Mayor Wayne Brown celebrates with tunnellers as the Hiwa-i-te-Rangi Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) breaks through, creating a 16km-long sewage line across central Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig
THREE KEY FACTS
Last week, Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown complained about council having to fund surf life savers on the east coast beaches. He called them “babysitters”.
Brown surfs on the west coast, where the water is more dangerous, and he said surf life savers there do a good job. Possibly, he’s not aware that in 2023, east coast surf life savers rescued 80 people.
Also last week, he thanked the Italian tunnellers who had finished boring the Central Interceptor, a new 16km-long sewage tunnel for the city, on time and on budget. “Muchas gracias,” he said, which is Spanish, not Italian.
It’s always like this. It’s great he’s focused on not wasting money, but he does it with what I view as casual rudeness and with blinkers on: To me, he measures value to the city by the value to him personally.
For an alternative view: Wayne Brown has delivered on his key promises
He rang me for a chat a couple of weeks ago, something he does quite often. As always, it wasn’t “off the record”: he wants to influence what I write. That’s not a criticism. We’re both doing our jobs.
The purpose of his call was to complain. About his own staff, who were “useless at organising things”. About councillors who “contribute nothing”. About Auckland Transport, which puts “no thought at all” into its decision-making.
And about Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson: “All she thinks about is how to help people buying their next Lamborghini.”
Is he funny? Sometimes. Is he right? Again, sometimes. But the complaints are constant.
I admire many things about Brown’s mayoralty. I don’t think he’s a menace, which is more than I can say about some Members of Parliament. I like the idea of an outsider coming in with fresh eyes and independent experience, shaking up the complacency. Done well, all institutions should go through it.
I’d be more than prepared to swallow a few dead rats if Brown’s good stuff was good enough. If he really was fixing the city, as he promised in 2022 and promises again this year. But is he?
My concerns boil down to three things.
First, the mayor does not appear to have a useful working relationship with the Government. Second, that also seems to be true for his relationships with everyone else.
And third, apart from doing things “better, faster, cheaper”, it’s still a mystery to me what he thinks this city could or should be. Where’s the vision?
Relations with the Government are a real problem. “Auckland control of Auckland affairs” was one of Brown’s key campaign pledges, but the Government has increased its control.
I reported last week that Brown does not meet regularly with the Prime Minister. You can argue that’s the PM’s fault, but it’s a reality and we have a mayor who also hasn’t been able to fix it.
Brown’s much-promised Auckland Integrated Transport Plan still doesn’t exist and I don’t think any Government minister has ever even mentioned it, let alone suggested it will happen. Instead, a new structure for transport decisions will give the Transport Minister direct involvement in the city’s own planning processes. This is unprecedented.
It’s not just transport. In March, Brown was not invited to the Government’s big Investor Summit, even though the host city mayor would ordinarily open such an event.
He rang me about that, too, to complain and to say he didn’t even know it was on.
When senior Government minister Chris Bishop made a major speech on the future of the city in February, the Mayor declined to attend.
Who does Brown work well with?
When he launched his re-election campaign this year, he didn’t invite any councillors and none turned up. He said he didn’t want to show “favouritism”.
But many of those councillors fell over themselves to align with him during the last campaign, and to turn up to his victory party.
They’re not there now.
This shows in my view a lack of working relationships that makes Brown ineffective. I see it showing up all the time.
When the council debated its infrastructure priorities last month, he said a new harbour crossing should be on the list. But he didn’t try to amend the list and nor did any of the councillors.
Last month, he mentioned in a council meeting that the NZ Transport Agency is working on a new harbour crossing “and has been told not to deal with council”.
That’s outrageous. But whatever the faults of Wellington, it doesn’t help Auckland to have a mayor who gets himself sidelined like that.
Brown’s big achievement is probably the Auckland Future Fund, which should provide a healthy long-term income stream for the city.
He’s delivered budgets with the lowest rates rises of any of our main cities and, while that’s been achieved with painful spending cuts, no part of the council’s operations has been decimated.
This is good, but not unusual: Phil Goff and Len Brown before him kept rates rises consistently moderate too.
