citizens debate an issue of the day, based on expert input from a range of sources. Do it in public, in front of the cameras, and you have the potential for a powerful, engaged and, crucially, well-informed democratic debate.
Ireland used deliberative democracy ahead of its referendum on abortion: that’s a powerful endorsement of its value.
We could do it with seemingly intractable topics of our own. Funding for hospitals and other healthcare? Superannuation?
What about the topic we’re most stuck on: public debt and tax reform?
Does this leave minor parties out in the cold? Not at all. They’d be where they always are, fighting to build support. The more support they have, the more influential they can be.
Would it apply to everything? Clearly not. With its new methane regime, oil and gas drilling and obsession with building roads, National is a long way from bringing meaningful climate-action plans to the table.
But think of it this way. When nothing gets done, or not enough gets done, because the centre parties are too scared of alienating voters, then voters get alienated all the more.
So they give us business as usual, more or less, even though BAU is no longer a thing. Democracies are being rethought all over the world. Sometimes well, more often very badly.
We could do it well. If we don’t, the threat of our own Farage will become real.
This column is the second in a two-part series. For the first part, National and Labour: Stuck in the middle without a clue, see here.