Brian Rudman: Business and politics unlikely bedfellows

Cartoon / Peter Bromhead

The two main Super City mayoral candidates, Len Brown and John Banks, must be doing something right.

Only 17 per cent of Auckland's top businessmen are "satisfied" with the candidates on offer and in the just-released Herald 2010 CEO Survey, 50 per cent of participants called for someone else to vote for.

Unlike my colleague Fran O'Sullivan, news of the business world's dissatisfaction cheers me up. What business wants and Auckland needs are not necessarily the same thing.

Despite all the campaigning to the contrary by business front groups like Committee for Auckland, you get the uneasy feeling the business community's ideal leadership team would be a supine mayor and council who would do away with the regulations that make cities liveable for the rest of us, lower the rates on their businesses, build more roads for their trucks and turn a blind eye when they pollute the city's skies and waterways.

The Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern) chief executive, Alasdair Thompson, says business leaders thought Mr Banks and Mr Brown were "okay candidates" but they wanted someone who was not a career politician and was more business-minded.

Both Mr Brown and Mr Banks have a background of successful business activity behind them but they also have years of experience in the political arena, which is a good thing. It means they're more likely to appreciate that the business community is just one interest group among many and a good mayor has to have regard for all sectors.

As to the absence of "business leaders" scrambling to ascend the new throne of Auckland, that's hardly a big surprise. Politics is a very different game from that of business. Any business leader with leadership ambitions only has to recall the torrid nightmare of Dick Hubbard's three years as Auckland City Mayor.

Politics requires a very different set of skills from running a business, particularly a privately owned business. In politics, it's not just the strength of your case that matters; you also need a majority lined up behind you.

In the run-up to the Super City being formed, big business lobbied vigorously for an all-powerful, executive-style mayor like London's, with presidential-like powers. In the end, sanity - and democracy - prevailed, and Auckland's new mayor will have just one vote on a council of 21.

True, he or she will have more power than mayors in other cities. Auckland's mayor will appoint the inner cabinet of committee chairmen - giving the chosen few a healthy pay rise in the process - and also draw up the city budget. But decisions will still need majority support and that requires political rather than business skills. And lashings of patience.

Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey summed up the frustrations that would-be dictators - benevolent or otherwise - now face under this watered-down governance model in an interview with Bill Ralston in the Listener last year.

"I thought it was an empowered job. A Boris [Johnson, London mayor] or a Ken [Livingstone, former Greater London Mayor]. That was every mayor's wet dream ... an empowered position. An unempowered position means you have to beg and grovel to get what you want."

As a long-time mayor, Mr Harvey was reflecting the frustrations of years of having to negotiate and compromise through many a battle. But that's democracy.

That's why the business-led reformers wanted democracy watered down. And why, now that it hasn't been, or only slightly, there's a distinct lack of interest from within the business world to stand for the mayoralty.

The mayoral race shouldn't be about selecting a show pony, whether from big business, show business or anywhere else.

It's about selecting a person who can work together in a leadership role, with the 20 councillors elected later this year to represent all sectors of Auckland society.