Brian Rudman: Mayors must focus as they face execution

Brian Rudman

Constitutional experts have spent decades trying to hatch a constitutional structure for Fiji with spectacular lack of success. With Auckland, Prime Minister John Key and his advisers have tried the other approach, taking just two weeks to come up with their road map for running a world-class city.

Meanwhile, out in Auckland's villages, a flurry of abusive emails from the mayors, aimed both at each other and at Local Government Minister Rodney Hide, highlighted the reality that governance structures, however well-designed, are only as good as the people charged with making them work. Auckland City Mayor John Banks' leaked email referring to his North Shore counterpart as a lunatic was a salutary reminder of how little things may change. That's if history is any guide.

In 2001, then Minister of Auckland Affairs Judith Tizard graciously declared the jury was still out on whether Mr Banks was mad. That was after former National Cabinet minister Mr Banks first became Mayor of Auckland. For better or worse, this is politics, and creating new structures isn't likely to change that.

The doomed outer mayors are now pleading from death row for a last date with their executioner. I'm not surprised that Mr Banks, whose allies are in power, can't stop grinning, and that both he and regional council chairman Mike Lee are mocking them. They're smart enough to realise that if Mr Hide does go to meet the condemned tomorrow, it will be solely to measure them up for a swift end. We've had so many variations on this theme from the mayors - both present and past - that one last death cell revelation is not going to carry much weight.

The scariest suggestion was from Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey, who invoked the desire to bring in business leaders such as Deloitte chairman Nick Main to mediate. As ARC chairman Mike Lee so eruditely replied, "sounds like elitist bullshit to me Bob".

Mr Lee, was of course, the intended victim of the comic-book putsch against the regional council, Mr Harvey and a gaggle of mayors and shadowy big-business backers tried to engineer in 2006. As in pre-European times, Tamaki Makaurau is the land of a 1000 lovers, the rich lands that everyone wants to control, be it big businessmen, Wellington politicians or local mayors trying to protect their patches.

It's forgotten now, but if we'd stuck with the model the Local Government Commission proposed in 1989 we mightn't be going through the current upheavals. The commissioners resisted the solitary Auckland council model now being proposed in favour of four big cities and three satellite districts, arguing Auckland could get the unity required on big issues with a strong regional council. National's Local Government Minister Warren Cooper feared a strong Auckland, and emasculated the proposed strong regional council.

In more recent times, a flurry of reforms - often eccentric and usually with Mr Harvey's fingerprint nearby - have been proposed. In 2005, Mr Harvey called for a Lord Mayor of Auckland, based as some sort of ambassador in Wellington. A year later he actually sent a letter applying for the non-existent job to Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen.

By spring 2006, everyone was talking one city. In the background were businessmen like Stephen Tindall and Mr Main. With their encouragement, Mr Harvey and the then mayors of Auckland, Manukau and North Shore, produced a plan to replace the ARC with an all-powerful Greater Auckland Council. This GAC was to have direct government and possibly other outside appointees, guaranteed seats for the mayoral plotters, but contemplated having no directly elected councillors.

The mayors advised Government against a referendum on this because it would "slow the process down" and "would create uncertainty and could potentially derail the process ..." The mayors argued "that speed and urgency is important as a means of overcoming pullback and resistance to change". So much for the present calls for consultation.

A week later and the attempted coup laughed out of court, Mr Harvey confessed to his fellow plotters, "last week we were roosters, today we're feather dusters". It's maybe unfair to link the other mayors with their predecessors' high jinks, but with Mr Harvey still playing a star role, is it any wonder people are no longer listening?

What's clear is that in the current struggle for control of Tamaki Makaurau, what's in the best interests of big business, or central government or the soon-to-be-dispossessed mayors, is not necessarily going to benefit the rest of us.

At the risk of repeating myself, Auckland's 1.4 million people should be asking loudly, what role, if any, am I going to end up playing after the revolution occurs?

At least various Maori groups recognise the potential power of the ballot box.

But with the voting system as proposed, with the mayor and eight of the 20 councillors elected "at large", we all risk being disenfranchised, not just Maori, in favour of the business rich.

If the mayors do have one last wish, that's what they should concentrate it on.