Auckland deputy mayor Delsey Simpson on life in politics and at home. Photo / Jason Oxenham
As Cyclone Gabrielle battered Auckland’s West Coast communities on Valentine’s Day, claiming the lives of two locals, deputy mayor Desley Simpson penned a love note on social media.
“Roses are bruised,
Violets have seen better,
But the cyclone in Auckland,
Has brought us all together.
HAPPY VALENTINES DAY AUCKLAND”
The note conveyed her thoughts to those impacted by the violent winds and thanks to people rallying in support.
It was, as people who know her say, a very Desley thing to do and sums up her love for the city and its people.
In an exclusive interview with the Herald on Sunday, Simpson opens up about a life of privilege, a sense of public service embedded in her DNA, dragging mayor Wayne Brown away from an interview with the Prime Minister and the personal toll from the storms.
The reality of the one-two weather punch really hit home with the death of Dave Lennard, who died after his home on Shore Rd in Remuera was hit by a landslide.
Lennard was a constituent in Simpson’s ward of Ōrākei who had her election sign on his fence and acted as “Mr Security” for the park across the road.
“I knew him. He wasn’t a name I didn’t know, and that’s hard”.
Simpson was also rocked by the deaths of two volunteer firefighters at Muriwai; the worst part of the anguish, despair and trauma she has witnessed first-hand as the person Aucklanders turned to for leadership since the floods.
Mayor Wayne Brown has come under fire for taking a back seat and handing the reins to Simpson to step up when disaster struck, but that’s not how Simpson reads the room.
“He asked me to do the big cleanup. We are a team and I have agreed to be part of that team. I agreed to step up for whatever reason if I’m needed. He asked me to do it and I did. All credit to him, actually,” said Simpson, who has shone and communicated in ways beyond Brown’s grasp.
Brown’s poor communication skills and terse relationship with the media were in full view the day after the floods when he appeared with the Prime Minister at a press conference in Auckland and got dragged away by Simpson.
She sympathises with Brown, saying as she stood behind Brown and the Prime Minister, she saw Chris Hipkins with four pages of double-spaced notes which he articulated incredibly well, and the mayor with nothing in the way of notes from staff.
“I could see him going down a path that he was never going to win. He should have been better prepared. I knew what he was trying to say but was unable to get his message across,” Simpson said.
The mayor’s performance convinced critics Brown is toast and Auckland has found an excellent leader in Simpson, but there’s another view the mayor is a doer, not a rock star, and just what Auckland needs. Simpson is in the latter camp.
After being chosen by Brown to be his deputy last October, Simpson said the more she’s got into the role the more she’s got to like him, saying a fresh set of eyes at the council is healthy.
“He’s smart, he’s very smart. He’s astute and he’s committed. He’s not a professional politician and I don’t believe he needs the money. He is here because he passionately has a few things he wants to deliver and wants to fix and leave Auckland in a better place.
“From my perspective, that’s why I’m here too. I think we are very complementary…the sum of two parts makes a good team,” said Simpson.
“People say ‘where was he in the floods’? You didn’t see him because he blended in with everyone else in a high viz vest and work boots on the ground,” says Simpson, who witnessed Brown come up with a practical and quick solution to re-open a stretch of Shore Rd for buses carrying students to six schools.
“I just smiled. He’s solution-focused.”
For Brown’s part, he picked Simpson for her integrity, professionalism, loyalty, ability to get things done and support around the council table.
Desley Simpson was born into a life of privilege in the affluent suburb of Remuera. She attended Diocesan School for Girls where her mother, Leonie Lawson, was head of music, an accomplished concert pianist, and only this week was helping a young man play a piece on the piano, aged 92.
“She has spent her life dedicated to developing musical talent. I have watched her give completely of herself to bringing out the best of young people, and it has obviously rubbed off,” said Simpson with a tear in her eye.
“My great achievement is my children,” says Simpson, who has a son and a daughter, and four grandchildren.
Simpson’s first marriage was to Scott Simpson, the National MP for Coromandel. They separated in 2004 and in 2008 she got together with richlister and soon-to-be National Party president Peter Goodfellow where Scott Simpson was a rival.
Goodfellow is the most public member of the otherwise private Goodfellow family. In 2021, the NBR Rich List estimated the family wealth at $700 million, built up over three generations in the dairy industry.
Simpson and Goodfellow married in a chapel at the rest home of St Andrew’s Village in Glendowie where his late father lived. It was an intimate affair with only a small number of guests.
Desley Simpson says she and Peter are really good together with complementary skills - “he is an absolute rock for me and incredibly supportive”.
Simpson is no slouch herself on the grand piano at home in Ōrākei, where Goodfellow can read the mood of his wife when he walks through the door.
“If he came in and if there is Rachmaninoff or Liszt blasting through the house, he might just go down the stairs and come back five minutes later…if I’m very relaxed I will play something light-hearted.”
Ōrākei Local Board chairman Scott Milne, a friend of the couple, says Simpson works extremely hard on her marriage and family, saying they have a naughty sense of humour and enjoy a good laugh.
