Brian Rudman: There's no 'I' in team, or Greater Auckland

Manukau City has a "vision" of usurping Wellington's crown as self-appointed "events centre of New Zealand". To help make it happen, Councillor John Walker, a one-man event centre in his athletic heyday, wants the city to more than double its events sponsorship budget to $1 million a year.

With Wellington spending around $9 million a year on the same mission, Mr Walker seems to be drifting off into three-minute mile territory here.

But you do have to despair at the parochialness of it all. Instead of creating inter-city battles over which council attracts the most events, councillors should be thinking how best to spend the ratepayers' hard-earned events dollar.

I'm not arguing against councils providing seed money for events, I'm just suggesting that turning it into a competition with other cities is not the best approach.

As one of the four major cities, and three tiddlers, that make up Auckland proper, Manukau should be looking to co-operate with its neighbours in joint sponsorships.

Councillors should forget Wellington and all its blather about being biggest and best and concentrate instead on what's best for Manukau and the region.

Wanting to steal Wellington's thunder reminds me of Manukau councillor Su'a William Sio's desire in March last year to hijack the Pasifika Festival from its traditional Western Springs venue in Auckland City and repatriate it to what he called its "natural home" of Otara.

I asked at the time whether Mr Sio was willing to find the $132,000 a year Auckland City ratepayers gave the event, and guarantee the additional $200,000 in sponsorship and stall rentals, but there was no reply.

He argued Pasifika belonged in Manukau because more people of Polynesian descent lived in his city than in Auckland. Glancing through a list of Manukau's current "premier events" sponsorships, this ethnic specialness is hardly to the fore. The biggest handout is the $100,000 for the Ellerslie Flower Show, a very palagi event. Another $120,000 goes to polo and horse and pony shows - three times the $40,000 going to the annual secondary schools cultural festival.

Another $40,000 has gone to something I've never heard of, the Supergames. Turns out this sporting event for the world's armed forces, emergency services and law enforcement agencies took place in March this year. Where? The Supergames website said it took place in, wait for it, Auckland, New Zealand.

Poor old Manukau spent $40,000 and what does the introductory come-on blurb on the website say? "Supergames offers you the opportunity to join other service personnel in a sporting extravaganza staged in one of the world's most stunning holiday destinations, Auckland, New Zealand." Manukau City gets its first mention in paragraph seven.

The lesson, surely, is that we Aucklanders should be doing these things together. Everyone else sees us as one city, so why kid around?

The continuing fiasco of the V8 supercar race is a perfect illustration of how not to do something. Seven years ago three - or was it four? - councils were played off against one another by the promoters over rival street circuits by the old Auckland Railway Station, or through Henderson, or on the Whenuapai Air Base or at Pukekohe. Pukekohe won.

Now we're in the midst of another costly - to ratepayers - round of argy-bargy.

The sensible solution would have been for the region as a whole to decide first whether car racing was something we wanted and, if so, where best it could be accommodated. We could then decide, on a regional basis, what subsidy, if any, would be available, and where that would come from.

At the time of Mr Sio's comments, I wrote of the craziness of the region hosting only days apart the two largest Pacific Island festivals in the world - Pasifika in central Auckland and the secondary schools cultural festival in Manukau City - without any joint marketing or promotional or organisational co-operation. There still isn't any.

The Auckland Festival is another example of how Aucklanders make things so hard for ourselves. With a bit of co-operation we could be not just the events centre of New Zealand but the centre of everything.

But I suspect Wellington has nothing to worry about. Team sport is not really Auckland's thing.