Diana Wichtel: of rain and drongos

Fallen trees were a problem throughout Auckland in the flooding. Photo / Michael Craig

OPINION

Summertime is normally a sleepy interval in the strange patterns of life at our end of the Earth. When I first came to New Zealand in the 60s, the holidays were like a sort of lockdown. Life shut its doors and went to the beach for weeks. The silly season. Nothing happened.

You have to wonder if the living will ever be that reliably easy again. This so-called summer, I woke one night to a sound heard regularly in every Auckland house I have lived in: rain on an often-about-to-leak corrugated iron roof. Ours is steel since we replaced the last of the original stuff, there since 1906, but the percussive properties are much the same. This time the sound became different, something far beyond the muted roar of even very heavy rain on a roof. My partner somehow managed to sleep through it. It seemed ridiculous to wake him because it was raining again in Tāmaki Makaurau. In that moment, along with so many fellow citizens, I understood what an atmospheric river sounds like.

We got off lightly. My partner was dashing out to put some rubbish in the recycling bin when he called me. An old pittosporum by the fence was on its way down. He gave it a shove away from the kitchen’s small bay window. It fell with a thunderous crash, shallow roots wrenched from sodden soil. Now we were paying attention.

The events of the next few days were the communications equivalent of a natural disaster. What the heck? Our new mayor was at first notably missing in what you could only hope was action of some sort. When he did speak ... It’s not so much what Wayne Brown said. Well, it was. When he finally fronted for a press conference, he declared that people didn’t want to see him out with a bucket. He blamed a lot of other people for communications failures – bucket-passing? In a leaked chat room text about missing a tennis game, Brown referred to “media drongos”. It would be fair to say that politics has, proportionately, offered gainful employment to as many drongos as has the media. The insult was gleefully taken up as a further invitation to the drongos not to take mayoral pronouncements too seriously. RNZ commentator, Hayden Donnell, changed the name of his media segment to Midweek Drongowatch.

Under interrogation from Kim Hill, Brown mused defensively, “It will be interesting to see just how well-prepared Wellington is when the earthquake strikes.” She replied with a withering, “That’s a low blow under the circumstances, Mr Brown.”

To Herald journalist David Fisher, Brown said, “Don’t f*** me over.” From Fisher’s interview: “There will be other stories coming, [Brown] said, and if you do me over, then they won’t be coming to you.” When told there are no deals, he said: “Everyone is a trader, mate.” Goodness.

There were other failures in the flooding response. This was about communication from the top. Brown eventually said sorry. He took a lot of flak. He also got a strangely understanding ride from some commentators not known to hold back when it was the former Prime Minister. The word “shambles” was hardly used. Headlines included pleas to “ease up” on Brown, to cut him some slack. Those not normally fans of requests for kindness seemed suddenly to be calling for some.

Brown rode into town demanding resignations, calling for council agency boards to quit. Remorseless negativity can turn on you. Who lives by the sword might end up on the receiving end of some swordplay themselves.

Brown is just “being true to himself”, said Paula Bennett, laughing merrily on Three’s AM show. Being true to yourself: for leaders, and even for normal people, that quality is possibly overrated. Who was more catastrophically true to himself than Donald Trump? It’s better, surely, to be true to the people you were elected to represent. The people you were elected to serve.