John Roughan: Capital still calling Auckland's shots

Auckland will govern itself no more than it ever has. Photo / Martin Sykes

One of the many things I love about Auckland is its political innocence. Its conversation doesn't engage with national or even civic affairs as earnestly as it does in, say, Wellington or Christchurch.

When you are in those towns these days you will be asked what Auckland thinks about this "Super City". They ask with an intensity of interest that sounds almost excited.

I try to to explain that it's hard to gauge what Auckland thinks. There's been no outbreak of enthusiasm or opposition, beyond a few mayors and their councils. The citizenry, by and large, took the view that it was going to happen regardless of what they thought. So they haven't been thinking much.

There are after all, better things to do in Auckland than ponder public issues. Let Wellington sort these things out.

And Wellington has. Just about all the big decisions in Auckland's development have been made down there. The motorways, the bridge, the shape of its local government, now the Super City.

The Super City will change nothing in this regard. Auckland will govern itself no more than it ever has, possibly less. Take a look at the plan that will shortly be enacted by Parliament.

Transport, notice, is not to be left entirely to the Super City. Transport has been Auckland's main problem. Every study, every poll, every discussion of the city's condition has cited one common frustration: road congestion. There really wasn't much else wrong with the place.

Yet solutions are not to be entrusted entirely to the planned Auckland Council. Decisions will be made by a quasi-autonomous Regional Transport Authority containing powerful representatives from Government agencies that will continue to control the money.

I'm not criticising this; I'm greatly relieved. Any competent Aucklander with serious political inclinations goes to Wellington and gets a seat in the cabinet. There they have rescued their fellow ratepayers from the follies of the local bodies a number of times over the years.

It took an Auckland prime minister, Helen Clark, to see the merits of a Super City and another, John Key, will see it through. The Auckland business lobby that urged them to do it, imagined a city is like a company and can be given the same power structure. That's how Auckland thinks.

Its small class of politically savvy citizens, many of whom stand for its local bodies, unfortunately don't live in the same city as me. Their minds are in some place where everyone lives within walking distance of work, or at least not far from two railway lines that bring them to the city centre where just about all of them work. They think they are in Wellington. They constantly carp that Wellington's railways are more generously funded than Auckland's. Right now they are worried that Transport Minister Steven Joyce might not give them all the electric trains he promised when he scotched another of their ideas: a regional petrol tax to pay for them.

Joyce lives in the Auckland I know, a gloriously expansive paradise of sunny suburbs on a low-lying volcanic landscape between two harbours and two coasts. The water is warm, the beaches are within easy reach. People travel to work in wildly diverse patterns. It is not a city you can serve with fixed-route public transport.

Wellington has always known this. Ministers have been knocking back expensive rail schemes for Auckland for as long as anyone can remember.

Ironically the old rail scheme owes its current revival to a decision made in Wellington. When the previous National Government put the chargeable assets of the Auckland Regional Council under a trust to clear the council's debt, the trust left a fund looking for a project.

Worse, its main asset was the Port of Auckland that the city's political class had "saved" from sale and now eyed its earnings as a permanent source of subsidy for passenger rail.

Eventually, they took the port off the sharemarket and blocked an obvious merger with Tauranga's spacious port, denying the country an economic gain and making it harder to claim Auckland wharves for public amenities. Little wonder the Super City is not to be trusted with transport.

Which leaves the question, do we really need it? We could be sacrificing a lot of local authority for this single city. I'm not excited by "one city, one plan, one rates bill".

Why one plan for all communities? Why can't mine protect trees on private property if we value them? This Auckland Council is going to seem a long way from most of us.

Typically, we will not take enough interest in the subject until it's too late.

The city is a vast collection of sublime living spots, a fine place for business and pleasure. But when it comes to public decisions a Tui billboard in Wellington is wiser: "Auckland a Super City? Yeah, right."