OPINION:
Efeso Collins stood up in a room crowded with businesspeople and residents from Parnell and Newmarket last week. He told them he lived in an apartment block in Ōtāhuhu and his mother had spent most of her working life as a cleaner at Middlemore Hospital, while his father drove taxis.
His mother went to work at 9.30pm and got home at 7am, at which time his father would go to work.
People in the meeting responded by telling him the Government's density plans will "ruin Parnell", because it will fill up with apartment blocks.
Fact check: Parnell already contains so many apartment blocks it would be hard to count them all. Many of the other homes are mansions built in the past few decades. Change has always defined the character of Parnell.
That didn't stop rival candidate Wayne Brown from agreeing the new rules would "destroy Parnell". Rival Viv Beck was on board with that, too: "We have to stand up on this or it will destroy our identity."
Both of them live in apartment blocks in the city that were built on the site of what used to be "character" colonial buildings.
Brown has been telling candidate meetings the density plans were foisted on the city by "a couple of women MPs". He means Housing Minister Megan Woods and National's deputy leader, Nicola Willis.
Fact check: "A couple of MPs", whatever their gender, can't foist anything on Parliament, or this city, or the country. In a rare show of unity, the density proposals have the support of all parties in Parliament except Act.
They enjoy that support because zoning reform is notoriously difficult for councils to adopt, so Parliament has done its best to depoliticise it. Almost everyone agrees we need denser cities, so public transport, walking and cycling can become more efficient and we will not be so dependent on cars.
In practice, though, turning that general agreement into specific rules is hard. The Auckland Council has proposed changes to Parliament's plans, so that defined "character areas" on the fringe of the city centre will be protected. It's a compromise solution and Collins supports it.
"Auckland has been planned for sprawl," he said in Parnell. "We need to plan well and I'm satisfied the council assessment is a place we can land on. But we have to plan for a city of 2.4 million people by 2040."
But Beck, Brown and Craig Lord all said the city was being ruined and the whole plan should be rejected. That option doesn't exist and it is disingenuous of political aspirants to tell voters it does.
The whole plan goes before independent commissioners in October. Either they will accept the council's proposed compromises, and the Government will accept their say-so, or the plan will go through unaltered.
There's a lot of what I'd call misinformed sneering at the council in this campaign. Lord likes to say Auckland Council is "broke" and "broken". Brown tells audiences council is "losing $3 million a week, which works out to about $1 billion a year". The implication is that spending is out of control.
Fact check: In the nine months to March 2022, the council group spent only 74 per cent of its capital budget, or $1.48b of the budgeted $2b for the period. The underspend was the result of the loss of revenue caused by the Delta and Omicron variants of Covid-19. In a nutshell, spending was deferred.
Direct revenue was also down, by $19m, while the council underspent its operational budget by $81m. Bus services and many other council activities were cut back.
Budget figures for the current period are themselves down on pre-Covid levels, because in 2020 the council responded to a $900m loss of revenue by producing a new "Emergency Budget". It followed that with a cautious "Recovery Budget". Many services have been cut and many people have lost their jobs.
These figures are all publicly available and will be updated in two weeks' time.
The council is not broke and it is not "losing" a billion a year. On the contrary, its financial management has seen it retain its AA rating from S&P Global Ratings and Aa2 from Moody's.
Brown, however, presses on. A good way to approach council rules, he told a Karangahape Rd Business Association meeting in Whammy Bar last week, is to "keep the inspectors out of it". He suggested the venue, which is underground in an old building, "probably failed all sorts of silly inspection tests".
Fact check: Whammy does not fail its health and safety tests.
I imagine every single customer will be pleased to know this: The roof is not likely to collapse and, if there's a fire, you'll probably get out alive.
Brown gave the Parnell meeting another insight into his thinking on officials. "Council is top heavy," he said. "I'm keen on the people who do the work but I'm not keen on the people who write reports about it."
But those reports are budgets and financial reviews, planning documents and value-for-money assessments. They make the council accountable, with briefings to elected representatives and information for the public so we know what's going on.
Without reports, we don't know if a job was done well or even if it should have been done at all, and the council doesn't learn from the exercise.
Could the council be doing all this more efficiently? Undoubtedly. That's true for most organisations. But if you want the work done better, is it productive to barge your way in and upbraid everyone for being stupid?
Efeso Collins, in response to Brown, said that in his experience, "If you attack the officials they will turn their back on you." He added that "in the main, council staff are there to serve".
Most of Brown's experience in "fixing" public agencies came a couple of decades ago. He seems to think he's never made a mistake. Perhaps he has not noticed that corporate culture in both the public and private sectors has moved on.
There's more. Brown likes to say that "every nine months the City Rail Link announces another year's delay".
Fact check: Construction of the CRL, like everything else, has been delayed by Covid. But it's happening: Despite the delays, they're about to break through with the second tunnel.
I asked Brown if he thought the CRL would be good for the city and was surprised when he didn't have an answer. I asked him if he believed the city needed more mass transit and he didn't even know how to answer. He talked about a new railway line from Avondale to Southdown, which would largely be used for freight.
Ask Wayne Brown to "fix" something and he backs himself to get it done. Ask him to come up with a plan, though, and he's at sea.
But who does he think should do the forward thinking? He wants Wellington to keep its hands off Auckland and he disparages Auckland Transport, council officials and the other councillors. Under a Wayne Brown mayoralty, who would have the vision and who would do the planning?
Actually, Brown may not think we need leadership like that. He's annoyed that AT wants more people to use public transport: "Auckland Transport should be told they are there to service the way we live, not change the way we live."
That's utterly wrong. Because of the climate crisis, behavioural change is the most fundamental task we face. And because of Covid, we know it's possible. Consumers have a role and so do corporates. But governments, central and local, must provide the framework and the leadership.
In my view, a politician who doesn't understand that is unfit for office.
