Dialogue: Mayor gives us all a good laugh

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

John Banks is the funniest mayor in my 30 years as a resident of Auckland City. He's made our local government a theatre of the absurd.

There he was, on Holmes the night after the protesters had been ejected from the council chambers. With him was a pleasant, controlled sort of older bloke who had been among those thrown out.

This guy, billed by Banks as some kind of defiant anarchist, sat quietly as though in search of reasoned discussion while Banks ranted away about the behaviour of riff-raff in general and some woman in a cowboy suit in particular.

This woman sat on the mayoral throne, and Banks kept going on about her cowboy suit as though anyone dressed in a cowboy suit must ipso facto be menacingly impertinent.

It was John Cleese funny. Maybe if we all dressed up in cowboy suits and sat on the throne we could drive this self-confessed obsessive-compulsive (NZ Listener, 03/11/01) completely off his rocker.

During that turbulent council meeting, apparently tut-tutting with exasperation, he shut Victoria Carter up to stop her cooler sanity seeping into the proceedings. Groucho Marx funny.

Then, the other day, claiming a special mandate as mayor, he was reported as saying he won more votes at last year's election than all the other candidates put together, a claim the published figures deny.

Whether he backed the no-rise-in-rates pledge made by Cits and Rats during the election campaign, I'm not sure, because I've never seen a yes/no answer from him.

And the only time I heard from him during his mayoral campaign was when he was in Queen St with a megaphone. That was comical to the point where I thought he might have won the annual busking award.

I imagined a shouting match between him and a stock auctioneer I used to know in Hawkes Bay, who in full cry could startle a pen of breeding cows 200 metres away.

I think Banks would win even if he lost the toss and had to scream into the wind. When he raises his voice it has a sharp edge to it, like the sound an empty tin can makes as it's kicked down a gravel road by a boy moving reluctantly to school.

All of which is good fun. I argued with friends that maybe it didn't matter that he needed a safety-catch on his mouth if we're going to get this kind of entertaining buffoonery in a city and nation that tend towards tedium in public life.

What harm can he do in three years? After all, the reason the city got a bit of the intellectual rough trade for mayor in the first place is because Aucklanders seem to regard the local body elections as either irrelevant to their lives or as theatre.

Two women I know confessed to voting for Banks because he was "colourful" compared with the "invisible" Christine Fletcher.

They were a bit ashamed of their electoral aberration after three months, but I wasn't sure they should be.

My case was that he is a laugh, a kind of satire on the modern business-based politician for whom every issue is simple and who thinks those who can't understand the obvious economic truths of life are fundamentally stupid and should be shoved aside.

But friends have persuaded me that the effect overall is damaging. He has spoken of zero tolerance of crime, a policy many people would support, except that he has no compelling say in that matter. But I had to agree that it's the zero tolerance of dissent that is most unsatisfactory in a democracy.

It wouldn't matter as much if the council was more balanced, had more rounded people on it to counterbalance Banks. But it's dominated by business people, and Banks is a paragon of that type.

A poles-apart situation would be having in the job an absent-minded professor of classics who'd never been off-salary, berating everyone with excerpts from Plato and Aristotle and doing nothing. That would be no better, but no worse either.

Recently, I read a lecture by a writer and Oxford don, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, given during World War I, in which he said: "Through the market clamour for a 'Business Government' will persist the voice of Plato, murmuring that, after all, the best form of government is government by good men; and the voice of some small man faintly protesting, 'But I don't want to be governed by business men; because I know them and, without asking much of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my back'."

I did have to agree with my friends that if you take as a given that a city is a community, then mayors and councillors should be well-rounded people capable of considered thought and tolerance, as well as action.

You do get the worrying feeling that the mayor and his deputy, David Hay, exercise thought processes of the one-size-fits-all-situations kind.

Yes, seriously, Banksie may not be the best mayor we've had in Auckland since I came here 30 years ago, but he's certainly the worst. And it's no mean feat to establish that position within four months of winning office.