KEY POINTS:
Just when you thought the Bruce Hucker saga couldn't become any more embarrassing for the left, it deteriorates into pure slapstick.
Yesterday, Dr Hucker's Auckland City Vision-Labour team mates gave their sacked leader two hours to fall on his sword and resign as deputy mayor as well.
It would have left the veteran politician with a vestige of dignity.
But true to form, he retreated into his city administration building bunker and fired off a two-fingered email to his colleagues, telling them if they wanted him to go they'd have to drag him out, screaming and yelling, by the hair.
As departures go, it is starting to rank with the humiliating last days of Saddam Hussein. For some reason I can't get the television images of that one-time strongman, all tousle-haired and bewildered, and oh so mortal after weeks on the run, being hauled out of his underground hidey-hole to be checked for lice and tooth decay by his captors.
Dr Hucker is also digging in for the long seige and farcically has grasped a breathing tube tossed into his grave by his conservative Citizens and Ratepayers foes.
Sniffing the chance to make mischief, the Citrats are keeping Dr Hucker's hopes alive by refusing to endorse the vote of no-confidence death warrant needed before the deputy mayor can be deposed.
What an ignominious rescue squad for someone who for 21 years has held himself up as the left-wing conscience of the city.
Two weeks ago Dr Hucker was sacked as City Vision leader because he refused to follow party policy on water charges.
But somehow he managed to be reselected as one of the team's Western Bay ward candidates for the October elections.
A few days later a totally unrepentant Dr Hucker again praised the water policy his colleagues said was "not financially sustainable or fair for households".
If that statement was not enough to guarantee his expulsion from the City Vision ticket, surely yesterday's desperate desire to cling to the rather worthless title of deputy mayor must be.
How can City Vision go into the upcoming election campaign with their most experienced candidate preaching a water policy which the rest of the team regards as heresy?
If City Vision wants to be taken seriously it's going to have to sack Dr Hucker and select someone voters can trust to follow the election pledges.
That he has managed to alienate practically every member of his team to the extent they are prepared to dump him four months before an election says a lot about Dr Hucker and his style.
Team members have long complained in private that to him consensus politics means follow Bruce or else. But as my colleague, Bernard Orsman, revealed more and more details of the bureaucrat-driven, council leader-backed plan to artificially pad water bills by more than 100 per cent over the next 10 years to pay for stormwater drainage improvements, Dr Hucker's team mates have begun to speak up for the policies they were elected on three years ago.
Tomorrow, a flurry of Auckland City politicians and bureaucrats fly to Wellington at ratepayers' expense to justify this doubling of water prices before a parliamentary select committee.
Hopefully the parliamentarians will quiz them on the council papers revealed in yesterday's Herald, exposing how ratepayers were told the effect on water bills of the new water policy "will be small in the first 10 years" despite advice from the council-owned water company Metrowater warning of "significant price increases".
The trouble with the select committee inquiry is that, like Dr Hucker's grim struggle to hang on to office, it's all about politics and will have no effect on improving the plight of Auckland ratepayers.
The only way parliamentarians are going to help Aucklanders is by confronting the governance crisis stalling the region.
The best way to control water prices is to create one regional water company, under the wing of an empowered, dominant, Auckland Regional Council.
But, like most of us, parliamentarians are suckers for a good diversionary sideshow. And with the Hucker farce playing to full houses in Auckland and the water pricing select committee grabbing the limelight, who's got time to be serious?
