Auckland Anniversary floods: Mike Bush critical of Mayor Wayne Brown and Auckland Council over flood review recommendations

One year on from the Auckland Anniversary floods, former police commissioner Mike Bush, who undertook a review into the failures of the emergency response on the night, says Auckland Council and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown have not followed “good practice” in failing to invite his team back to review the recommendations of his report.

Bush said Auckland Council is essentially “marking their own homework” when it comes to implementing the 17 systemic recommendations of his 107-page report - and he has not been contacted by anyone at council since he delivered it in April 2023.

The rapid review was commissioned by Brown to investigate “all aspects” of the emergency response to the January 27, 2023 deluge in which four people died.

“We understand that they have done work to implement the recommendations,” Bush told the Herald this week.

“However, we’re not in a position to say formally that they have been implemented because we haven’t had the opportunity to go back and assess it. I would say to do that is good practice.

“No, we haven’t been invited back. Normally, when you’ve got a list of reviews, you hold yourself to account for it and you make sure they get implemented. If you accept them, then you implement them. Right?”

The Bush report covered the 48-hour period from January 27, but was weighted to the first 12 hours of the event response.

A key finding was that across Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz), Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) and the mayor and his staff, “senior leaders underestimated the importance of their visible leadership roles”.

Among the review’s 17 recommendations was a call for a separate, urgent review to examine AEM’s planning for emergencies, hire more qualified emergency response staff and develop common IT systems for partner emergency agencies.

Bush said this week it would be impossible for him - and his consulting team, who produced the report at a cost of over $100,000 - to determine if the 17 recommendations had been successfully implemented from the outside looking in.

“You’d need to actually do an examination or a review to see that they’ve been implemented,” Bush said.

“We understand second-hand that work has been done, but we haven’t had the opportunity to fully review to ensure that those recommendations have been implemented.

“You don’t mark your own homework, do you? It’s better to get someone else to mark your homework - someone independent. They might have done that, they might have brought someone else in. But it wasn’t us.”

Bush said he’d spoken to Brown “socially, just in passing” since the review was delivered, but his flood review was not discussed.

The mayor’s office was approached for comment for this article.

Upon the report’s release, then-Auckland Council chief executive Jim Stabback accepted: “We were not as well-prepared for it [the floods] as we could have been.

“Recommendations that can and should be easily or immediately implemented will be. In some cases, actions are already under way,” Stabback said.

Bush said of Auckland Council’s claim his 17 recommendations were all in the process of being addressed or implemented: “They could well be right. I just don’t know.”

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, pictured on January 28, 2023, at the West Harbour Fire Station, fronting the media in relation to the worst flooding the Auckland region has ever experienced. Photo / Dean Purcell

A man tries to clear the drain outside his house in Greenlane during the worst flooding the Auckland region has ever experienced. Photo / Dean Purcell

Auckland Council’s current chief executive Phil Wilson officially took on the top role on November 1, 2023, and was present in Brown’s office the night of the January 27, 2023 rain event.

Wilson told the Herald work has been conducted to implement the 17 Bush report recommendations, but in the interest of comprehensiveness, they were compiled with findings from “an overall debrief of the council’s response to each of the severe weather events between January and May 2023″, including Cyclone Gabrielle.

The Bush report and overall debrief findings together formed a Prioritisation Plan that was formally agreed upon with the mayor and councillors that “boils down” to 29 actions.

Of these, Wilson says council has completed almost two-thirds, 19, including all that were designated urgent, with a further 11 actions in progress.

The chief executive said there is a “close-out deadline” of the end of the financial year, June 2024, to implement all 29 recommendations.

“As we approach that deadline, we will schedule an independent assessment of progress and completion. In the meantime, there are regular implementation reports to elected members,” Wilson said this week.

“We have always accepted the findings in the Bush report, and agree with Mr Bush that an independent review of implementation is valuable and good practice.”

Wilson said this independent assessment will be commissioned after discussion with Mayor Brown, the Chair of the councils Civil Defence and Emergency Management Committee, Auckland Councillor Sharon Stewart, and the independent Chair of the council’s Audit and Risk Committee.

However, Auckland Council clarified to the Herald that this independent assessment will not necessarily be undertaken by Bush’s consulting firm, saying “it would be inappropriate to predetermine the supplier” of such an assessment before its scope is determined.

Mayor Brown commissioned the original Bush rapid review three days after the record-breaking downpour.

Brown was widely criticised for the slowness of his public response to the downpour and the eventual decision to place the Auckland region into a state of emergency at 9.27pm, when flooding was already widespread across the city.

Among the key findings of the Bush report were: The council’s emergency management system was unprepared, and there was a communication failure from senior leadership during “critical early stages”, and an emergency management team that “appeared to lack the command, crisis and leadership skills to cope with the event”.

“This unprecedented event unfolded with extraordinary speed. Minutes mattered,” the report said.

“From the time Auckland Council emergency managers stood up an incident team at 4.30pm on that Friday to the end of that team’s first virtual meeting at 6.15pm, much of the damage was done.”

Tom Dillane is an Auckland-based journalist covering local government and crime as well as sports investigations. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is deputy head of news.