Dick Hubbard's first year on the job

Dick Hubbard

Dick "call me nice" Hubbard is in his office at Auckland City's administration building feeling pleased about his first year in the job.

From the 15th floor he looks down at where his predecessor, John Banks, based himself at the Town Hall with its stately rooms and leather chesterfield sofas.

Grandeur is not Hubbard's style. For a start, his office is handy to staff and councillors, even if that means putting up with the kind of bad design he is trying to rid the city of.

It's fair to say the mayor does not much care for the boxy mahogany veneer fittings and tacky furniture, but the surroundings are improved with artworks and sculpture from Auckland icons Pat Hanly, Peter Siddell and Greer Twiss.

Calling up the Auckland Art Gallery to decorate your walls is a perk of the job.

Does Hubbard think Aucklanders have warmed to him after delivering a strong mandate at last October's election where he walloped John Banks by 19,016 votes?

"Yes, they have. I am picking up the vibes as I go around. There are a couple of reasons. One, they respond very strongly to the concept of vision. When I talk about the vision of Auckland in 10, 20, 50 years people really respond to that.

"Secondly, they want some niceness at the leadership level. People don't like political point-scoring and have come to realise that you can be nice but make the appropriate tough decisions at the same time.

"John was an iron fist in an iron glove. I would be an iron fist in a velvet glove."

Any fist would have done in the past year for the cereal-maker, who came from left-field 10 weeks from the polls to challenge and defeat a determined incumbent, a former mayor (Christine Fletcher) and an experienced councillor (Bruce Hucker).

The election campaign went down as the dirtiest in living memory but did little to prepare the first Auckland mayor in 51 years with no local body experience.

Hubbard is averse to the term "political novice" but it's hard to brush off. In the early days of the mayoralty he came across as lacking experience, political nous and appeared out of his depth. It has been a bumpy ride. The amazing thing is that he survived and is now growing in the role.

It was pretty hectic settling down, he says, but he never went home thinking "this is too much, I can't get my head around it".

"My philosophy always has been about taking on challenges, be they work-related, physical challenges or mental challenges. I have always stretched myself," says the lanky 58-year-old, who climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in January, is eyeing Mt Aspiring this summer and in his office has the mountaineering boots, ice pick and climbing rope that took him to the summit ridge of Mt Cook.

With a naughty grin, Hubbard tells the story of being in the Auckland Town Hall council chamber for a Council for Sustainable Development meeting early last year.

During one of the breaks when everyone had popped out, the businessman saw the mayoral chair and sat down in it for a couple of minutes. For a believer in the power of the mind it was a symbolic step on the mayoral road.

Hubbard disagrees with Banks' view that being Mayor of Auckland City is the second-biggest job in the country after the Prime Minister's, but says it is a bigger job than running Hubbard Foods - the company he and his wife Diana set up in 1988 that grew to be the country's third-largest cereal company with an annual turnover of $38 million. 

The job, though, is no place for the faint-hearted. Auckland City is a complex organisation where public service routinely plays second fiddle to the agendas of senior officers and seasoned politicians.

Hubbard juggles the long hours between strategic long-term thinking, working with officers and councillors and getting out in public.

Time management, he says, is probably a wake-up call for his deputy, Bruce Hucker, who was taken ill eight days ago suffering from exhaustion. It's no secret, Hucker has been the monkey around Hubbard's neck since the centre-left block, led by Hucker, wrestled control of the country's largest council for the first time since 1938.

Hubbard's and Hucker's skirmishes are well-documented and led to the perception of the lame duck and the megalomaniac.

Hucker infuriated the mayor at the outset by springing a social blueprint on Hubbard. The mayor mounted a coup - that failed. Rumblings between the two continued well into this year. Talks between Hubbard, City Vision and Green Party member Neil Abel took place in July about replacing the 19-year council veteran with Vern Walsh or Richard Northey.

Hubbard's trumpeted "Team 20" concept has turned to fairy dust.

The leadership difficulties get played down by close allies such as Vern Walsh who, predictably, explains them away as a misunderstanding between two roles.

He says Hubbard's transition from the corporate world where he was the boss, "end of story", to the political world where it is about numbers and political persuasion, contributed to the strife.

