Auckland mayor Wayne Brown's slow reveal of what 'change and fix' might look like
Wednesday, 26 October 2022
Todd Niall is the senior Auckland affairs reporter for Stuff.
OPINION: If Auckland mayor Wayne Brown’s plan to “Fix the city” was a dance of seven veils, he’s really only shed a couple of them in the weeks since his election.
“Less is more” he unveiled as his mantra in a prepared speech to an informal gathering of 170 fellow council politicians on Tuesday, but along with other catchy one-liners, what it will mean and how it will play, is not yet clear.
When it came to an awkward-sounding post-speech question session in the closed-door gathering at the Aotea Centre, not one of the assembled 20 councillors and 149 local board members spoke up.
Maybe they were still trying to figure out the contradictions and puzzles in the speech they had just heard, which Brown handily distributed to media – the same media he mostly won’t yet be interviewed by.
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Brown wants to cut management, have fewer and shorter meetings but more decisions supported by fewer reports to read, and more powers, budget and discretion devolved to 21 local boards.
Yet 21 local boards, needing to make more decisions on how to spend bigger budgets, will need more managerial support and presumably more reports than before.
Brown wants to “improve transport services overall” and spoke often of giving buses more priority, yet he wants each community to decide whether they want to retain kerbside parking – road space that might be needed to build a better citywide bus network.
The mayor wants council committees – the number and structure of which he is yet to reveal – to make more final decisions and not pass everything up to the full council’s Governing Body.
However, what is his view on then having appointed members of the Independent Māori Statutory Board which sat on almost every committee so far, getting voting rights on those final decisions?
He suggested there might even be times where he respected a committee’s right to make a decision, even if he disagreed with it. That doesn’t seem to sit comfortably alongside his campaign talk.
Brown called on the 169 to advocate for, and deliver, what they had advocated to their communities while seeking election – yet around the council table they will be advocating positions at odds with those of some colleagues.
If 20 ward councillors champion their owns views, how do they then line up behind Brown’s “vision for change” if they disagree amongst themselves and perhaps even with the mayor.
A catchy line was the reference to 12,475 pages of reports produced for local politicians in the months leading up to election – a horror figure supporting his call for shorter reports.
Yet when Stuff checked this number with the council, it included large volumes such as the annual report, which was counted three or four times as it followed its statutory path through various committees.
It also included large volumes of planning documents, which are required by legislation to be presented to councillors even if they choose not to read them.
Rates should be as low as possible – a view held by every council, but it is the deciding what needs to be spent and what can be put aside, where the trick lies.
The mayoral rubber has yet to hit the political road. That will come when committees are set up, when leadership roles are or aren’t distributed and some big issues come to the table for a vote.
Mark down Tuesday November 1 in your diary to see those veils start to fall, as that’s when the first business meeting of the full council will be held – the first of a series leading up to Christmas.