Simon Wilson: Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s budget has fallen apart over airport shares sale

OPINION

What a mess. Mayor Wayne Brown has revised his budget but it doesn’t have the support of a majority of councillors. Perhaps even worse, he doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do about that.

Brown is headed for a showdown meeting of Auckland Council next Thursday which seems destined to end in disarray. Just three weeks later, on July 1, his council is required by law to have a budget in place for the 2023-24 year.

His announcement yesterday seemed designed to tell Aucklanders he was offering a good deal and that the councillors opposed to it are villains. But it contained nothing new and no indication of how he might break the deadlock.

And it was made in such a disastrous way, he came out of it looking like a villain, or a buffoon, or both, himself.

Brown confirmed he has changed his mind about some of the cuts he proposed last December.

Some media organisations were initially excluded from Wayne Brown's announcement. Photo / Michael Craig

Arts and community services, including the Southern Initiative and the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) will get at least some of their funding restored. This was revealed on May 17.

And as announced on May 23, he has proposed a $20 million package for better bus services. This will include increasing driver wages to $30 per hour, reinstating suspended services and improving reliability.

All this is really good news and most councillors support these proposals.

Also as earlier announced, the mayor is now prepared to raise rates by about the level of inflation, and tolerate a bit of extra borrowing, especially for flood and disaster management.

But he says the whole package is contingent on selling the airport shares, and most councillors do not support that.

Therein lies his problem. Most councillors want to keep the shares, or most of them. Most councillors will also vote for rates to rise by about the same amount as inflation and will tolerate a bit more borrowing. And most also want to stop the cuts, or a good part of them.

These things just don’t add up. Rates and/or debt will have to be higher to avoid the cuts, unless the shares are sold.

Some councillors do argue for double-digit rates rises and more borrowing, but they’re not in a majority.

Brown knows all this. He knows the stakes are high. Which made it all the more surprising that he used the meeting to aim so low.

It began badly, with attempts to exclude some media. The Herald was welcome (honestly, what did I do right?). But TVNZ, Newshub and Stuff were shut out.

The mayor justified this by saying he was more interested in talking to ratepayers than journalists, but we weren’t allowed to livestream the meeting, either. If he does want to talk directly to ratepayers, that’s a good way to do it.

Later, the mayor’s head of communications, Kate Gourdie, produced another excuse: the room was too small. Why not use a bigger room?

This is a basic democratic issue and media concerns were resolved only when Brown’s chief of staff, Max Hardy, overturned the earlier decisions and allowed all media in along with livestreaming. Sanity prevailed, at least on that score.

Another problem: the meeting was “primarily to brief stakeholders”, but there were very few representatives from south or west Auckland: the local communities that have been most in the firing line for budget cuts.

Yet they allowed in fringe lobbyists who frequently disrupt council events and represent hardly anyone at all, along with an awful lot of men in suits.

Brown grumbled his way through a long and rambling speech, acknowledging he doesn’t have the numbers and also making it clear he has no plan B.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown explaining his budget proposal with two members of his communications team. Photo / Michael Craig

He was gratuitously abusive to Auckland Transport. He attacked some councillors by name and insulted Heart of the City CEO Viv Beck, who was in the room.

He did all this in front of business leaders who included not only Beck, but Brett O’Riley from the Employers and Manufacturers Association, Simon Bridges from the Auckland Business Chamber and Sunny Kaushal of the Dairy and Business Owners Group. The heads of Ports of Auckland, Auckland Transport and other council agencies were also there.

Effectively, he had called them together to watch him being grumpy because he’s not getting his way and is lost for ideas. What must they all have thought?

Politics, as Otto von Bismark liked to say, is the art of the possible. Sulking is unproductive. Insulting people whose minds you’re trying to change is even worse.

Yesterday, Brown repeated his claim that several councillors are “financially illiterate”. He called out Christine Fletcher, Mike Lee, Wayne Walker and John Watson, for signing the low-rates pledge of the Ratepayers Alliance but not honouring it.

The irony is that Brown became mayor with their enthusiastic support. They had all been offside with the previous mayor, Phil Goff, and Brown must have thought they would become the backbone of his new regime. Instead, most of them are offside with him too.

But these councillors have hardly ever voted for an Auckland Council budget. Brown has discovered what Goff already knew: what really seems to unite them is an addiction to saying no.

The city‘s budget has fallen apart and the mayor ended his presentation by saying: “To the last to leave, turn the lights off.” So mayoral.