Brian Rudman: A home where the elephants roam? It doesn't seem to fit the city plan

About all I can remember from my school French classes is that there's a hot dry wind that blows in off the Mediterranean and makes people do crazy things.

In Auckland, the cyclonic winds blowing from the tropics in recent days seem to be having a similar effect.

And nowhere more so than at the Town Hall, where Auckland City councillors have decided to fight the recession by voting to spend $13.5 million on a herd of Asian elephants.

What's more, they want to let them loose on the inner-city Western Springs veldt.

Now I'm as much an elephant hugger as the next bloke, but I can't help remembering that just last week I got a stern lecture from the bureaucrats about how upsetting it would be for the sacred eels of the Springs duck pond to have to share their murky lair with the foundation piles of the fabulous Wind Tree sculpture, formerly of downtown Queen Elizabeth Square, but now homeless.

In that conversation, my attention was also drawn to an official park management plan which ordains that the whole area is for passive recreation only - a place of quietude in a natural setting, to be left as it is.

But just a few days later this plan is but a bit of scrap paper to ignore.

The zoo bureaucrats admit there is a management plan that "was adopted by council in 1995, following public consultation" and that "a proposed change in use to the zoo would be inconsistent with the management plan".

"However, as the park is held by council in fee simple, the management plan is not a statutory document."

In other words, we can get around it with little trouble. The result, the councillors ignored the plan and agreed to the zoo hijacking 22,000sq m of the park as a home for 10 wandering elephants.

I can't help feeling that if the native eels that the management plan is so worried about - as are the Ngati Whatua - are going to be upset about a few poles of inert stainless steel, then the bush-dwelling taniwha will be seething about a herd of pachyderms tromping uninvited into their territory.

Zoo director Jonathan Wilcken appeared on television on the night of the vote to say what fun it would be for visitors to the Springs to look up from their duck-feeding and spot an elephant or two peering over the new boundary fence.

It brought back memories of the hilarity caused by one-time city councillor and botany professor Valentine Chapman when, in the late 1960s, he proposed letting hippos loose in the pond to deal with the perennial water weed problem. Perhaps there was a stiff norwesterly blowing that week, too.

With that in mind, maybe we should cross fingers and hope the tropical storms die down before our leaders have another rush of blood to the head and declare the whole of the Springs precinct a wild life game park.

With Mayor John Banks now talking of shifting Sir Edmund Hillary's do-it-yourself family home from Remuera to the Museum of Transport and Technology next door to the zoo, who knows what might happen.

It could become safari headquarters; a place for big game hunters to kit out before boarding a vintage Motat tram - reinforced, of course - for the trip through Auckland's Jurassic Park.

As I've said before, a zoo without elephants might as well pack up, so the enthusiasm of the zoo staff for this project is understandable. I also accept that these beasts are social beings that need a bit of company.

What is bewildering is that the most vociferous political supporters of the elephant project are the same councillors who have been screaming blue murder about the level of rates increases for the less well-off, and the savage cuts to social and community services the city is undertaking.

Yet they brush aside the $13.5 million establishment costs of the elephant grand plan, to say nothing of annual costs rising to $460,000 a year by 2021.

But even putting aside the need for belt-tightening in these recessionary times, surely the impending upheaval of Auckland local governance calls for caution.

Isn't a decision on discretionary spending of this kind best left to those who might end up paying the bills, by which I mean the regional ratepayers who will presumably take over ownership of the zoo some time soon.