Mr Fix-it, Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, inspecting Auckland's big new sewage tunnel earlier this year. Photo / Michael Craig
THREE FACTS
There’s a lot at stake for incumbent Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown in the council elections this year.
Not so much the mayoral race itself: he’s the clear frontrunner and few would predict an upset. But Brown’s got a plan and he’s very keen to see it fulfilled. For that, he needs not just mayoral votes, but support from voters in the election of ward councillors.
Brown’s plan is to be rid of councillors he doesn’t like. There’s a core of five, and the mayor’s new Fix Auckland ticket, set up with his deputy, Desley Simpson, is standing candidates against four of them.
The five are Wayne Walker and John Watson in the Albany ward, Alf Filipaina and Lotu Fuli in the Manukau ward, and Mike Lee in the Waitematā and Gulf ward. Fix Auckland has two candidates each in Albany and Manukau, but has not stood anyone in Waitematā.
It’s not that Brown needs more votes around the council table. He has been able to fashion a working majority this term with core support from the political centre, leaning a little to the right on some issues and a little to the left on others.
His budget has been passed with solid majorities in each year of the three-year term. This includes steady rates rises, the contentious sale of airport shares and the establishment of the Auckland Future Fund, a wealth fund for the city.
His achievements also include reform of the council-controlled organisations, to which council has given near-unanimous support.
And Brown enjoys strong council support for the negotiating positions he is taking with the Government on a regional deal, transport planning and the wider question of devolving power and funding from the central to local level.
These are the big things Brown cares about and his council has supported him.
He doesn’t get his own way on a bunch of other stuff, like library opening hours, the new cycleway connection on Victoria St or making the stadium debate(s) go away, but it’s unlikely he loses much sleep over them.
There’s one other big thing that does matter to Brown: the floods and landslides of our climate-related wild weather.
It was officials, not the mayor, who initiated the council’s programmes for managing this, but he supports them and, on the whole, so does the rest of the council.
So, given that he already wins the things that matter to him, why is Brown so determined to get rid of a handful of his colleagues? They’re not even the only ones who annoy him.
It’s because he finds these five exasperating beyond measure. They rage and fulminate, they lecture him and the other councillors, and they quite often attack the integrity of council staff. Brown’s had enough.
This frustration doesn’t bring out the best in him. In a meeting last week, he said, “Councillor Walker, if he hasn’t been run over by a car, I’m sure someone will provide one.”
He didn’t mean it as a death threat, but it’s a nasty thing to say.
Is there politics in it? Yes and no. All five of the councillors on Brown’s get-them-gone list say they’re on the left. But they mean very different things by this, and several other councillors on the left do not drive him to distraction.
The Manukau councillors are staunchly Labour: anti-asset sales, defenders of the poor and advocates for community services and social policies that help the vulnerable.
Brown, they know, has no apparent interest in poverty. He has had almost nothing to say about one of the biggest issues facing the city: the housing crisis.
Brown and these councillors are involved in a classic political conflict.
With Mike Lee and the Albany councillors, whom he calls the Albanians, it’s different. They celebrated the mayor’s victory in the 2022 election and he gave both Watson and Lee important roles in his leadership team.
But by July 2023, not even a year later, he was fed up with their behaviour and dumped them both.
Lee, Walker and Watson are independent renegades. They argue against what they see as corruption, bureaucratic control and projects that cost too much, but principally they vent their fury on the mayor. They’ve done it to every mayor they’ve served under.
All the councillors oppose Brown from time to time. But there’s a critical distinction between the renegades and most of the others, whatever their politics.
The others build working relationships with officials. Whether it’s Desley Simpson on the right or Richard Hills on the left, most of them try, in workshops and informal negotiations with the mayor and his staff, to wrangle him closer to their own position.
They engage. In politics as in life, this is how you get things done.
But for some councillors, being an angry outsider is the only thing they know. So they sit on their high horses and keep shouting at the mayor and the rest of council. Brown is sick of it.
