The Front Page: How has Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown fared six months into the job?

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown speaks at an Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) press conference. Photo / Jed Bradley

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has marked six months as the most powerful mayor in the country with fresh criticism over his leadership.

A review into Auckland Council’s response to the January 27 floods, which claimed the lives of four people, found a “system failure” of leadership in the first 12 hours of the response in which “much of the damage was done” before Auckland Council or Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown had taken any action.

NZ Herald reporter Tom Dillane told The Front Page, the NZ Herald’s daily podcast, that the report gives validity to the criticism Brown copped from other councillors and members of the public for his response.

“There’s evidence that he wasn’t in the council building until 4pm that day. He said during the press conferences [in the days after] that he was at his desk from 4pm ... which is true, but it is not evident how proactive he was being and what was being said to the mayor during those hours.

“One of the findings of the report was that he only, I think he only met one of the emergency management managers that night around 7pm. So it goes both ways. Council obviously didn’t do its job in preparing him for this kind of situation in the first three months, and the mayor himself didn’t seem like he had a lot of initiative to seek it out himself.”

NZ Herald senior writer Simon Wilson told The Front Page that the report reflects badly on Brown’s leadership for not fronting the crisis earlier, when every Aucklander was aware of the extent of the rain and flooding.

Wilson says the report has also highlighted a culture at Auckland Council of “dysfunction in terms of international communications.

“Now, it’s not that Wayne Brown is responsible for everything wrong at council, of course he’s not, he’s only been there six months now. He’s not to blame for any of that, but it is his job to address it and front up to it and deal with it, and that’s the big question now for him: does he have the skills and the willpower to be the leader of the city needs? That’s what the report is really saying.”

Brown did not show up to the press conference detailing the findings from the report alongside its author, Mike Bush. Prior to the report’s release, Brown spoke at the Project Auckland lunch hosted by the NZ Herald, where he criticised a number of council and public officials by name who were in the audience.

Wilson says that Brown’s habit of criticising officials during his time in office is making his job more difficult, as there are increasing vacancies for senior roles across council.

“He’s got to replace his chief executive. He’s only got an acting chair of Auckland Transport. There are other vacancies either now or coming up in the CCOs, the council controlled organisations, and in the senior leadership team at council itself. He’s got to make sure that good people go into those jobs. He’s making the job a little bit harder for himself by criticising the people who are there now publicly in ways that they can’t respond to.”

On the positive side for Brown, Dillane says that the Mayor’s focus on cutting back road cones - with Brown wanting to reduce $145 million spent on traffic management a year - is likely going to win him support from the public.

“I think he’s picked up on a frustration with Aucklanders in general that there’s been a lot of large infrastructure projects, especially in the city centre over the last few years, and his campaigning, one of his catch calls was no new projects until we finished the big projects we’re doing. And I think the road cone thing, perhaps there’s a degree of it being calculated and that this is seen as opposing the roadworks.”

Listen to the full podcast for more on the flooding review, Brown’s relationships with council and the wider public, the upcoming Auckland Council budget, and final rankings of Brown’s performance so far.