So, too, Hucker's enthusiasm to vigorously pursue his agenda after years in opposition without first giving the mayor time to come to grips with the political system.

C&R Now leader Scott Milne declines to discuss the problems or Hubbard's first-year performance beyond a Bankesque slogan - "he has done more than John Banks in his first term; more overseas travel, more committee meetings, more bureaucracy, more rates increases all in one year and more smoke from spinning wheels" - saying the mayor is still settling into the job.

Milne, with mayoral aspirations himself, is keeping his gunpowder dry.

Another possible mayoral challenger, Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett, is not so reserved. Far from promising to be a business-friendly, no-surprises mayor, he says Hubbard sprung a hefty 9.7 per cent rates rise without warning and spends too much time looking at the little stuff instead of big-picture promotional, economic and infrastructure issues.

Right-leaning politicians like Barnett and Milne and, before that, Banks, preach the philosophy of holding rates to inflation but ignore the decades of tight-fisted infrastructure rundown under C&R rule.

So it was brave of Hubbard to side with City Vision-Labour and go for a 9.7 per cent rates rise, coupled with a redistribution of rates.

The increase has been targeted at local public transport and roading improvements; protecting the city's volcanic cones, particularly Mt Eden; boosting urban design and heritage controls and staff levels; and getting back into affordable housing.

Hubbard sees his biggest goal as delivering on the targeted rates package. "I did it on the basis that the people of Auckland wanted action. We couldn't provide the action within the existing financial constraints and had to make sure we had the resources to deliver. I asked [people] to trust me on that and I have got to deliver on that trust."

A litmus test for Hubbard is taking the targeted rate for volcanos and gaining world heritage status for Mt Eden through preserving its archaeological features and replacing buses with a mini train to shuttle visitors to the top.

Budgets are agenda-setting exercises where politicians can tick off their promises. Cities, particularly Auckland, are complex beasts and delight in throwing up issues to test politicians. The dirty dirt scare, noise over Western Springs speedway and the Civic carpark leaky roof crisis spring to mind.

Furthermore, Hubbard inherited timebombs left over from the Banks reign. Like Banks, he had some sympathy for the eastern highway but that was quickly banished because of the numbers on the council. The $750,000 V8 street race fiasco went the same way when independent commissioners gave it the thumbs-down.

This year, Hubbard has set out on a mission to rid Auckland of "crap buildings" and preserve the city's disappearing heritage. The mayoral taskforce on urban design, new minimum sizes to stop shoebox developments and tighter heritage protection controls for 16,300 houses, are firepower to the strong messages he picked up on the hustings.

But when it comes to real-life urban design and heritage issues, Hubbard has preferred to use those prominent ears of his to listen rather than take up cudgels. He gets tetchy at suggestions of copping out on the art deco Jean Batten State building and the pavers in Vulcan Lane.

"Point one. On Jean Batten the bulldozers haven't gone through and on Vulcan Lane the pavers haven't been ripped up. Point two. My style is not about political grandstanding. With Jean Batten it appears the Bank of New Zealand have a legal right to demolish the building and tests through the Environment Court have indicated that."

Hubbard, who asks others to look to the future, balks at the suggestion future generations will blame him for razing the Jean Batten building.

"If it was demolished I would like to think I'd been the mayor who put one hell of a lot of work, time and effort in trying to save it. My conscience is clear on that."

When it comes to results, Hubbard can proudly point to the $12.5 million land purchase at Matiatia on Waiheke Island, which has islanders like former broadcaster John Hawkesby fizzing about the "stroke of genius" securing the prime coastal gateway.

Another positive sign is his effort to improve relations with his fellow mayors and the rest of the country after Banks' bad-mouthing of colleagues and snide remarks about people south of the Bombay Hills.

"There has been an unfortunate negative perception from the rest of the country about Auckland and I'm doing my best to redress that," says Hubbard, who received as much positive mail from people outside Auckland when he was elected.

"I like to think I am bringing a style to Auckland that people want. I believe it is a lesser political style than in the past. I think Aucklanders want less politics at leadership level."

Looking ahead, Hubbard has given himself a goal of six years to complete his challenges - bedding down the targeted rates rise, progress on transport, urban design and heritage, and bringing a sense of niceness to Auckland City.