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.
It’s election time: for mayor, council, local boards and licensing trusts. Until voting ends on October 11, Love this City is focusing on news, issues and personalities from the campaign trail. This week:
Wayne Brown and Warkworth sewage
Mayor Wayne Brown opened a new wastewater plant this week, at Snell’s Beach, southeast of Warkworth. The sun shone, the wind blew, there were grins and speeches and waiata all round, and a small flock of royal spoonbills huddled in a corner by the old and soon-to-be-decommissioned effluent ponds.
The spoonbill is a bird that manages to look both beautiful and ridiculous at the same time. We live in such a great city.
Papa Hetaraka from Ngāti Manuhiri told the VIPs and a hundred or so Watercare staff, “Where I come from, a mare is a female horse.”
When it was his turn to speak, Mare Brown looked at everyone in their hi-vis coats and said he was pleased to see so many orange gnomes, not orange cones.
The plant is part of a $450 million project to upgrade wastewater management on the Mahurangi Peninsula and around Warkworth, the main town in the area.
All over the city, council election candidates are arguing about infrastructure, growth and spending, but often the debates are random and badly informed. This project is a real live example of how development happens in Auckland.
“It involved a lot of clever engineering,” said Brown. “Clever and expensive. And I raise this because in this area, development got ahead of infrastructure.”
Developers demanded and in some cases won the right to build new subdivisions on “greenfields” land, even though the necessary infrastructure was 10 or more years away on Watercare’s workplan.
That workplan is important. It’s supposed to give confidence to developers about what they can and can’t do. Pushing it out of shape in one place undermines that confidence everywhere.
Brown said it had caused “environmental damage” and a lot of frustration and heartache. “So we’re fixing it. We’re getting ahead of it.”
He referred to the debates in Mt Eden, Remuera and other city fringe suburbs about intensification. “I believe that [build density in parts of those suburbs] is what we should do. We’ve spent a lot of money on the infrastructure there and we should use it. But there’s a lot of talk about greenfields growth being better. Greenfields is expensive and difficult. This project is an example.”
In addition to the wastewater plant, the $450m is paying for new pumps, a new pipeline under the town and down to the plant 5km away, new desludging, filtration and ultra-violet treatment facilities, and a new pipe to carry the treated water far out to sea. The local population is currently about 6000, but growth to 18,000 is projected in the next two or three decades and the project has been future-proofed to manage waste from 30,000 people in the decades beyond that.
When the whole thing is finished, sometime next year, the area will have the wastewater infrastructure it needs for development. And the pollution problems that have driven Mahurangi Peninsula oyster farms almost to the wall will be over.
Or, as Watercare chair Geoff Hunt put it, “We expect there will be very, very few wastewater overflows into the Mahurangi Inlet.” You can never say never, but Watercare CEO Jamie Sinclair says a flood event that overwhelmed the new facility would have to be “massive”.
Brown noted that putting the pipe through the town had been difficult. Watercare itself says it was a “source of considerable controversy within the community” and the project had been through three major redesigns in response to public feedback.
Or as Brown put it, “People complained about having no wastewater, but they also complained about the pipe to solve that problem being laid. These things are not easy, but they’ve got to be done.”
He added that for anyone who thinks Watercare isn’t doing enough, it has a thousand projects lined up for the next decade, budgeted for a total of $13.8 billion. As is the council way, most of these capital works will be funded from debt, so that the cost is borne by the generations that will benefit from them in the future.
“One or two councillors don’t understand this,” he said. “That’s because they don’t understand a balance sheet. This is the way to support growth.”
Then it was back to the jokes. “The current Deputy Prime Minister [that’s David Seymour] told me I should learn how to get on better with the Government,” said Brown. “But I think he’s the one who should learn how to do that.”
“I’m going for a beer.” Mayor Wayne Brown.
During a candidate meeting in Whangaparāoa, during a discussion on accountability, Brown got up, muttered his intentions and walked out. He really did go to the pub, and called me later to say so. He reckoned they were singing his song in there, literally: the pub band played a Coldplay song Brown’s own pub band plays. He also said he’d got more votes from the pub patrons than at the meeting.
“Animals are people too.” Rob McNeil, mayoral candidate for the Animal Justice Party Aotearoa.
McNeil says this often. He also says, “I may look like a chartered accountant, but that’s because I am a chartered accountant. But my shirt is from the Warehouse.” He confesses he doesn’t know much about how council works, but promises to “work my tail off to look deeply into every aspect of council operations”.