As promised, Brown has implemented wide-ranging reform of the council-controlled organisations (CCOs). It’s too early to know the value of this, because the new structure won’t be in place for a few more months.
One of the agencies to disappear is Eke Panuku. But just before Brown abolished it, he got it to build “Browny’s Pool”, a free, public, seawater swimming pool at Karanga Plaza near the Viaduct Events Centre.
The pool brought out the classic Wayne. It was cheap, but not as cheap as he’d hoped for. So he rang me to complain about it.
“It only cost as much as it did because silly old Eke Panuku insisted on changing sheds and toilets.”
But shouldn’t a pool have changing sheds and toilets? And weren’t the toilets already there?
“Well, the toilets were due for an upgrade, that was already going to happen, that’s why it cost more.”
So ... what was he complaining about?
Those new changing sheds, by Pac Studio, are shortlisted for an architectural award to be announced later this month. It’s a small and rather beautiful new public building. That’s, you know, a good thing.
Brown is now promising more. He talked last week about “all of the Browny’s pools I’m going to put in next term”.
I’m a big fan of that, but it will require more babysitters.
He used to be keen on moving the port. Instead, he’s locked in a plan that keeps all the current port operations on-site and allows a new cruise ship facility to poke further into the harbour. It even requires the council itself to spend tens of millions of dollars it doesn’t have to repair or demolish Captain Cook and Marsden wharves.
He likes to say he’s forced Port of Auckland to pay a bigger dividend. But the new board and chief executive, appointed under Goff, are responsible for that.
In my view, Brown has never sounded stronger or been in real terms less effective than in dealing with Auckland Transport (AT).
Immediately on becoming mayor, he demanded AT follow instructions and listen to public opinion. He established a monthly reporting system, under which AT has to account for itself, in public, against a set of KPIs signed off by council.
All of this happens. The problem is, there are some council instructions Brown doesn’t personally agree with, such as emissions reduction and some of the safer-streets projects. And there are many instances in which public opinion doesn’t line up behind him either. But Brown keeps complaining anyway, even when AT is doing what it’s been told to do.
It’s true AT is not always good at delivery and its consultation processes do not inspire confidence. But while some of its failings are big, many are small. In my view, Brown treats small mistakes as if they’re symptomatic of catastrophic failure.
Even if you agree with him about AT, the problem is that his approach doesn’t produce better outcomes, by his reckoning or anyone else’s. Brown has turned Auckland Transport into possums caught in the headlights and the public into angry drivers intent on running them down.
He consistently favours men in his appointments to major committee chairs and agency boards. His handling of the 2023 Anniversary Weekend floods was widely criticised for a lack of empathy and he still says he did little wrong.
The comments of many councillors, MPs, business leaders, council staff, community leaders and others who deal with the mayor share a theme: Working with Wayne, they say, is all about managing Wayne. Trying to steer his obsessions into something constructive, to get him not to say silly things, to help him represent the city well.
The wry smiles when the conversation turns to “dealing with Browny” are plain to see.
Why wasn’t he asked to open the Investment Summit? Maybe this is a clue: In his speech to an infrastructure conference last year, he joked about the benefits if Wellington was destroyed by an earthquake. He’s so random.
In 2022, the year Brown was elected, the research group Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures presented nine options for how Auckland might progress. Sir Peter Gluckman, the Koi Tū chairman, made what should have been a game-changing speech when the report was launched.
He talked about the city’s failure to grasp its opportunities, and the impact this has on the economy, social disparity, cultural life, the environment and more.
Here’s the big statistic. With 36% of the country’s population, Auckland produces 38% of GDP. That’s poor. Main cities are supposed to be engine rooms for their national economies. London, for example, with 13% of the British population, produces 23% of its GDP.
Gluckman wasn’t complaining, he was offering a way forward. Brown, to my knowledge, has never spoken about any of this, or anything else like it. Although he’s the mayor, he doesn’t appear to have a plan or do much big-picture thinking at all.
He’ll be 80 next year. His stamina is impressive. But if he wins re-election in October, I hope he uses his second term to bequeath us more than cost cuts and grumpiness.
A Flaxmere house fire was caused by residual heat in folded tumbled-dried clothing.