Bevan Rapson: C&R's zeal loses its appeal

Hinu te Hau. Photo / Supplied

The machine age could be over.

On the verge of a new political era, Auckland's once-influential party engines are spluttering.

This week, we learned of yet another setback for Citizens & Ratepayers, as candidate Hinu te Hau quit to stand as an independent.

It is further embarrassment for an organisation that has previously been one of the country's most successful political brands yet has found only 14 candidates to stand for the 20 seats on the new Auckland Council.

The right-leaning ticket is even under threat in deep-blue Orakei, where its veteran Doug Armstrong is being challenged by former Newmarket Business Association chief executive Cameron Brewer.

If elected, Brewer would almost certainly end up working with C&R members, but the contest Armstrong is facing shows how the old organisation's grip is weakening.

It's even more splintered on the left, of course, where just a few candidates remain under the City Vision banner, while others stick with Labour, come up with localised tickets or opt - like Brewer, and the leading mayoral candidates - to declare themselves "Independent". Somehow, a tag that's associated with eccentric also-rans in national politics has come to represent lofty non-partisan ideals on the local scene.

This all adds to the uncertainty about what's going to happen when the new mayor and councillors get the keys to a new system of local government.

Without clearly defined factions, the job of cobbling together a majority for any given vote could prove challenging. Herding cats? Possibly. Not to mention wrestling alligators and putting on tea parties for chimps.

It will all be far removed from the cool functioning of, say, a David Hay-led C&R majority on the Auckland City Council.

For a classic example of the power of a machine, it's worth recalling John Banks' first mayoral term when Hay's team and the mayor rammed through a hard-nosed programme devised by Sir William Birch.

Their resolve in the face of public protests was absolute, the execution clinical, the complaints of other councillors rendered irrelevant.

I sat in on one of the ruling faction's working breakfasts back then (yes, journalists get all the glamour jobs) and felt the shared sense of purpose among those stolid, cereal-munching civic crusaders. Their cause was righteous and they had the numbers. The machine reigned supreme.

Trouble was, the voters didn't like it, ejecting Banks and overturning the C&R regime at the next election.

The next man with "the numbers" was City Vision's Bruce Hucker, who ended up in a damaging power struggle with mayor Dick Hubbard. Their joint failings helped to open the door for Banks and C&R to return three years ago, though without quite the same reforming zeal.

Of course, the absence of an established, dominant machine like Citizens and Ratepayers doesn't mean bipartisan happy families. Look at North Shore City, where council relations turned bitter over the power of Mayor Andrew Williams' "A-team", or Manukau City, where Len Brown's supposed talent as a "unifier" didn't stop a couple of Manukau councillors and C&R candidates for the Auckland Council from going after him hard over his credit-card spending.

Independent or not, most of the 20 new Auckland councillors will fall naturally on either side of a right-left divide. The mayor, by careful selection of a deputy and committee chairs, might seek to mould a new centre-right or centre-left machine for the new era.

Alternatively, he could aim at the kind of "grand coalition" Mike Lee has constructed at the Auckland Regional Council, with plum jobs shared among ideological foes.

But either way, neither C&R nor any other ticket will be running things over their morning cornflakes.