“Fun fact. Upper Harbour has the largest proportion of non-Samoans in all of Auckland. Look out for us!” John Loau, candidate for the Upper Harbour Local Board, at a meeting in Albany.
“I will not back down when faced with multimillionaires sitting around that council table.” Councillor Lotu Fuli, standing for re-election in the Manukau ward.
“We are supposed to understand better the louder he gets, like an Englishman getting French to understand English.” Wayne Brown on Waitematā and Gulf councillor Mike Lee, who often employs a fiery oratorical style.
“Speed humps and roaming dogs.” Mayoral candidate Kerrin Leoni, in Whangaparāoa, talking about things “where the council isn’t listening to the public”.
“We put an additional $5.3 million into animal management last year.” Councillor Richard Hills.
In many parts of the country, it’s hard to win a second term as mayor. Just ask Wellington, which has had three single-term mayors in a row. But if you can jump that hurdle the job is probably yours for life. In Upper Hutt, 71-year-old Wayne Guppy is seeking a ninth consecutive term in office.
Longevity can also be the rule for councillors. Around the Auckland Council table, there are still five OGs, as Alf Filipaina likes to call them: original gangstas from the first Super City council in 2010. Four of them are standing for a sixth term: Christine Fletcher, Mike Lee, Wayne Walker and Filipaina himself.
As Newsroom has reported, Hamilton’s outgoing mayor, Paula Southgate, has called for term limits. She wants mayors and councillors restricted to three consecutive terms in the same role, after which they have to retire. That’s one more year than American presidents are ordinarily allowed.
In Manukau, ward candidate Swanie Nelson has a similar pitch. “I admire both councillors,” she said at a recent candidates meeting in the Māngere town centre, “but I think they shouldn’t stand for more than four terms.” That was a direct reference to Filipaina.
Southgate is 61 and has served two terms as mayor. “Now I recognise I don’t have the same energy for another three years,” she says, “I’m moving aside to let somebody in who does.”
It’s probably easier for politicians to cling on at council than in Parliament. There’s less media scrutiny to expose seat warmers. In Parliament, there’s more pressure from your colleagues climbing the party ladder behind you, Winston Peters being the exception that proves the rule.
Low voter turnout also helps incumbents, especially as older people vote more.
Auckland Council’s Research and Evaluation Unit reports that only 21% of 26 to 35-year-olds voted in the last council election, but 62% of 76 to 80-year-olds cast their ballot.
As the young Upper Harbour Local Board candidate Selena Wong said at a meeting in Albany this week, last election, only 35 young people voted for the board she wants to get on.
These numbers show that council elections are dominated by older voters and that candidates skew older. Some of those candidates are long-serving. As Southgate says, this poses a challenge to democratic representation.
It may also be suppressing the vote. Are councils – voting for them and being on them – in the same category as classical music and lawn bowls: something younger people see as an old people’s game?
The demographic impact on the Auckland Council is stark. Twelve of the 21 people around the council table are boomers, and eight of those 12 are men.
Only three councillors – Chris Darby, Kerrin Leoni and Sharon Stewart – are retiring, although Leoni is running for mayor instead of her ward seat. This means there could be as few as three new councillors.
But if there was a three-term limit, those three retirees would be joined by the four OGs, along with Desley Simpson, Daniel Newman, Richard Hills, Greg Sayers and John Watson. That would create a total of 12 vacancies.
Mind you, there’s never a guarantee that new councillors will be younger. Of the six newbies elected last time round, Lotu Fuli, Ken Turner, Maurice Williamson and Wayne Brown were all older than the people they replaced. Only Andy Baker and Julie Fairey were younger than those who’d gone before.
Of course, if there was a three-term limit this year, Brown, who at 79 is the oldest of them all, would still be eligible for another six years.
“Youth. What do they want?” mused Kent Neville-White in Albany on Thursday. He works in property, is standing as an independent for the Upper Harbour Local Board, and he was being ironic.
Term limits are not the only way to increase voter turnout, or to get young people to vote, as several candidates around the city have been saying.
At a University of Auckland student meeting this week, City Vision’s Waitematā and Gulf ward candidate Patrick Reynolds said the solution was obvious: compulsory voting. He also proposed civics classes and lowering the voting age to 16.
