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Privatising part of Ports of Auckland, Auckland Airport and the region's water assets would help the Stock Exchange, says former Auckland City deputy mayor and businessman John Strevens.
He has urged the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Auckland Governance to establish an "infrastructural trust" to oversee a variety of trading operations with the ability to sell shares.
The trust would be limited to selling 49 per cent of an asset and have to re-invest proceeds in infrastructure. It would pay a dividend to the regional council. In the case of the airport shares, of which 22.8 per cent are held by Auckland City and Manukau councils, ratepayers in those cities would be paid a dividend or given a credit.
The Auckland Regional Council, through its investment arm, owns 100 per cent of Ports of Auckland after swooping on the remaining 20 per cent three years ago for $170 million. Apart from a private company, United Water, delivering water services in Papakura, all of Auckland's water assets are in council ownership.
Mr Strevens said privatisation would help the Stock Exchange, which was desperately short of infrastructure companies.
He said the trust would be an elected body like the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust (AECT) that holds 75.1 per cent of the shares in the energy company, Vector. However, it would operate about five companies and be more like a holding company.
Mr Strevens, who served as an Auckland City councillor for 27 years on the right-wing Citizens & Ratepayers ticket, including six years as deputy mayor, said the trust would have a commercial focus and be independent of any political body.
Politicians, he said, could not be trusted to set the right charges for services like water.
The commission was also encouraged on Friday to transfer the AECT's shares in Vector into an over-arching regional body.
John Collinge, who was C&R president for six years and a former AECT member, said Vector's electricity, gas and fibre optic assets should be held, operated and developed for the benefit of the whole region.
He said Vector was responsible for all of Auckland's electricity reticulation, but the benefits of the shares were limited to consumers in Auckland City, Manukau and Papakura.
Commission chairman Peter Salmon, QC, questioned Mr Collinge on the fairness of transferring assets owned by the three councils to a regional authority when other councils had distributed power shares to consumers. Mr Collinge acknowledged the anomaly, but said the important priority should be providing the best possible electricity, gas and cable services for the region, and funds for infrastructure.
In another suggestion on Friday, planner John Sharpe said the 1960s American model of suburbia based on the motor car was no longer sustainable. It was time to go back to the pre-World War II model of designing suburbs around public transport.
Instead of filling farmland in Botany and Flat Bush with 80,000-plus residents, Auckland had to get serious about intensive residential growth around underutilised rail corridors.
Mr Sharpe said land around rail corridors must be purchased, then master-planned and handed to developers who "must make more money from the alternative approach".