There’s a good question to ask any sitting councillor standing for re-election. What did you do? Not, what speeches did you make before you were voted down, but what did you get done?
Brown faces 11 other contenders in the mayoral race and seems unbothered by any of them. His election spend has been limited to a few radio ads, although as mayor he also does social media. His leading opponent, Kerrin Leoni, says he has declined at least one invitation to meet-the-candidate events.
Leoni herself has raised a moderate amount of money and plans to campaign hard, but Brown has a big war chest at his disposal. He has also reformed the campaign team of Tim Hurdle and Matthew Hooton, who were instrumental in his 2022 win.
There are 13 wards in the Auckland Council setup, six of which elect one councillor while the other seven elect two. That makes 20 councillors who, with the mayor, make up the governing body of council.
Demographically, the current governing body comprises 13 men and eight women. Over half of them are boomers, born before 1965, and 16 are Pākehā, with three Samoan and two Māori.
Three councillors have been there continuously since the start in 2010: Filipaina, Christine Fletcher and Sharon Stewart. Mike Lee was also there at the start but lost his seat in 2019 before regaining it in 2022.
Only four councillors are retiring this year: Stewart, Leoni, Angela Dalton and Chris Darby.
Beneath the governing body there are 21 local boards, with boundaries that are usually but not always roughly aligned to the ward boundaries.
In the ward elections, incumbents usually win. Usually but not always. Four sitting councillors were voted out in 2022 and some of the other votes were close.
That’s not true this year in Ōrākei and Rodney, where incumbents Simpson and Greg Sayers, respectively, are standing alone. Pretty much all the other 18 wards are in play.
In the twin-seat Albany, incumbents Walker and Watson have been in the job since 2013, but the Fix Auckland candidates have strong local profiles. Gary Brown and Victoria Short are both on the Hibiscus and Bays Local Board, Brown as chair, and in 2022 he stood for mayor while she stood for council and placed third.
Labour candidates have always been safe in two-seat Manukau. But they haven’t had much serious opposition, either.
The Fix Auckland candidates are Vicky Hau, who manages the Māngere Town Centre, and Luke Mealamu, the owner of a large security firm and brother of former All Black Keven Mealamu. Keven is himself an unsuccessful former candidate for the Franklin ward.
Both Hau and Luke Mealamu are also standing for the local board.
And Mayor Brown is a local identity in Ōtāhuhu, which is in the ward, because he owns a popular pub there and is on the business association. Will his face on billboards with his candidates make a difference? It hasn’t been tested.
Still, Filipaina and Fuli are local heroes in that ward and it will be a shock to see either of them unseated.
In Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa, also with two seats, Christine Fletcher won easily in 2022 on the National-aligned Communities & Residents (C&R) ticket, and should do so again. But Julie Fairey, on the Labour-Greens-aligned City Vision ticket, had to wait for the final count before learning she had beaten C&R’s Will McKenzie for the second seat.
This time, C&R isn’t even standing a second candidate, perhaps recognition that Fairey has consolidated her hold. City Vision has teamed her with Jon Turner, who is currently championing off-leash dog-walking in Monte Cecilia Park. He’s on the Puketāpapa Local Board.
Fletcher is also in election mode: she went to battle against RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop’s housing density plans last week, with a high-profile op-ed in the Herald. Fairey has a badly broken leg, after being crashed into by an inattentive motorist while she was stationary on her bike at an intersection.
In two-seat Manurewa-Papakura, the Greens-aligned Angela Dalton is retiring. Local board chair Matt Winiata, a real-estate agent, is chasing her seat on the ticket of incumbent councillor and National Party member Daniel Newman. They’ll be hard to beat.
In the two-seat North Shore, Richard Hills is standing again but progressive independent Chris Darby is retiring, and both positions are being chased hard by local-board stalwarts John Gillon and Danielle Grant.
One of the oddities of council elections is that many candidates invent their own tickets. Nowhere is this less informative than in North Shore. Hills, Gillon and Grant are standing for Positive Leadership for the Shore, Putting the Shore First and Shore Choice, and I’m not even going to say which is which.
