Absolutely positively Hubbard

Dick Hubbard at his office in the Civic building with a painting by artist Peter Siddell as his backdrop. Picture / Kenny Rodger

There was Dick Hubbard on the telly on Wednesday night looking, I thought, miserable. He must be having a horrible week, I thought, with the howlings over rates rises and councillors and junkets. This is completely wrong. I know this because he will spend a great deal of time telling me so. And also because interviewing him is like talking to a shiny, bouncy, ball. The questions go thwack. The mayor's answers go bounce. So thwack, bounce, thwack, bounce we go: he on his merry way and me somewhat less jolly.

He has just spent $20,000 plus GST of his own money putting an ad in the Herald, putting his case for his vision for Auckland - which means his vision for getting us to pay for the thing. He will no doubt complain that this is mean and grumpy. He certainly objects to the use of the word junket, or jaunt. "Junket and jaunt are emotional words." Well, used in the context of a trip that cost $85,000, people do feel emotional. "People do feel upset about that and I understand that. I've heard the clear message from the people of Auckland and we will reconsider our policy. I mean, I'm a pragmatist."

He is also relentlessly positive. "I am." "You are," I say, "in fact, annoyingly positive."

"Heh, heh. Well, I've always been of the attitude that the glass is half full, not half empty. I always like to see the bright side. I always like to think I'm cheerful. I'm upbeat and a mayor's job is actually to talk the city up, to help create that feeling of good will." He is a "huge believer in the fact that you've got to have a belly laugh from time to time".

One of his political opponents likened that ad to Zinedine Zidane's head-butting brain explosion. It has also been called obscene and desperate, paternal and lecturing.

He says he got the message yesterday saying that I wanted to talk to him, so opened the paper to see a line saying "Dick Hubbard under attack." It was actually "Mayor under fire", but he says "those are the sorts of things that come out of left field".

I can't imagine why else he thought I wanted to talk to him. Perhaps he thought I was dropping by to congratulate him on his ad. He is hugely pleased with it, says most everyone loves it and "I've been overwhelmed with the response and that's not just a trite response".

He looks a bit hurt when I say the picture in the ad makes Auckland look bloody awful. I wondered whether this might be some mayoral cunning: a subliminal message designed to suggest that if you don't buy into the mayor's vision, you'll get the bleak city you deserve. "No, I certainly haven't read that interpretation into it. I don't see those as dark clouds, I see that as a photo of opportunity, not a photograph of the lights going out."

Well, of course he does. And, of course, he is not the mayor under fire. "Absolutely and categorically not." Later, though, he talks about being concerned with how "all the negative publicity" was affecting staff morale - another reason he gives for placing the ad. I wonder then if perhaps he should have felt under fire. "No, I feel there's been too much negativity. When you say mayor under fire, [it means] Auckland City's been under fire."

This is a distinction which has the effect of making him look too tough to take it personally and the attackers look disloyal to the city. He's quite clever, and, yes, quite tough - in his gentlemanly way. You won't see him slagging off people in public but he reckons he can be pretty stern behind closed doors. He is in control of his council, he says, and gets pretty stern at any suggestion to the contrary.

He came to office as the nice mayor. Now, I suggest - just to attempt to knock a bit of that bounce - he's the most hated man in Auckland. "No. That's your perception, not mine." If it is a perception, then that, surely is a worry. "No, the reality is in party politics you'll always get people on the other side who try and stir up a sense of hate."

Anyway, he says, he is now not just the nice mayor, he is also the firm mayor. "I believe that, everything being equal, you should be as nice as you can be. But that doesn't make you wishy-washy, or weak." A more accomplished politician would never have introduced such words. He says, "Well, some people say niceness is about being weak or wishy-washy. You can be a strong decisive leader and you can still be nice. They're not exclusive terms."

We're hard on our mayors; it's hard to get a second term. Hubbard is going to go for one. "If you don't make yourself available [voters] would say, 'Well, you've denied us the chance to judge you'."

Also, in Hubbard-speak - how he loves a good homily - "you turn the wheel of the good ship Auckland and it does take a while for the helm to respond".

The captain, then, is calm and in control and has most certainly not had a brain explosion. "My brain is perfectly fine, thank you very much, and all the neurones are turning over."

He simply wanted to "try and paint the picture in my own words. I enjoy putting things into my own words. I've always enjoyed writing [the newsletters he wrote to go inside boxes of Hubbard cereal] and I've talked a bit about values and all sorts of things in my own words and my own speak, so to say."

I think the ad looked as though he was on the back foot, but, no, of course he isn't. And people have written in "commenting on the style, saying, 'Good on you for getting on the front foot' rather than being on the back foot". That's a bounce.

He wasn't at all miserable on TV. Another bounce. "No. no, that's not right." He was "just very focused and very pleased".

What he is really saying in his word picture, by my reading, is that Aucklanders are mean-spirited, penny-pinchers who are lacking in vision. "No, I'm not. I'm saying that we've got to provide a sense of vision. If you provide a sense of vision, people respond."

He can't see that his exhortation to vision might also read like a retort. "No, this is front foot; this is being out on the front foot."

Isn't he basically saying, "You told us what you want, but you don't want to pay for it?" "Well, no. What I'm saying is that if you want the waterfront that you want or deserve, this is the path that we've got to go down." And, "yes, the money's got to come from somewhere, that's the reality".

This is an unusual thing for a mayor to do. "It is. I'm an unusual mayor and I think I've been an unusual business person too. I rewrote the rule book a little bit when it came to business with the style I did Hubbard Foods. When I put the clipboard letters into the cereal boxes, people said, 'Well, that's fine. But keep to facts and recipes and interesting snippets, but don't talk about yourself and don't put values and opinions in because you'll upset people'. And I started doing the reverse and that's when it made the big difference because people said, 'Oh, now we're seeing the real Dick Hubbard'."

It is nice being mayor, according to Hubbard. Quite nice for the ego too, you'd imagine. "Ah, we're all driven by a little bit of that."

He says he has to guard against strutting around, feeling terribly important. "You've got to make sure you don't get captivated by that, that it doesn't become an ego trip or a power trip."

But be assured he has "a healthy ego. You've got to have belief in yourself, you've got to have faith in your abilities. You've got to like yourself."

He is visiting the Herald after the interview, so we walk back together. You might mistake him - if you didn't know he was a multimillionaire mayor - for a shy, gawky man who seems to have difficulty putting one foot in front of the other with any degree of surety. He still seems to find small talk difficult. He is happier with big, vision-type talk. I take him up in the lift in which is displayed a picture of two men driving a 50-tonne machine through rock. "Boy," he says, "you'd feel powerful driving that, wouldn't you?"

Perhaps, I suggest, he should line up a photo op. "I could," he says, "but that would make me a boring mayor." At which he gives one of his belly laughs, slaps me on the back, and is gone. Some time later I go and look at the photograph. I realise that he hasn't, finally, had a brain explosion, he's making a truly appalling pun. The machine is called a boring machine. You'll either like him for it, or wince. Only a very confident mayor would have risked it.