Auckland mayoralty: Simon Wilson on co-governance, climate change and the big fix the city needs

Auckland mayoral candidate Efeso Collins at his official campaign launch in Otara on the weekend. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

OPINION

Playgrounds in Auckland have an average of five pieces of equipment, but in south Auckland the average is three. North of the harbour bridge, where 20 per cent of the city's children live, they have 33 per cent of the playgrounds.

At an Auckland mayoral debate on the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei marae last week, journalist Mihingarangi Forbes, presenter of The Hui, said the data came from council and she wanted to know what the candidates would do about it.

Wayne Brown said the lesson of the vaccine rollout was that decision-making on such things should be at the community level. "Give local boards the responsibility," he said.

That's a good idea, but it's only half the story.

It was left to Efeso Collins to explain why the inequity exists. "The funding is based on what's there now," he said. "If you've got more playgrounds, you'll get more money to maintain and develop them."

So you have to change the funding formulas. Unless that happens, he said, empowering local boards won't be much help.

The Ngāti Whātua debate will be broadcast on Three's The Hui tonight.

A few days earlier, Tā Mark Solomon, chief executive of Kāi Tahu, was interviewed by Tova O'Brien in a big session at the Auckland Writers' Festival, alongside National's former Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson.

Solomon said that by 2050, the majority of Pākehā will be retired, the majority of the workforce will be non-white, and on current trends far too many of them will be stuck in low-wage jobs, if they're working at all.

"We cannot hope to remain a first-world nation," he said, "if we keep treating non-white children and the workforce as we do now." His data came from Statistics NZ.

Brown talks a lot about "fixing Auckland", by which he means getting infrastructure projects finished. But the pipes are being fixed at this very moment, the Queen St work is nearly done, motorway and busway projects to the north, south, east and west are well under way and the underground rail line will be finished before long too.

Meanwhile, whether it's housing or healthcare, transport or playgrounds, quite a few other things need fixing. It's not hard to draw a line from playgrounds to ram raids, from under-resourced communities to kids getting their kicks outside the law.

If we're going to "fix Auckland", how about we try to fix the structural inequities in resources and funding? A mayor can't do it all, but a mayor shouldn't pretend the only thing that matters is engineering.

Nor, in my view, should a mayor engage in the sort of "Kiwi/iwi" style advertising candidate Viv Beck produced on Facebook last month: when it comes to co-governance, the ad declared, she's "No" and Collins and Brown are both "Yes".

Finlayson had something to say about that. After generations of polluted waterways, he said, "What is wrong, in the context of a treaty settlement, in an iwi saying, 'We want to clean it up'? Co-governance is a perfectly acceptable and, indeed, laudable project." He added that they've been doing it for 15 years on the Waikato River and "it seems to work just fine".

Beck, on the other hand, told Forbes, "What's concerning me is there's a lot of division. I think it's important to bring people together and the trouble with co-governance is that people are quite angry."

Forbes asked her if she didn't think the whole point of co-governance is to bring people together. Where previously some were excluded, co-governance allows everyone to be represented around the decision-making table.

"Some co-governance is undemocratic," said Beck. "I get it with the treaty, yes, but not when it's undemocratic." She didn't say what she meant by that. Partnership principles, inherent in the treaty, underlie all proposals for co-governance.

Beck uses a similar line when she's talking about car parking, bus lanes, cycling networks and other proposed changes: they're making "people" angry so they should stop.

But it's only true for some people. Those who want bus trips not to take so long are people too. So are those who want safer streets and a society that takes its climate responsibilities seriously.

Auckland mayoral candidate Wayne Brown at his campaign launch in Avondale, March 2022. Photo / Dean Purcell

The council now has a bold plan to reduce emissions by 2030 and the people who want that to happen are not angry their concerns are finally being addressed.

There are always people upset when their views don't prevail. If we wait until everyone's happy, nothing will ever change.

Beck and Collins both say politicians should be better at listening. But they mean different things. Beck suggests that because some people are complaining, the plan is bad. Collins says let's listen to the voices we don't usually hear from.

Climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) turned up at council on Thursday to have their say.

They didn't glue themselves in a ring around the mayor's chair, as XR did around the Speaker's chair in the British Houses of Parliament on Friday, although they were fresh from a court hearing after some of them had painted "Zero emissions 2025" on the footpath on Queen St and glued posters to the ANZ Bank building.

Instead, amid reports that a third of Pakistan is underwater and the Tasman District has suffered six storms in six weeks, they unfurled a banner and reminded council of the urgency of climate action.

Auckland is affected, as most people know. XR showed a picture of how a bad flood is likely to affect New Lynn, taken from council sources: much of it is underwater.

New Lynn flooding: The image shows the likely result of a major culvert collapse, such as was threatened in the floods of March 2017. Image / Auckland City Council

They talked about the wet-bulb effect, which is what happens when the air becomes so hot and humid it stops us sweating in order to control our bodily temperature. "It's not unimaginable this coming summer," said XR's Mairi Jay. She's an environmental scientist at the University of Waikato.

The part of Auckland most susceptible to the wet-bulb effect, because it's low-lying and near large masses of warm water, is Manukau. South Auckland also has much less tree cover – as well as fewer parks and playground equipment – than the rest of the city. And because of poverty, the homes of Manukau are less likely to have air conditioning.

The impact of the climate crisis is another thing the next mayor of this city will have to "fix".

And yet, just yesterday the new executive of the Auckland Business Chamber called for a "smarter response to transport emissions". Sadly, his prescription is about as unsmart as it is possible to be.

Simon Bridges proposed we should stop trying to boost public transport, provide more roads for driving on and quickly convert the vehicle fleet to electric.

He said these solutions met his three guiding principles: they were evidence-based, targeted and would not undermine "social and economic sustainability".

Simon Bridges, new boss of the Auckland Business Chamber. Photo / Andrew Warner

Frankly, he's got a nerve. As a former Minister of Transport he will have read enough reports to know they are none of those things.

The evidence is clear that providing more road space for cars encourages more driving. EVs do the same: people like driving them and think they do no harm, so they drive them more. The Bridges' plan would create far more congestion than we have now.

It would also make the roads more dangerous while doing nothing to reduce emissions. We know this because his ideas are basically unchanged from when he was in Government, and that's what happened then.

There's no getting around this: we have a big fix in front of us. We have to find better ways to live.

Also at the writers' festival, the novelist and historian Douglas Jenkin was asked to name the thing he missed most from Auckland decades ago. He said: "Kids walking and riding to school."

"You learn things about the world," he said. "Being out in it, on your own or with friends. And you learn so much about who you are."

What a fabulous thing to say.