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Inside Wayne Brown’s bid for re-election - Simon Wilson
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Wayne Brown announces his bid for a second Auckland mayoralty at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron on Auckland's waterfront. Photo / Alex Burton
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“Wayne is a single-minded engineer with just the right amount of Asperger’s to fix this city,” Wall told the crowd. That got a good laugh.
Later he told me, by way of clarifying his own political outlook, that he was “Elon Musk’s biggest fan”.
Brown himself, however, is proud of his cross-party links. He’s got Labour people in key advisory roles helping run the city, but for this campaign he’s brought back the old firm of Tim Hurdle and Matthew Hooton, National operatives who masterminded his successful campaign in 2022.
Not that he’s popular with everyone. About half the councillors turned up to his victory party in October 2022, but not a single one of them returned for this event. Is that odd? He says he didn’t invite any, but why not? Haven’t any of them become his mates?
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During the speeches, an old mate of Brown’s leaned over and asked if I’d noticed the demographic in the room: closing on 90% middle-aged white men.
But Brown didn’t see it that way. He told the crowd they represented his good relationships with diverse groups in the city: “the business sector, the property sector, Chinese, Indian, Pacific Islanders, Māori, sports people, environmentalists, South Auckland, ‘because I’m on the board of the Ohdihu Business Association’.”
He wasn’t wrong, they were all in the room, but overwhelmingly the crowd belonged to the first two groups.
Still, King Kapisi was there. Zambesi’s Neville Findley was there, too, along with the film and television producer John Barnett. Barnett went to school with Brown, back when winklepickers were a thing.
Being mayor was “a job I want to keep doing’, Brown said, before extolling the virtues of “the lovely Wydimatta”.
I know, it’s not a big thing. Not on the scale of stopping wasteful spending, or strengthening council finances, moderating the rates rises and making council agencies more accountable. The things Brown is staking his campaign on.
How you talk doesn’t matter if you get things done.
But is that true? You can be a good custodian of the public purse and also put a bit of effort into pronouncing the language of the tangata whenua, can’t you?
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Anyway, it’s official, he’s standing again. He wouldn’t comment on the fact his deputy, Desley Simpson, may stand against him. She won’t comment either. No other big names are in the ring, yet, at least.
Is Brown a good custodian of the public purse? Yes but also no, I’d say. It’s only 200 days until the polls open: just enough time to take a closer look at that.
The path to somewhere
Moyle Park is a tree-lined, sprawling green space in Māngere, with playing fields, sports clubs and a stream running through it. At its south end, a pathway leads over State Highway 20, just by the airport/Manukau interchange, connecting to Māngere Central Park, Favona and Māngere East.
I wrote about it in late 2022, because it had a problem that was about to be fixed. The pathway came to a bog and stopped: 30 years earlier, when it was built, the funding had run out.
Residents on the east side of the motorway wanting to get to the Māngere town centre or any of the schools or sports facilities to the west had to drive the long way around.
For the lack of 600 metres of asphalt, they couldn’t walk with dry feet, take a pushchair or ride a bike or a mobility scooter. The local board and community advocates had been asking for years for the path to be finished.
In December 2022, the Government of the day announced that it would be. The Moyle Park pathway was one of hundreds of projects in a new $350 million Transport Choices package.
They were small-scale, cheap, easy to build, mostly shovel-ready, and most of them were local initiatives. They included 397 new or upgraded bus shelters, 240km of cycleways, 119 improvements to school access and 11 new bus routes.
Some of them were even built, but budget cuts after the announcement stopped many of the others. Moyle Park had its design and consultation funded, but not construction.
The good news is, Auckland Transport picked it up and has now finished the job.
Politicians love to talk about local issues and listening to the community, but at the time Transport Choices wasn’t supported by Mayor Wayne Brown or National’s transport spokesman Simeon Brown. And although Labour’s Michael Wood introduced it, he then presided over the budget cuts.
The thing about local projects is that they don’t change the world, so it’s easy to ignore them. But they can change your world, if you happen to live there.
Moyle Park is a very popular project: a video on Facebook has had 120,000 views.
Please sir, can we have some more swimming pools?
