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.
Councillor Julie Fairey is back in hospital, following complications after she was rel="" title="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-councillor-julie-fairey-suffers-broken-leg-in-bike-car-crash/BCQ4AK3RGVAXVFVFPWYA5BNBAM/">hit by a car in June. The driver did not see her as she waited with her bike at an intersection, and drove into her when he cut the corner.
The car broke Fairey’s leg and left her with other injuries which have made movement extremely difficult. She was recuperating at home but the injuries took a turn for the worse this week and she is back in hospital for specialist care.
She told me, rather gamely I thought, that she’s “going well with the recovery so far”.
Fairey attended this week’s council meeting remotely, from her hospital bed.
At that meeting, Mayor Wayne Brown took the unusual step of asking the council to approve online attendance requests one-by-one. He wanted to out any councillor who did not have a good reason to stay away.
When he read out Christine Fletcher’s name, he said, “I believe she’s in another country”.
I asked Fletcher about this and she confirmed she is in Fiji with her family for a “special event”. Fletcher attended the meeting remotely.
Brown did not express a view on that. He accepted that Fairey could not be at the meeting because she was “run over by a car”, and wished her well.
He also accepted that Maurice Williamson was online because he was recovering from surgery, and that Alf Filipaina, also online, had advised he was unwell.
Then Brown referred to Wayne Walker, who wanted approval to be online. The mayor said: “Councillor Walker, if he hasn’t been run over by a car, I’m sure someone will provide one”.
The two Waynes do not get on, but several councillors said they did not find this comment funny.
“I think it’s really inappropriate to make jokes about people,” said Kerrin Leoni, who is running against Brown for mayor.
“If we’ve got a reason why they’re not here, we should just be sticking to that and not talking about people getting run over.”
Walker himself did not respond to Brown’s jibe until later, when he explained that he, too, was unwell, and had advised council staff of this.
We’re into the last two months of the council’s current term and things are a little bit fractious. Online attendance has become a flashpoint for this.
The online option dates from the Covid pandemic and has remained in place ever since. There are always some councillors who use it.
Following stories of some of them “attending” while on holiday, the onliners were asked to keep their cameras on. But some still don’t do this and among those who do, some use an artificial background.
In an attempt to counter this, the council resolved last year not to count any online attendees towards the quorum. That’s the number of members required to be present for a committee or full council meeting to take place. Usually, it’s half plus one.
They can speak and vote remotely, but they have to be in the room to count for the quorum.
This hasn’t noticeably increased the number of councillors who turn up to meetings. Nor has it encouraged some of them to arrive on time. A few are almost always late.
The new rules mean meetings often start late and two recent council committee meetings have had to be abandoned altogether for lack of a quorum. Council workshops, where there is no quorum, are even more poorly attended: at a transport workshop last month, only five councillors were in the room.
“I want to make sure that people understand you have an obligation to be here unless you’ve got a good reason,” Brown told his colleagues this week.
But the problem isn’t limited to attendance. Only 10 of the 21 members of the council’s governing body filled out a recent survey on priorities for the future of transport, despite repeated appeals from staff.
And yet these same councillors believe they are fit for purpose when it comes to transport planning. They’ve voted to take it away from Auckland Transport and supervise it themselves, inside the central council structure.
And how’s this? The main topic of the workshop that only five of them turned up to was: what they’ll be expected to do in the new transport setup.
Candidate nominations for local body elections closed at Friday midday. The incumbent Wayne Brown is the mayoral frontrunner, with Whau ward councillor Kerrin Leoni standing against him in the hope of becoming the city’s first wahine Māori mayor.
Down the ballot, things are more spicy. There will be some hotly contested ward elections, caused by retirements and simmering conflicts on this term’s council. Stand by for outrage and aspiration to start flying around Albany, Howick, Manukau, Manurewa-Papakura, North Shore, Waitākere, Waitematā and Whau. More on this soon.
Will Auckland get a “regional deal” with the Government before Christmas? And if so, what will be in it?
Regional deals are a way for central and local governments to work together on strategic development. As in: 10-year plans that include priority spending areas, major projects, funding arrangements and decision-making processes.
How will this apply to Auckland. We’re what’s known as a “primate city”, the meaning of which was explained on the Conversation this week by Tim Welch, a planning expert at the University of Auckland.
Primate cities are at as least twice as big as other cities in the country (Auckland is four times bigger than Christchurch and greater Wellington), and it plays, or should play, an outsize role in the national economy.
