An unusually busy day at the Waitematā Railway Station. Photo / Dean Purcell
This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Auckland Transport as we know it is soon to be no more. Yesterday morning, Government ministers and Mayor Wayne Brown announced the legislation bringing an end to the independent AT regime. The council will take over policy and planning, AT will remain in charge of operations, and the Government will have its fingers swirling around in the pie.
It hasn’t been all bad, by any means. AT’s fourth-quarter and full-year (to the end of June) reports to the council this week contained some revelations, on both sides of the ledger:
Is there a sweet spot in the anguished debate about homelessness? An issue on which everyone agrees, so progress can be made?
If there is, its name is CHPs.
Community Housing Providers are non-government agencies and charities, often deeply embedded in communities, that provide housing and support services. Registered CHPs provide homes to people on the Public Housing Register and can access the Income Related Rent Subsidy.
This provides an assured income stream with low margins that can appeal to funding agencies wanting to help build our social housing stock. To grow this work, the Community Housing Funding Agency (CHFA) was launched in November 2024 with the aim of “bringing together charities, philanthropists, fund managers and the Government in a partnership to efficiently raise money”, as chief executive James Palmer puts it.
Now, Palmer has announced that CHFA has been given an A+ credit rating by S&P Global Ratings. On the back of that, it’s launching New Zealand’s first social bond programme.
The Salvation Army is a CHP, along with city missions and many other church-affiliated groups. So are the Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust and similar trusts in other cities. Outfits like Age Concern and Habitat for Humanity are CHPs and, while iwi have some different characteristics, many of them operate as CHPs.
One of their great strengths is the resources they put into wraparound care. CHPs tend to be good at looking after their tenants.
At the same time, their operations are not always easy to scale up. A church housing complex or a papakainga with a dozen units can’t easily become a whole village with a hundred. Even well-resourced large groups don’t necessarily want to become construction entrepreneurs.
As CHPs themselves endlessly say, they are not the solution to homelessness. But they are an important part of it. And the new social bond and credit rating will help the money flow.
“There is a lot of talk about solving New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit and housing crisis,” says Palmer. “But this is not just theory – this is real system change in action.”
The new arrangements, he says, “provide investors and KiwiSaver providers a real opportunity to align financial returns with social good, while helping to solve one of New Zealand’s most pressing challenges”.
Palmer credits ANZ Bank for its anchor support of the programme, along with the Government.
“Through the leadership of Housing Minister Chris Bishop and Finance Minister [Nicola] Willis, the Government is helping CHFA to be scaled up to meet unprecedented demand and to work more closely with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, helping community housing to be more efficient for taxpayers, while we all come together to deliver more homes.”
When the Government scrapped Kāinga Ora’s social-housing construction programme, it made a specific carve-out for CHPs. The 2024 Budget allocated funding to them to build and operate another 1500 homes. Palmer says the lending pipeline is now over half a billion dollars.
The CHPs say CHFA is making a difference. Lisa Woolley, chief executive of the large social-services provider Visionwest Community Trust, says, “Thanks to CHFA’s lower-cost lending, we’ve been able to deliver nearly 10% more homes compared to other lenders. This has significantly enhanced our capacity to address urgent housing needs.”
To me, what’s been striking during the Tāmaki Makaurau byelection is the camaraderie. While Labour and Te Pāti Māori have some serious differences, there’s been genuine friendship on display among their MPs and other members.
At the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei debate, for Whakaata Māori’s The Hui, TPM co-leader Rawiri Waititi and Labour list MP Shanan Halbert were even rocking the same shirt.
At the earlier Waatea Marae debate, Labour candidate Peeni Henare and TPM’s Oriini Kaipara were full of smiles and mutual support. Not even frenemies, they were united by their shared enemy, the Government.
A week later in Ōrākei, though, that had cooled. No surprise really: it’s not the Government they’re trying to beat just at the moment, it’s each other.
Henare has had his knowledge and experience on display for much of the campaign, while the political newbie Kaipara has made a virtue of her raw commitment. But when Jack Tame interviewed them separately for TVNZ’s Q&A, she produced a very smart piece of politicking: Henare, she said, should be our first Māori prime minister.
Smart, for many reasons. She broke a political rule, to praise her opponent like that. That will have endeared her to voters who want politicians to rise above pettiness, not to mention those who like a bit of rule-breaking.