The truth is, Hills is Labour and chair of the council’s powerful Policy and Planning Committee, which means Mayor Brown trusts him to do a reasonable job, while Grant is in the National Party.
In two-seat Howick, former cabinet minister Maurice Williamson is favoured to win a second term, but Stewart’s old spot is wide open.
Williamson is “supporting” local board deputy chair Bo Burns for the job. But Paul Young, a councillor last term, wants to get it back and Damien Light, a local board member who has stood for the ward twice before, is also having another crack.
There’s a very hot election for the single-seat Waitematā and Gulf Ward, where incumbent Lee faces five challengers. Chief among them are City Vision’s Patrick Reynolds, deputy chair of the City Centre Advisory Panel and a former member of the Waka Kotahi board, and Genievieve Sage, chair of the Waitematā Local Board.
Sage was one of four C&R members elected to the board in 2022, but she accepted an invitation by the three City Vision members to become chair, thus rejecting her own ticket’s choice for the role. C&R was furious and quickly parted ways with her, but she did not cross over: Sage has remained independent of both sides.
Sage was widely expected to join Brown’s Fix Auckland ticket, but that hasn’t happened.
In addition to council experience, which they all have, Reynolds would bring urban-planning clout, Lee the package described above, and Sage what she says is a desire to rise above the squabbles and build a better city.
The Whau seat is vacant, with Leoni deciding to run only for mayor and not the ward as well. This ward is always hard fought: centred on Avondale, it’s been represented by four people since 2010, bobbling between National-aligned and Labour-aligned councillors with each change.
Sarah Paterson-Hamlin represents Labour this time. She works for the Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust and is on the local board. Craig Lord, an anti-rates-rise candidate who has twice stood unsuccessfully for mayor, has joined the WestWards ticket of Waitākere councillor Ken Turner.
And among the four other candidates, the Greens have put up Anjana Iyer: she’s “a South Indian, queer woman living with a visible disability, and I’ve called Auckland home since 2011”.
Next door in the twin-seat Waitākere, incumbents Shane Henderson and Turner both seek re-election. Henderson is Labour and the council’s most outspoken advocate for more low-cost housing. Turner styles himself as an ordinary bloke.
Among the nine others running against them, three names stand out. National-aligned Linda Cooper wants the job back: Turner won it off her in 2022. The Labour-Greens aligned Future West ticket has put up long-time environmental activist and former local board member Christine Rose. And local businessman Sunil Kaushal is standing alongside Turner on the WestWards ticket.
Democracy is alive and well at the local board level. The Henderson-Massey board has a remarkable 29 people chasing eight seats, including all but one of the incumbents.
In Howick, 25 people seek election to the 11 seats, Maungakiekie-Tāmaki has 23 candidates for seven seats, Ōtara-Papatoetoe has 21 also for seven and in Devonport-Takapuna 20 people are chasing six seats, with only three of the 20 being sitting members.
The Act Party has bounced into contention in Auckland this year, with candidates in five wards and many more for local boards. They include three for the Ōrākei board, where C&R currently has a lock on all seven seats. That’s another hot contest to watch.
Assuming he wins, where will all of this leave Mayor Brown in his quest for a council to do his bidding? There will probably be at least half a dozen new councillors. But who they’ll be is still too early to know: in wards all over the city there are feisty showdowns, friendly meet-and-greets and an awful lot of social media still to come.
Right now, though, my guess is that he’ll have a similar range to now. Half a dozen loyalists, half a dozen angries and about half the council somewhere in the middle.
The challenge for Brown and his deputy on the Fix Auckland ticket, Desley Simpson, will be to work with that dozen in the middle to create a programme of policies for the new term that allows them to make real progress.
Most councillors will be winnable to sensible plans but not to silliness. Of course, how each of them defines “sensible” and “silly” will remain, as always, up to them.
Voting is by postal ballot. Voting papers will be distributed from September 9 and voting closes on October 11.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning 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.