One of his rivals for the job, the Waitematā local-board chair Genevieve Sage, said we need to “reverse the trend to gutter politics” and called out especially the “toxic” attacks on women. She herself has been frequently abused on social media.
Rebecca Huang, another candidate for the Upper Harbour board, suggested at the Albany meeting that the key was: “Go to them. Don’t expect them to come to you.”
Huang is one of three Gen Zers standing for that board, along with Wong and Apurv Shukla. They were among 22 candidates who fronted the meeting, which, despite being organised by local youth organisations, was attended largely by the usual much older demographic.
Huang had two other thoughts on the matter: if councils want more young people to vote they should work with groups that already exist, and they should prove that getting involved is worth it, by delivering results that young people want.
At a recent meeting in Grey Lynn, local board C&R candidate Anne Batley Burton took a different approach. She said young people should be financially educated, so they would “know how things are paid for before they vote”.
City Vision’s Alex Bonham said getting people engaged in projects was always valuable. Her example was the Meola Rd cycleway in Pt Chevalier, for which local school students campaigned prominently.
But C&R’s very-long-serving Greg Moyle wins my prize for the most original suggestion. He thought local board meetings should be in the evenings, so young people would be able to come along and watch.
“Some things the mayor gets to do really piss me off,” Wayne Brown said on Thursday. But this wasn’t one of them. He and Housing Minister Chris Bishop were opening the first two buildings in what he said would become “a village within a city”.
The buildings, known as Toi, are part of a joint Marutūāhu-Ockham project, involving local iwi and the Ockham development company, on the Unitec/Carrington hospital site that stretches from Mt Albert to Pt Chevalier.
Village is one way to put it. Paul Majurey, speaking for the iwi, said they’d be putting up about 30 buildings over the next couple of decades, and other developers will do more. There’ll be shops and other commercial activities, education facilities, parks and playgrounds, all of it connected at each and along its length by good public transport.
Nobody mentioned it, but this was the dream of Labour’s then-Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Phil Twyford, now masterplanned and finally coming to fruition.
Density done well is how all the speakers defined Toi. One of the buildings contains own-your-owns, the other rentals.
Brown said, “Apartments with green spaces around them, this is what we want, built where there’s good infrastructure.” He talked about how “the cost of using public transport is trending down, and the cost of using a car is going up, and that’s a good thing. This is good for my city”.
He mentioned Warkworth and its wastewater issues. “When development gets ahead of infrastructure, bad things happen. This is a simple way of saying that greenfields, building out, is not helpful to our city.”
I was standing next to Bishop, who’s a fan of greenfields growth as well as density, and he went a bit silent and frowny at that moment.
Then Brown went on election-campaign alert. “Beware those people promising zero rates rises,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
The mayor also spoke very warmly about Ockham boss Mark Todd and Marutūāhu’s Majurey, who “have both become friends of mine”.
Majurey couldn’t resist a wry response: he was the chair of the council’s “place-making” agency, Eke Panuku, which the council has abolished, at Brown’s instigation.
“The mayor’s favourite CCO,” Majurey called it.
Worried about those “two million homes”, where the 15-storey apartment blocks are going to go or whether there’s enough infrastructure to support Auckland’s anticipated growth? I’ve done an explainer on the proposed new plan change, available here.
And in more plan-change news this week, Minister Bishop has announced the timetable for consultation.
The council meets next week to decide the plan change’s future. It’s not a yes/no, adopt or reject decision. What it will decide is whether to “notify” the proposal.
This means the council will formally notify the minister that it wants a consultation and evaluation process to be established.
“The council has asked for a transparent process, and that’s exactly what we’re committed to delivering,” Bishop said this week. So he’s telling us, ahead of time to avoid confusion, how he will respond to notification.
First, the public will get seven weeks to have their say, from November 3 to December 19. This period starts after the council election on October 11, so it will be managed by the new council.
Then, an independent hearings panel (IHP) will be established.
“The IHP will hear from Aucklanders who have submitted on the plan change through the process,” said Bishop. “I am looking at setting an overall timeframe of around 18 months.”
The IHP report will guide the eventual outcome.
There have been claims that the 18-month timeframe is a victory for those who claimed the whole process was rushed. In fact, while the Government insisted on a rushed drafting process, the consultation process and the timeframe are normal.
To sign up for Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter, click here, select Love this City and save your preferences. For a step-by-step guide, click here.