Dialogue: This mayoral hoon had better slow up

By GARTH GEORGE

Memo John Banks: If you don't hold your tongue, pull your head in and get your feet back on the ground you will become the laughing stock not only of metropolitan Auckland but of the whole of New Zealand.

You were not appointed monarch of Auckland; it is not your personal fief. You were elected mayor - merely the first among equals in a democratically elected council there to administer the city for the sole benefit of its ratepayers and residents.

Only weeks into the job you have so misconducted yourself that many of those who voted for you or supported your election have already come to the conclusion that they committed a serious error of judgment.

We didn't for a moment believe that we were getting an unreconstructed 1990s far-right economic ideologue of a breed that went out of fashion when Ruth Richardson got the chop. But that's what you have revealed yourself to be.

It has become obvious that you have completely lost touch with the real world in which the vast majority of us - wage and salary earners and small businesspeople on incomes of $100,000 and less - have to live.

You have, apparently with little or no consultation, appointed Sir William Birch as a "consultant" to the council, which would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. Never in the history of New Zealand politics did any politician take so long to do so little as that Muldoon-to-Bolger lapdog.

From the big-spending days of Think Big to the contemptible penny-pinching of Richardson and Shipley, Bill Birch was in the grey eminence - a public trough survivor able to adapt his politics to every wind of change that blew, no matter how softly.

Banning so-called boy racers from Queen St is nothing but a self-publicity stunt, for it will confer no benefit whatsoever on 999 out of 1000 Aucklanders, who would never go into Queen St late on a weekend night.

Those people who do go park their cars in parking buildings, scuttle straight to their theatres or restaurants, then scuttle right back home again. So the only people likely to be harmed are those who have been silly enough to buy apartments on the main drag.

In any case, it is not the boy racers who are the problem, but the drunken or zonked louts, both male and female, who infest the pavements.

The tree on One Tree Hill was an Auckland icon for decades. Its disfigurement and subsequent destruction engendered more letters to the editor of this newspaper than any other matter for at least the past 13 years. A vast majority of Aucklanders have an emotional attachment to Maungakiekie and want a tree back on the summit.

And they are quite happy to have their money spent on it, bearing in mind that politicians and bureaucrats spend other people's money more liberally than their own and that a close watch should be kept on the costs.

Pensioner housing has been part of the city council's service to the community since the 1930s and, once again, most citizens are happy to have their rates and charges subsidise it for the benefit of their less fortunate neighbours.

To talk of disposing of pensioner housing simply as a "cost-cutting" exercise is utterly repugnant, particularly since inexcusable damage has already been done by your shoot-from-the-lip pronouncements putting dreadful uncertainty into the minds of vulnerable pensioners who depend on council housing for shelter.

Auckland needs a three-day series of V8 supercar street races as much as it needs more sewage and stormwater overflows into the harbour.

The thought of closing off downtown streets for that time and filling them with the ghastly pollution of noise and fumes is about as appealing as turning the Town Hall into a porn theatre-cum-brothel.

Perhaps the public would take more kindly to the idea if the street-racing circuit took in Remuera Rd and its side streets and, come to think of it, Judges Bay Rd, too.

But, once again, the damage has been done, with a gratuitous insult to the people of the Franklin District, whose Pukekohe circuit has for decades had an international reputation for its efficient and hospitable hosting of big car-racing events.

And last but not least, conspicuous and extravagant consumption, such as driving a personal Bentley round the city, does not appeal to many New Zealanders, even Aucklanders, particularly when the price of that vehicle would pay for half a dozen pensioner units, and the money tied up on other wheels in your garage at home would probably provide quite a few more.

Why don't you pop down to Invercargill and take some lessons from Tim Shadbolt?

E-mail Garth George