Speaking of custodians of the public purse (see above), Auckland Council debated swimming pools yesterday.
Not that the agenda item was “swimming pools” as such. The official title was “Aquatic Network Review”. A little bit silly, but never mind.
Swimming pools are the third most-used type of council amenity, after parks and libraries. But despite their popularity, they’re unevenly distributed around the city.
In South Auckland, the old Manukau City Council believed in them so strongly, it built “a pool in every suburb”. Amazing, and almost true.
But in west Auckland, the West Wave leisure centre in Henderson has the only public pool serving a population expected to grow to half a million.
The council has four new “aquatic facilities” in the planning pipeline over the next 30 years: one in Avondale and another further west, one in Howick to the east and one in Drury in the far south.
But none of them is funded. The reality is that Auckland Council hasn’t built a single indoor aquatic centre in its 15 years of existence and there’s little reason to think that might change.
The reason? They’re too expensive. At the council meeting, figures of $75 million to $110 million were floated about.
Council officials reported that the benchmark for pools in comparable cities internationally is one for every 35,000-50,000 people. During the last 15 years with no new pools, Auckland has grown by 300,000 people.
On top of that, Helen Clark’s Government stopped funding new school pools and major renovations in 2001. Since then, hundreds of school pools have closed.
Poor access to swimming pools is just another thing to remember when someone says this is a great place to bring up kids. There are real consequences: Councillor Richard Hills said that Australia, which builds a lot of pools, has a rate of drowning only half our own.
What to do? Mayor Brown believes the city should build “swimming pools, not entertainment centres”. Outdoor pools are cheaper and besides, Auckland shouldn’t be benchmarked for swimming pools against other cities, because we have so many beaches.
He thinks the Government’s failure to do its bit should not be a ratepayer’s problem.
And he’s not impressed with councillors who campaign only for pools in their own areas. People will travel, he said. “Most of the people using the new seawater pool at Karanga Plaza on the waterfront come from south Auckland and Kelston.”
He calls it Brownie’s Pool, although I’m not sure anyone else does. He said it cost 100, maybe 300 times less than a flash new indoor aquatic centre, and what he’d like to do is “put four or five of them around the city”.
Really good idea. I asked him at his campaign launch on Wednesday if he had any specific achievements in mind for a second term. He couldn’t think of anything, but he has now. If he’s re-elected, let’s hold him to it.
The idea would work at any beach that becomes an unswimmable mudflat at low tide, if there’s a rocky promontory you could walk out on, to deeper water and a safe enclosed swimming pool. Okahu Bay would be perfect, he suggested later.
Councillors agree with Brown that pools cost too much and they need to find alternatives.
Shane Henderson said he had been to New Brighton in Christchurch to see how they built a new pool for $11 million. He reckoned West Auckland could do it for $15 million and the council should make that happen.
Andy Baker said that in the Franklin ward, which stretches right around the far south of the city, they’re working on partnerships with private providers to get new facilities built. Richard Hills said Birkenhead College has an outdoor pool, heated by solar for over a decade, and it cost only $100,000.
But Angela Dalton was angry about the complete lack of progress. Council has policy to build more pools and no one has ever suggested that be changed, she said. “We’re not saying we won’t build pools anymore. We’re just not funding them.”
Council heard there were 8 million visits to aquatic centres last year, of which nearly half were people using the pools and most of the rest were people using the fitness centres.
Dalton compared that to stadiums, which council frets over far more often: they get only half a million visits a year. “Limit pools at your peril,” she said, “because this is what our communities want from us.”
It’s especially true of indoor pools. Seawater pools are splendid but they’re a boutique response to the issue. Large indoor pools offer thousands of people respite from the heat in summer and great activity options for kids and everyone else in winter. At West Wave, they often queue for an hour to get in.
And John Watson and Dalton both said swimming pools are essential for learning to swim.
“You can’t really go into the sea if you don’t know how to swim,” said Watson.
The council agreed, unanimously, to direct staff to develop a business case for a “multi-pronged approach to delivering aquatic services”. It will take a year.
Bike lanes on Victoria St
How exciting, to see bike lanes finally laid down on Victoria St West, connecting the Nelson St route with the Queen St valley. Not open yet, but they’ll soon be ready for use.
