Auckland Council budget: Mayor Wayne Brown versus the furious few – Simon Wilson

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown: His battle for a new budget publicly begins today. Photo / Michael Craig

OPINION

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is in the political fight of his life. He wants a major rethink of how the council raises and spends money, and most councillors will try to reach an agreement on how to do that. But some seem ready to just say no to everything.

Wayne Brown was in fine form at a packed meeting in Remuera on Friday morning. Local MP and Act Party leader David Seymour hosted the event, with the mayor as his guest.

The Brownisms flew thick and fast.

As always, he didn’t mind whom he offended. “Steven Joyce was the third-worst politician in my lifetime,” he said, to a strained silence in the room.

He didn’t mind criticising his own officials. Auckland Transport, he is still saying, despite big cuts to its spending, has too many “silly projects” and is building “speed humps no one has asked for”. That got approval.

His jokes are usually at someone else’s expense. “Oh look,” he said at one point, “that man’s fallen asleep.”

Often, he speaks an insightful truth.

“Digging tunnels for light rail was stupid, and digging them under the harbour for a new crossing is even more stupid. They’ve spent $350 million so far on those projects. That money would have fixed all the potholes.”

He got an appreciative laugh.

Then he claimed he had introduced the “radical idea” of expecting the port to make a profit, “which no one had ever thought of before”.

In fact, the port, owned by the council, was paying a dividend long before Brown turned up.

Week by week around the council table, Brown exhibits all these traits.

Many councillors and officials find him hard to work with; for some, he’s downright impossible.

But what the mayor is trying to do – his big goal – is not wrong. He wants to put an end to business as usual. He wants a clear-eyed understanding of how the money gets spent and why.

He wants his councillors to understand that the gap between what the council does and the revenue to fund it is too wide.

And in contrast to Phil Goff, his predecessor, Brown is not interested in managing what’s in front of him. He has some big plans to close the gap. He wants, still, to fix Auckland.

In the year and a bit he’s been in office, the political forces around the mayor have almost completely flipped.

He’s close to former Goff allies he used to denigrate, while most of the renegades who couldn’t stand Goff and cheered Brown’s victory are renegades once again.

The reason for this, put simply, is that most councillors try to be constructive. Often, they do not agree. But they seek the acceptable compromise. They try to build majority support, in order to progress.

Brown doesn’t care if they’re on the right, like Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson, or on the left, like Manurewa councillor Angela Dalton. He’s there for whoever wants to get things done.

The renegades, though, just say no to almost everything. They say it loudly, angrily, frequently and at length. They are the furious few.

Christine Fletcher, Mike Lee, John Watson and Wayne Walker all have a track record of doing this.

When they speak at council meetings, the other councillors hear them out and move on, mostly without engaging. They treat the furious few as if they are online trolls.

Brown talked about them at his Remuera meeting. “Some councillors have had a long career opposing everything,” he said. “It’s done them very well. But it doesn’t help.”

Referring to Walker and Watson, who are both Albany ward councillors, he added, “I don’t know what’s wrong with the water in Whangaparāoa.”

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown (right) with Act Party leader David Seymour at a public meeting in Remuera last Friday. Photo / RNZ / Finn Blackwell

Today is Brown’s big day. The council, convening as the Budget Committee, will consider his draft Long Term Plan (LTP), which includes a 10-year budget.

All councils have to go through this: debating an LTP, putting it out for public consultation and adopting a final version before the end of the financial year, which is June 30. The exercise is repeated every three years.

Today, they will be hoping to agree on what to send to public consultation, and how.

Brown calls his draft “radical”. In addition to leasing the port operation and establishing an investment fund, he wants to overhaul transport planning and relations with central government. There are also major financial pressures from flood management, water and a very long list of other demands.

He says he wants to do “fewer things really well, rather than lots of things poorly”.

“We have a lot of libraries,” he told the Remuera crowd. “One in every suburb, just about. Yet young people don’t read. So they’re called ‘something-or-other centres’ now.”

He stopped, and then said, “I wasn’t picking on libraries.”

The draft plan talks about “paying more to do more” or “paying less to do less”, but to what extent is each of these acceptable?

There are four revenue-related areas: sell or lease assets, cut services, raise rates and increase other revenue. No consensus has emerged among councillors about how to strike the balance.

There is no right answer, and certainly no good answer.

There will be – there have already been – some desperately difficult debates. Opposing sides will really struggle to agree. But they will try, mightily.

Just saying no to every proposal is the worst answer of all, because it’s pointless.

“Everything,” said Brown, “comes down to two questions: What is the problem we’re fixing? And how do we do it better, cheaper and faster?”

Whether or not he’s rude to councillors today, and no matter how furious some of them get, he’ll have the public onside in wanting that.

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.