Mayor Wayne Brown signs the declaration for a state of emergency in Auckland. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome in 2024, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. Today it’s five of the top from Simon Wilson.
The day began badly for Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown. The tennis game he had planned was rained off.
We know this because playing tennis was the reason he gave Tom Day, a producer at Today FM, for declining a request for an interview that morning.
It rained all day, as we know. The torrents were far greater than predicted and every fire truck in the city was said to be out. Houses and shops were flooded, streets turned into rivers. As the day unfolded, it became clear we had a massive emergency on our hands. By early evening, everyone knew it.
Three people are confirmed dead; there may be more.
The mayor responded with … what? Where was he all day?
We heard nothing from him. For much of the day, we heard nothing from Auckland Emergency Management (AEM), either. AEM is the council agency with responsibility for co-ordinating civil defence in the city.
What went wrong? The “speculation” that Brown and the AEM team should have declared an emergency sooner came from several of his own councillors. And from National Party leader Christopher Luxon, who said they should have acted “much quicker”.
It’s too soon to know if that’s true, but it will certainly be the subject of an inquiry.
It’s not too soon for something else to be clear: The mayor was missing in action. Read more >
The scaffolding has been erected in the town square and there they are, lining the streets, banging their timbrels, blowing their vuvuzelas, in thrall to their own frenzied sound and fury. The champions of our toxic media, baying for the one great prize they now believe is close: Death to the hated queen.
Not, for almost all of them, that they mean it literally. But it is election year and, from the dungeons of social media to the ramparts of talkback radio, they can smell political blood on the wind.
They could be disappointed. There are many things we can be confident about this election but a big win to either side is not one of them.
On the contrary, after the outlier result of 2020, the polls suggest the country is reverting to the norm. That is, as in other MMP elections, it will be a close-run fight between the centre-left and the centre-right.
And it may, or may not, be complicated by parties that are not part of one bloc or the other.
This election is hard to predict for other reasons. The world is volatile now. Read more >
In February 2018, the new prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, went to Waitangi.
She was pregnant and warmly welcomed, and she talked about “what we value”.
Manaakitanga, the spirit of generosity and caring. Kaitiakitanga, or guardianship.
The importance of speaking kanohi ki te kanohi, or face to face.
She talked about “the gap between us”, in unemployment, mental health, housing, incarceration.
“We don’t seek perfection,” she said. “Frank and open disagreement is a sign of health.”
She declared: “I believe in the power to change”.
And, she said: “You must hold us to account. I want to [come back and] stand here with my child and only you can say when we have done enough”.
As it turned out, in the innocence of 2018 we had almost no idea what real change was.
When it came time for an election in late 2020, voters here knew how well we’d done and they could see where National’s erratic, uncertain and often panicky responses might have led us. They voted accordingly.
But in politics, they say, what makes you strong will also, one day, bring you down. People get sick of it.
Now she has resigned. But is this too superficial a way to read the end of Jacinda Ardern? Read more >
Sir Ian Taylor wrote an “open letter” to Greens MP Chlöe Swarbrick in this paper recently. An open response doesn’t seem untoward.
Taylor is an entrepreneurial businessman who has built world-leading IT companies, located them in his home town, Dunedin, kept them there and kept them growing through good times and bad.
His work has boosted our appreciation of environmental issues, sports and culture in enormous ways. He’s created high-value employment, produced innovative tech and grown the wider economy of Otago, all with unflagging dedication. He’s an outstanding New Zealander and we need many more people like him.
Taylor’s open letter concerned the Green Party’s new tax and benefits package, announced on June 11. That package includes a wealth tax, an income guarantee, child benefit reforms, a zero tax rate on everyone’s first $10,000 of income, a higher marginal tax rate for those earning over $180,000 and a higher corporate tax rate. The wealth tax includes private trusts.
The Greens say the package will make 95 per cent of all taxpayers better off. That’s everyone earning less than $125,000. Nobody has yet disputed these figures.
In fact, while there have been plenty of political objections, nobody has discredited the data or the analysis the Greens used to construct their policy.
Taylor’s worry is about the tax on trusts. Read more >
We voted for change, as Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon told us on election night. But why wasn’t Labour the party of change? With an absolute majority in Parliament, why didn’t it do more?
We know what happened. The Government was battered by Covid and inflation, it was timid on tax and benefit reform and didn’t understand the demands of our changing demographics. The support base was soft, the leadership weak and it did not know how to respond to fears about co-governance. But why?
The need to build back better should have been an opportunity, not a burden. The astonishing Covid successes – in health and the economy – could have locked in public support for a decade.
And co-governance? We live in a liberal democracy that embraces cultural diversity. It’s generally accepted that we’re “on a journey” to establish meaningful relationships between Māori and Pākehā. It’s also well known that the state of our drinking water poses a risk to public health that most local councils do not have the resources to fix.
So how did the plans for water reform go so awry? The Crown offered to take on the financial burden and somehow there was outrage.
Some critics blame a lack of competence. They say Labour was just out of its depth. Read more >
Simon Wilson is a senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Metro services had suffered from a lack of investment, according to the Government.
Comments