She made life just a little bit awkward for Labour, raising the spectre of a leadership challenge and implicitly reminding voters it is the only party in Parliament that has never had a Māori leader. Instilling awkwardness in the other lot is good politics, too.
Mainly, though, Kaipara showed she was generous and open-hearted. That undermined the idea, beloved of some, that Te Pāti Māori is full of intransigent extremists.
The election ends on Saturday. There’s been no public polling, turnout is expected to be low, and any result is possible, from a landslide one way, to a super-close vote, to a landslide the other way.
The City Rail Link company made an “updates” report to the council’s transport, resilience and infrastructure committee this week. It was working through 26,000 documents, said chief executive Patrick Brockie, and had now certified 51 drivers to take the trains through the tunnels. It was the kind of information that tells you there’s lots going on without really telling you much at all.
Councillor Julie Fairey wasn’t having it. Now that much of the above-ground work around the stations is complete, she wanted to know why the fences and cones and construction stuff haven’t been moved. Give Aucklanders back their streets. Give shopkeepers back their customers.
Brockie said CRL was “in discussion with Auckland Transport” about that.
Mayor Brown was also unimpressed. “Can we not speed that up? Every time I look out the window at Albert St, there’s more work going on. You’re still wrecking businesses there.”
“We’ll definitely look into that,” said Brockie.
The exchange revealed two things. One, that CRL and AT have still not grasped the need to restore normal service to the streets as soon as possible. It was the last meeting of this committee before the election, and you might have thought they’d have turned up with the good news that those fences are about to disappear. But no.
The second revelation was more of a reminder: that after three years of spluttering about all that construction disruption, the mayor has not managed to change how they do it.
Although, when it came time for AT to give its report, it was clear the agency had at least got the cones message. Some 7783 “redundant pieces of temporary traffic management” had been removed from roads in the last three months, AT declared. That’s what they call road cones.
On the downside, though, about a dozen drivers a year apparently succumb to road rage because of the same “temporary traffic management”. This causes about one death and half a dozen serious injuries each year. Not to the roadworkers, but to the drivers themselves, and other road users.
Meanwhile, KiwiRail revealed that rail closures ahead of the CRL opening next year are going to get worse before they get better. Labour Weekend and a month after Christmas will see full shutdowns as the network is readied for the big event, and there will be many more partial shutdowns, too.
Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson said, “It’s going to be a painful summer with no trains. We’ve got some big events coming up and it will be tough.”
Councillor Shane Henderson asked AT, “What are your plans to get West Aucklanders back on the trains when the work is done?”
He didn’t get an answer, but Simpson observed that, on trips to Rome, she had noticed how new rail services there also took a long time to build. That’s right, ma’am, Rome’s railways weren’t built in a day.
Manukau councillors Lotu Fuli and Alf Filipaina did their spirited best to persuade the council to bump up the funding for community facilities last week.
At issue was a $20 million pot of money: an unexpected bonus resulting from the council being able to sell its shares in Auckland International Airport more profitably than had been expected.
The shares had originally belonged to the Auckland City Council and the Manukau City Council. Other legacy councils, such as North Shore, sold their airport shares some time before the formation of the Super City in 2010.
In 2023, the council decided to spend the money on community projects “already in the pipeline but [which] lacked full funding”, in the areas formerly covered by Auckland CC and Manukau CC. It established a “Fix and Finish” fund and called for bids from the local boards. In they came: $57.3m worth of applications for 14 projects.
What to do? The money was divvied up, but most projects received only a third to a half of what they wanted. But that did not, as several councillors have noted, enable them to be “fixed and finished”. In many cases, the money will be hard to spend because of that.
Fuli had a plan. One bid – $12m for a Manukau Sports Bowl – was set aside. For the rest, she proposed that the council raise $25.3m in new debt, so they could be fully fixed and finished.
“Those boards weren’t asking for gold-plated project money,” she said. They consulted and they wanted enough money to fix things “which had been left to rot for decades”. Some were sports facilities, but by no means all.
“The Epsom library will have to close without the funds it needs,” said Fuli. “Waiheke needs to convert a helipad into a proper heliport for safety and emergency services.”
Mayor Brown was derisory. “Why not make it more and we can all have a good time?” he said. “If we were stupid enough to do this ...” He petered out.