The theory is: If the gorilla is happy, everyone’s happy.
But right now, the gorilla is not happy. The third State of the City report, sponsored by Deloitte and released last month, revealed we are last among nine comparable cities on productivity, opportunity and a range of quality-of-life measures. The reason, Welch says, is that successive governments have treated the city as a burden, rather than an engine of national growth.
Part of the problem is our view of how a big city should function. In effect, we tend to think of it as a large version of a small town.
The “uncomfortable truth”, Welch says, is that we are “hampered by car dependency, low-density housing and weak economic performance”.
On the measure of how good the city is to walk in, Auckland ranks 82nd out of 84.
Many Aucklanders don’t see the problem. Car dependent is what we are. Density is for some other part of town. Bike lanes aren’t part of any transport strategy, they’re the archetypal “nice to have”.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon even told councils recently to “forget the ... excessive bike lanes”.
Although, to be fair, Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown recently and with great enthusiasm turned the first sod on the last section of one of those cycleways, connecting Tāmaki Drive with Glen Innes.
Every time housing density, light rail or other mass transit is proposed, there’s a chorus of complaints. But in cities doing better than Auckland, apartment buildings are normal and mass transit and cycleways aren’t fringe ideas either. They’re mainstream.
Cycleways are not at the heart of the problem. But transport and housing are.
This month, the Government and the council will begin negotiations over a regional deal.
The central question for Auckland will be how to build a stronger economy: one that raises the living standards and quality of life of the city, which will spill over to the whole country.
But beyond platitudes, does either side understand what this will require?
The Government has tended to lean toward discussion of “funding mechanisms”, but that’s only part of the picture.
Auckland Council has provided ministers with its own list of five priority areas: housing, transport, innovation, global relations and the environment. What the council says about them has the potential to raise some tricky questions, because there are some big gaps between the two sides. The council’s list is in italics:
Will the Government kickstart construction of the thousands of housing units it has stopped over the last 18 months, leaving communities like Mt Roskill to deal with swathes of empty land?
The Government cut $564 million from Auckland Transport’s budget last year and produced a transport plan that Brown says “makes zero sense for Auckland”. Brown calls its flagship policy “Roads of National Party Significance”.
Will the Government rethink any of this? Will it help the mayor establish fully efficient bus-priority on arterial roads, as he repeatedly says the city needs? Will it speed up the construction of dedicated rapid bus routes and rethink its neglect of emissions reductions, both of which are important transport policies for the council?
Will the Government rethink the cuts and narrow focus it has imposed on the science and technology sector, and will it boost support for tertiary education?
Auckland gets most of the country’s new migrants. They’re an economic powerhouse and bring exciting diversity, but they also put pressure on infrastructure and social cohesion. How will the Government help the council manage that?
The ecosystem of the Hauraki Gulf is endangered on many fronts, including the sharp decline of snapper and crayfish stocks and the spread of exotic caulerpa weed.
The Minister for RMA Reform thinks protected views of volcanic cones should be abandoned, at least in part. And Auckland still needs an awful lot of help to deal with the growing dangers of flooding caused in large part by climate change.
Does the Government even believe the council should be spending money on the environment? In all their recent speeches about councils “getting back to basics”, no minister has said a word about this.
Some things are missing from the council’s “big five” list. Auckland has a crisis at the underachieving end of education. We have some appalling health outcomes too.
And given Brown’s core election pledges in 2022, he must be disappointed the apparent focus of regional deal negotiations will not be “Auckland for Aucklanders”.
The mayor used to say the single biggest thing the Government could do for Auckland would be to stop telling the city what to do. That is, to devolve the decision-making power – and the funding that goes with it.
But this Government has taken more direct charge of Auckland affairs than any other in recent decades and there’s no sign this is on the table for debate.
It’s a critical issue. GST on Auckland rates amounts to more than $400 million a year, all of which goes to the Government. Further, because the Government doesn’t pay rates on its own property, despite using local services, that’s another $36m the council doesn’t receive.
This is make-or-break time for Brown. Getting a regional deal that devolves some of the power to the city is one of the big reasons he ran for mayor in the first place. These negotiations begin as his first term draws to an end, but they won’t be finished before the election in October.
It could also be make-or-break time for the Government. National’s strong showing in Auckland won it the election in 2023, and it still polls better here than in the country as a whole. National will be very keen to make that last.
