Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has extended the State of Emergency due to the risk of ongoing slips and flooding.
Video / Auckland Council
It’s time to cut Wayne Brown some slack.
Cue more Twitter outrage for even suggesting this — particularly from the trolls who hang out there in a perfect echo chamber.
But yesterday the mayor apologised.
In a video supplied by the Auckland Council, Brown admitted he dropped the ball lastFriday when it was quite obvious that he should have called an emergency far earlier than he did. Not waiting until late that evening, when most people had already begun winding down operations mid-afternoon in preparation for Auckland Anniversary Weekend.
“I was too slow to be seen. The communications weren’t fast enough including mine. I am sorry,” he said in his scripted message.
As a mea culpa, it was probably as good as it gets (for Brown).
But it wouldn’t have been an easy step.
The mayor has a high opinion of his competence — some of it deserved. That was on display earlier when he fell prey to his own omnipotence as chair of the Upper North Island Supply Chain Strategy Working Group.
Brown believed it was simply logical to shift Auckland’s port to Whangārei. The working group concurred. Finance Minister Grant Robertson, the Treasury and former Auckland mayor Phil Goff, who Brown had disparaged, didn’t.
The upshot is that the study joins plenty of others gathering dust.
New Zealanders prefer humility as a trait, not self-acknowledgement of personal brilliance (the Māori saying that “the kūmara doesn’t sing of its own sweetness” is well-put). But there was just enough humility on display yesterday as the mayor extended the city’s state of emergency for a further seven days.
Any more would have been out of keeping with his brand.
In a sensible environment, it would be time to draw a line under the lengthy and debilitating media jostling and sideline attacks, and focus on the major challenges ahead of Auckland.
This is going to require Brown and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins to form a partnership when it comes to addressing the infrastructure fails, destroyed roads, smashed cliff faces, insurance challenges and the impact on broken lives.
But Brown has outraged some journalists by letting them know he holds their profession in poor opinion — “drongos”, even.
And he did drop the ball, initially blamestorming council hirelings for the poor communications, trying to wrestle control of the messaging from councillors and just stuffing up. And journalists are right to have questioned that.
His first press conference with the Prime Minister looking on was an “epic fail”. Aucklanders wanted leadership, empathy and confidence that their mayor was in charge — not allowing the conference to be dominated by pin-pricking debate. Just rolling out the help they could expect.
But that was then.
His minders — unless they think their job really ended when they shoe-horned him into the mayoralty — have a duty to spend time and school him enough to establish a working relationship with the media.
They have a big responsibility here.
When Brown came to power at last year’s local body elections, it was off the back of a campaign promising to “Fix Auckland”.
It was a brilliant slogan informed by focus groups and market research organised by political operative Matthew Hooton, which found concerns about infrastructure and transport, and voter dissatisfaction with the council and Auckland Transport. Another operative, Tim Hurdle, ran the mayoral campaign and a further political operative, Ben Thomas, ran the media side.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown at the West Harbour Fire Station fronting the media in relation to the worst flooding the Auckland region has ever experienced. Photo / Dean Purcell.
In an environment where Aucklanders had had a gutsful of central Government-imposed lockdowns, orange cones, inner-city crime, ram raids, 501s — the list goes on — “Fixing Auckland” had an immediate appeal.
It could mean anything you wanted.
But at its heart, it was simply vacuous.
Hooton continued to run interference for Brown well after his election. He was a master of the 5pm press statement. But he did not open doors to the mayor for the key journalists on New Zealand’s flagship daily (the Herald) or anyone else.
Hence, the mayor did not have a bank of goodwill he could draw on when disaster struck.
Brown can be abrasive and challenging. He loves a good argument, but considering yourself the “smartest person in the room” (let alone letting that be known) is not really smart. Journalists are smart too.
That working partnership between central Government and the city must be forged.
Until an atmospheric river dumped an epic 24.5 centimetres of rain on Auckland in a mere 24 hours, the city did not feature among the vulnerable communities the Government was looking out for: Westport, South Dunedin and Tairāwhiti, areas where substantial fiscal help will be needed in the future to shift people away from flood-ravaged or low-lying areas.
The challenges ahead of Auckland are not highlighted in the National Adaptation Plan either.
Put simply, Auckland is now in the face of monsoon weather.
There will be hard decisions ahead on where houses are built or demolished, and those decisions will be confronting.
Can Brown the engineer also become an empath?
Sir Bob Parker — who was an otherwise quite ordinary mayor — didn’t choke when the February 2011 earthquake devastated his city. He became the face of Christchurch, a cheerleader who wrestled help from the Government.
I don’t think the mayor should overdo the hair-shirt act.