Fuli said the extra money would increase the council’s debt-to-revenue ratio from 224% to 225%, which was still under the permitted 250% ceiling.
“It would cost 5 cents a week for the average household,” she said. Next year’s average residential rates rise would go from 7.9% to 7.97%. There was no legal reason why it couldn’t be done.
The mayor and some councillors argued that all ratepayers would be paying the extra, but only some local boards would benefit. Lotu and Filipaina responded that all of Auckland benefits from the sale of the airport shares, even though they came only from Manukau CC and Auckland CC.
Most councillors were sympathetic to the idea that “fix and finish” funding should enable things to be fixed and finished. But Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson spoke for the majority when she said there was a process for deciding what to spend money on. It was bad practice to change that.
“The annual plan is the process,” she said. “And Alf, you’re usually a stickler for process.”
That’s true: he knows the rulebook much better than most of his colleagues and often throws it at them. The annual plan, or budget, was decided in June. Fuli and Filipaina did not persuade any of their colleagues to support their motion.
Auckland is getting three more diesel ferries, and several councillors are not happy about it.
Auckland Transport made the decision, explaining to the council this week that it could not be confident in electric ferry technology, but knew the city would need to replace some of the existing ferries soon, so it made the decision to buy some “modern diesel ferries”.
Councillors Angela Dalton and Richard Hills pointed out that AT was under a specific instruction to decarbonise the ferry fleet. Hills reminded the AT executives that 68% of Aucklanders had supported the targeted climate-action rate, part of which is supposed to pay for electric ferries.
“There’s a good reason for that,” he said. “The ferries account for 20% of our emissions. You’re telling us there’s uncertainty, but we’ve gone backwards. Sydney ferries will be fully electric by 2035.”
Councillor Mike Lee had a different complaint. He pointed out that, to date, the ferry companies have owned their own ferries. This, he suggested, was just Fullers “socialising” the cost while it “privatised the profit”.
AT insists that, when the time is right to commit to e-ferries, it will be able to sell the new diesels.
“Who to?” said Hills. “The world is converting to electric.”
The council received an unprecedented 16,739 reports of roaming dogs in the financial year just finished. There were also a record 1341 reported attacks on people and 1253 attacks on other animals.
Another record: 10,214 dogs were impounded. That’s a 23% jump on the previous year. The council’s three animal shelters, in Manukau, Henderson and Pukekohe, now operate at or near capacity at all times.
Animal management manager Elly Waitoa says staff are doing what they can.
“Our staff work incredibly hard to keep Aucklanders safe from dog-related harm. Unfortunately, we are still seeing people not registering or desexing their dogs and not keeping them contained on their properties, leading to an endless cycle of more litters, more roaming dogs and more attacks. It gets harder each year to keep on top of.”
Un-desexed dogs are at the heart of the problem.
“Around 22 per cent of dogs impounded in 2025 were puppies under three months old, and this included over 200 litters of three puppies or more,” says Waitoa. “There is a clear link between high numbers of unwanted puppies and the fact most roaming dogs are not desexed.”
Only 35% of impounded dogs are claimed by their owners within seven days, which means 60% of them are euthanised. Waitoa says the rate is much higher than previously known.
“This is unacceptable to the public and it’s unacceptable for us. Our staff are all dog-lovers, and the high euthanasia rate puts a significant toll on them. But when you have shelters full of unregistered dogs with behaviour issues that cannot be safely rehomed, no one coming in to claim them, and more aggressive dogs on the streets needing to be impounded every day, there is no other option.”
Waitoa says she has a simple message for dog owners: Please desex your dogs.
“Desexing is one of the simplest, most effective steps dog owners can take to break this cycle. It reduces aggression, lowers the likelihood of roaming and attacks, and decreases the number of dogs ending up in shelters. It benefits both the dogs and the community.”
The council has a veterinary team trialling a free desexing programme at its Henderson shelter, and there’s even a dog pick-up/drop-off service targeting high-risk areas and dog breeds.
With sponsorship from the SPCA, dog rangers also offer free desexing vouchers to dog owners they encounter in suburbs where there are high numbers of roaming complaints.
The council wants more from the Government: a law change to allow councils to desex dogs before returning them to their owners. But as regulatory and safety committee chairwoman Josephine Bartley says, “While most dog owners do the right thing, we need the rest to step up and ensure their dogs are desexed and properly controlled, otherwise these problems will keep getting worse.”
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