Like Nelson St, they’re the cheap solution: just dividing off a strip of roadway with concrete, to make it safe, and slapping down a bit of paint. This approach should be widely applied around the city.
They’re also the last bit needed to make the bike lanes in that part of the city fully functional. Further eastwards, running down the hill to Queen St, Victoria St is being transformed into a safer zone for pedestrians, cyclists and scooter riders, with lots of seating and planting, ahead of the CRL station opening next year.
There will still be vehicle lanes, but the train station and all the extra commercial and residential life coming to or already in the area will make Victoria St extremely busy. It’s great that traffic will be calmed and all the modes of transport using it will be separated from each other.
Bit like Quay St. Look how good that is now.
Will there be grouches anyway? Of course there will. But this cycleway went through the public consultation process and received 79% support.
Horses for courses at Avondale
On the face of it, Avondale Racecourse presents the perfect opportunity for density to be done well in Auckland.
It’s 33 hectares of open area, a blank slate with almost no buildings, no stands of bush or heritage trees to protect, so it’s ripe for anything. It’s near the railway, good bus routes and even a cycleway, all of them connecting into town and out to New Lynn.
Avondalites are Westies in their own minds, but Avondale was part of Auckland City, not Waitakere City. You can go either way. And the area is growing: new apartment blocks pop up all the time. The town centre has been cruelly neglected, but that will change.
And the racecourse owners want to sell.
What would you put there? A few thousand homes? Or nothing much at all: keep the playing fields and the market, which is said to attract 20,000 people every Sunday?
Hold on, the people of Avondale say that’s the wrong question.
Fifty of them crowded into the council meeting this week to ask a different one. They represented businesses, residents, the Whau Pasifika Komiti and many others including the Maritime Union, which national secretary Carl Findlay said has a lot of members living in the suburb. The owner of the Avondale Market was there and so was most of the local board.
Avondale appears to be as one. “It’s not often we see a community as united as this,” said councillor Lotu Fuli.
Jaclyn Bonnici from I Love Avondale led the presentation. “This could be an incredible case study of what is possible when the community holds hands with business, with recreation groups, with everyone,” she said.
Instead, they believe a process is already underway that will shut them out. The Jockey Club owns the land and the NZ Thoroughbred Association has taken over the Jockey Club and is working with Fletcher Building on development plans.
“We’re not opposed to density,” she said. “We love housing in Avondale, we’ve welcomed [developer] Ockham in the past and will do so again soon, we work closely with Kainga Ora. But how can we say how much housing the area should support if we can’t see the geotech and flooding impact reports?”
Cynthia Crosse from the Avondale Business Association reminded the council that the Racing Act 2020 requires that community consultation occurs, “but there has been none”. She said council staff are, instead, already helping Fletcher Building with their plans.
The business association has its own concept plans for the land, drawn up by Motu Design.
What’s the right question? Bonnici said they were asking the council to convene a working group involving all the interested parties, and take it from there.
How about, someone suggested, at least half the area remaining as a sports park, with playing fields and other recreational facilities, and the rest becoming densely residential?
Here’s the design principle: the more housing you have, the more open space you need. And the racecourse is also a flood detention zone and a stopover point for migrating godwits.
Council made no decisions on Wednesday. There’s much more on this to come.
Coming soon to Tamaki Makaurau
Sunrise Yoga: Queens Wharf (right out at the end) Wednesday until March 11, 7am-8.15am.
Mermaid Parade: Queens Wharf, Saturday, February 22, 11am-4pm.
Helensville A&P Show: Helensville Showgrounds, Saturday, February 22, 9am-5pm.
Te Ahurei Toi o Tamaki Auckland Arts Festival: Bookings are open, March 6-23
Summer in the Square: Sky Pirates All Stars – all day 5x5 basketball action featuring teams entered from all over the city, Saturday, February 22. Whanau Day, Sunday, February 23. Both in Aotea Square.
Coming into town? Kids ride free on public transport on weekends and public holidays. Fanshawe St carpark has a $7 flat fee a day on weekends.
Simon Wilson is a senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