Simpson is also conscious that she is very privileged, says Milne, which can work to her detriment because of tall poppy syndrome.
“Regardless of the Gucci and the glamour, she is an incredibly capable woman and a bloody good leader,” he says.
Simpson is unashamedly herself, saying she likes bright colours and the finer things in life, including nice cars and being “a bit of a magpie for sparkly things”. Currently, she drives a bright blue Porsche 911 high-performance sports car with the numberplate “Desley”. Over the summer she spent a month in Spain with Peter, staying in fancy hotels before arriving home the day before the January floods.
Pink is a favourite colour and earned Simpson the nickname, Lady Penelope, after the character in the 1960s cartoon show, Thunderbirds, who dressed in pink and rode in a pink Rolls Royce with a “FAB 1″ numberplate.
“That’s me”, says Simpson of her colourful dress sense, saying it was her incredibly well-dressed mother who set the standard: “That’s just what you do in my family”.
Simpson’s sense of public duty comes from a long political lineage: her great-great uncle Sir Henry Brett was the fifth mayor of Auckland in 1878 and her grandfather, Sir James Donald, became a member of the Harbour Board in 1935, deputy chairman in 1938 and then chairman well into the 1940s.
Simpson’s rise to deputy mayor began chairing the Hobson Community Board in the pre-Super City era, followed by six years as chair of the Ōrākei Local Board before being elected to Auckland Council in the Ōrākei ward in 2016. At last year’s election, she won a third term with a whopping 20,000 vote majority. One of her biggest regrets is her father, Stanley Lawson, was not alive to see her enter politics.
“I’m very passionate about the place I live and if you put a map in front of me I would be able to say ‘here are the sports fields that have been upgraded, here’s the Ōrākei Basin walkway, here’s the shared path, here is Colin Maiden Park, still open space, not intensified housing’ ... but I could never have done that on my own ... you cannot do politics on your own,” Simpson said.
It’s been the collaborative style of politics that differentiates local government from central government politics where Simpson has thrived, first at the local board level, followed by two and a bit terms on the governing body.
In Phil Goff’s first term as mayor, Simpson was deputy chair of the finance committee under Labour councillor Ross Clow and was promoted to chair of the finance and value-for-money committees in the second term.
Simpson says she and Goff were initially very wary of each other, but when he walked out the door last year to become New Zealand’s High Commissioner to Britain there was mutual respect, albeit challenging at times.
“His political colours were very clear and so were mine and we would both sit opposite each other when we had a ‘discussion’ and leave that to one side while we dealt with the problem in hand,” she said.
Speaking from London, Goff said he had a “good personal professional relationship with Desley”, saying their political colours never got in the way of following an evidence-based approach to meeting the challenges facing Auckland.
He thanked her for supporting his policies on environmental sustainability, climate change and investing strongly in infrastructure.
The pair worked well together when Simpson steered Goff’s emergency and recovery budgets through Covid-19, addressing a $900 million budget hole over three years and cutting spending. Simpson earned universal praise from colleagues at the end of the process.
It was a very different response in her ward when Simpson, a National Party member, agreed to chair the finance committee after the 2019 elections.
“They didn’t want another Labour person as mayor. They got it. They didn’t like that and here was their centre-right-leaning councillor working with him. That was tough.
“My answer to that is if I am offered an opportunity I will take it…I wasn’t going to let Auckland crash and burn. I was going to do my best. If he had of been more tribal that would have been very difficult, but I give him respect for leaving that at the door,” she said.
Scott Milne perceives Simpson as the “smartest, hardest-working councillor” and a person who exhibits exemplary loyalty to the office of the mayor and deputy mayor. That’s not surprising, coming from a friend on the right of politics.
But respect for Simpson crosses the political divide. Josephine Bartley, the Labour councillor in Simpson’s neighbouring ward of Maungakiekie-Tāmaki, says Simpson is respected on both sides of the spectrum.
“She can get down in the grass and the weeds, but also sees things at a strategic level. I have a lot of respect for her,” said Bartley, adding the Team Auckland approach through the tough budgets included the local boards at the insistence of Simpson.
Efeso Collins, the Manukau councillor who was runner-up in last October’s mayoral contest, says he made a conscious effort to sit next to Desley at the council table to discuss and share their different life experiences as representatives of the richest and poorest wards.
A couple of moments stand out for Collins.
During Covid-19, Simpson turned up at the Māngere budgeting service with trailer loads of goods, including food, women’s sanitary goods and furniture. The second occasion was attending the Kai Ika project by the Outboarding Club at Orakei and the Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae with Simpson where fish heads are redistributed to families and community groups in South Auckland.
“Fish heads are a delicacy from where I come from. The fact kilos of fish heads are going out freely to families shows the connections that were getting built.
“I really enjoyed our working relationship. There is a part of me that misses her and had I been successful [for the mayoralty] I would have asked her to be my deputy. On that regard, Wayne and I were very much on the same boat,” Collins said.
What does the future for Simpson? Does she want to be the mayor of Auckland?
“You never say never, but right at the moment I’m very challenged being deputy mayor.”
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