Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown being interviewed by the Herald. Photo / Michael Craig
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has defended being in the background while deputy mayor Desley Simpson leads the council response to the January 27 floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.
In a rare, one-on-one interview with the Herald, Brown placed fixing Auckland ahead of dealing with the media, revealed he suffered a back injury while helping the storm relief effort, and believes he knows who dobbed him in over his infamous “media drongos” comment.
Unlike the mayors of other disaster-struck towns and cities whose leadership has shone through, Brown has taken a back seat to Simpson.
As the Herald’s Steve Braunias noted this week: “(Brown) has become the vacuum to his deputy mayor’s power: the one person we have been able to look to for an example of leadership and strength…She’s fronted. She’s stood up.”
Asked why he was not front and centre when disaster struck, Brown said the media had not been his focus with Simpson doing some of that work and a good job with the media.
From Rodney in the north to the Awhitu Peninsula in the south, the mayor said he had been out every day with building inspectors, and geotechnical engineers, visiting broken bridges and picking up rubbish with the student volunteer army and navy groups.
“So, I’ve been on the ground,” said Brown, pausing to excuse himself from wriggling in his chair from back pain caused by helping to unload an army truck when he picked up a 40kg carton of tinned goods from a young guy “which is probably more than I should have”.
“I’m determined we learn the lessons,” said Brown, bashing a finger on his desk. “We have had reports into floods before and they don’t do the things that are recommended. So that’s where I’ve been. That’s my skill set.”
Talking of skill sets, Brown said he is never going to be a smooth-talking politician.
Since becoming Mayor of the Super City last October, Brown has turned down more than 100 requests for media interviews and admitted he “dropped the ball” and was too slow to be seen on the evening of the January 27 floods.
The events of that evening, Brown’s included, are the subject of an independent inquiry headed by former police commissioner Mike Bush.
Sitting at his desk on the 27th floor of the council headquarters, Brown pulled out a graph showing predicted rainfall figures on January 27 from the MetService against the actual figures, which at times were seven times more.
“It can be hard to spot a looming crisis, especially when you are dealing with the first one which was Auckland’s wettest 24 hours on record with no warning from the MetService. So the idea I was asleep at the helm and didn’t care was completely wrong and not true,” he said.
The lesson Brown said he has taken from the storms was the importance of talking to the public, “but you have to be informed to do that”, he said.
Brown has previously apologised for “dropping the ball” and being too slow to be seen on the evening of January 27, saying he was in his office from 4pm. In his interview with the Herald, Brown said before 4pm, he was at his apartment, a short walk from the council headquarters, working online with his media person and others all day.
Brown also believes he knows the person who leaked a WhatsApp message from his tennis group the night after the January 27 floods. In the message, he says he can’t play tennis because he has to deal with “media drongos” the following day.
When it comes to tetchy relations with the media, Brown is not of a mind to change tack, brushing aside criticism at his lack of engagement with journalists, who are the gateway to the public and whose job it is to hold politicians to account.
When the Herald suggested his media strategy was a weakness, Brown said the media was simply not a big focus for him. “My focus is to fix Auckland for the ratepayers and the citizens…I don’t think it is necessary to give a lot of one-on-one interviews… my days are really full from dawn to dark.
“I’d like to see the media focus on the big issues that matter to Aucklanders rather than the number of interviews I do or don’t do. In fact, I would be happy to have more balanced reporting. I would be happy to answer more sensible, searching questions about the big issues,” said Brown.
A big focus for Brown is “The Big Fix-Up” after the weather gods unleashed their fury on the Super City.
A lot of the work will be guided by a review of the council’s planning rules and regulations, hopefully bringing government ministers to the table.
“We need to have a big, grown-up conversation. The events of the last two weeks have drawn big questions about building on cliffs, which is generally wealthy people, and bigger questions about intensification in stormwater paths, which generally affects poorer people.”
There are examples of new developments on floodplains where stormwater infrastructure prevented flooding, like a Kainga Ora development at Northcote, but in Māngere, there were rushed developments before the infrastructure was put in and homes got flooded, Brown said.
Brown also wants central government to stop interfering with local government’s planning rules, saying the Auckland Unitary Plan took some years and a lot of money to put in place, and while not perfect, it is doing a pretty good job.
“It did not need to be overruled by a joint party approach that did not consider the infrastructure requirements,” said Brown, referring to the Government and National’s directive for more intensification almost anywhere in suburban Auckland, known as Plan Change 78.
“I think the last council did their best to limit the impacts of Plan Change 78, but I think it’s time to review that again. Did we do enough because we have learned some very severe lessons in the last two weeks,” he said.
The other big challenge on Brown’s radar is his first budget, containing a raft of cuts to address a $295m funding hole and the cost of living crisis. The budget process means the full impact of the storms cannot be calculated to go into the document, although an extra $20m for stormwater maintenance has been added.
Brown said it is a misconception he is out to cut everything, saying he does not like making cuts, but has inherited a big budget gap largely due to the last council not making cuts.
“By law I have to produce a balanced budget by the middle of the year, starting off with a $295m hole, which has been exacerbated by the weather events that means we have to consider some tough choices.”
As well as making big calls on selling the council’s airport shares valued at $2.2 billion and cutting running costs by $125m, some of the most contentious proposals are cutting community grants, such as library hours and $2m for the Citizens Advice Bureau.
Brown said one choice available to households, where rates are forecast to rise by 4.6 per cent, is higher rates. But that comes at a time when 600,000 households are under intense pressure to make ends meet from having to remortgage at about 4 per cent more than last time, he said.
After four months in the job, the Herald asked Brown what he had learned and the high and low points.
There’s more to fix than he thought, said Brown. The finances are in a worse state than he thought and the floods have shown up some of the poorer spending choices.
“I think there will be questions about cycleways versus floodplains” - a reference to where the council prioritises spending; on reducing carbon emissions or building resilience to climate change.
The high points have been passing the draft budget for consultation and seeing how people have come together to respond to the weather events.
The low point has been the floods.
The 19-year-old disappeared without her wallet or mobile phone.