But how will these things be achieved? There’s not much agreement anywhere. Councillor Christine Fletcher told Housing and RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop very bluntly this week that he risks losing the Auckland vote with his housing density proposals.
Bishop, for his part, believes greater density, especially around the main transport hubs, is critical to Auckland’s success.
“The simple reality is that housing in Auckland is some of the most expensive in the developed world and is holding the city back,” he told the Herald.
“The answer is to build more houses - and that’s what our planning reforms will enable.”
Candidates for the council elections in October will doubtless make their positions on these issues loud and clear between now and election day, October 12.
I wrote this week about Bishop’s “message” to councils: he’s told them to focus on “efficiency and effectiveness” and stop trying to win architectural and design awards.
But good design is the way to achieve efficiency, I said, as well as being the key to building a beautiful, stimulating and economically successful city.
I’ve been trying to think what Paris would be like if Bishop was in charge.
There’d be none of the boulevards, parks, sewerage and other public works built in the 19th century by Baron Haussmann. No art nouveau in the Metro. No vaulted railway stations, no graceful bridges across the River Seine and no Paris Plages, the summer beaches along its banks. No Pompidou Centre, no Louvre with or without its pyramid, no repurposing of central city streets for pedestrians and cyclists. No Eiffel Tower.
No Paris, really. The thing about making a beautiful city that everyone wants to visit is that the people in charge get inspired by what came before, add their bit and bequeath more beauty to those who come after.
After the Notre Dame fire, what would our minister have advised? Just whack up a big shed?
With funding from council and the Government, the restoration of the St James Theatre, on Lorne St in front of the central library, is finally scheduled to begin. The deal was part-brokered by local MP Chloe Swarbrick earlier this year and the start date is October.
Meanwhile, the derelict site in front of the St James, on Queen St facing the Civic, is up for sale. The site comes complete with planning consents for a 43-storey tower. Hopefully, this means it will be developed, but it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
Time for the council to lean on whoever needs to be leaned on, if you ask me. That site is a disaster zone in the central city and urgently needs a temporary renovation. A pocket park, please, like the pop-up Griffiths Gardens that used to occupy the site of what is now the CRL’s Wellesley St station entrance.
The council did it once, now they can do it again.
Auckland has some really good bridges, especially walking bridges. Ngā Hau Māngere, which joins Māngere Bridge and Onehunga, has an enormous and very graceful arch and a wide walkway with lots of room for fishing, walking, cycling or just hanging out. And while the name means “gentle lazy winds”, architect Pete Bossley added several places to shelter, because sometimes the wind off the Manukau harbour isn’t quite as gentle as you might want.
Arches feature in some of the other bridges too, notably Warren & Mahoney’s Waterview Connection footbridge, which joins New Windsor with Ōwairaka over SH20, along the route of Te Auaunga/Oakley Creek.
The city’s newest bridge is in Panmure, where the old arched walkway across the Panmure Basin has been replaced by a brand-new version whose design echoes the original.
Te Kōpua o Hiku is named for the deep pool of Hiku, which it straddles. The local iwi, Ngāti Pāoa, say the pool was once occupied by Moko-ika-hiku-waru, a lizard-fish with eight tails who is their kaitiaki taniwha.
The bridge is the result of a partnership between Ngāti Pāoa Iwi Trust and Maungakiekie Tāmaki Local Board, and features some pretty snazzy artworks commissioned by the council’s Public Art Unit.
Janine Williams (Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāti Whātua ki Kaipara, Ngāti Mahuta) and Shannon Novak (Ngāti Pākehā, Croatian) have combined Māori and Croatian imagery to evoke ideas of protection and belonging. Their work was inspired by tā moko and the Croatian practice of putting markings on the fingers and hands of children during wartime, to protect them and help them return home.
There’s also a light show, playing every night until 10pm. It’s controlled by a weather station on-site which collects data on the prevailing winds in real time and converts it into patterns of light that pulse, or breath, across the bridge.
Morgann Le Bars of Norwich Group did the lighting design and David Hayes of iion provided the technical wizardry to make it work. This “breathing of the wind”, they say, is a metaphor for the breath of the local tupuna, kaitiaki taniwha and everyone who comes to enjoy the area. It’s the fourth project the Public Art Unit has commissioned from iwi working in collaboration with iion.
That bridge is pretty handy for just walking across, too.
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