Wayne Brown's acceptance speech as the new mayor of Auckland. Video / NZ Herald
OPINION:
Every so often there is a tidal change in a nation's thinking, a change as imperceptible as a sea tide until something happens to make it evident, the re-emergence of a reef - or an election result.
The local election results last weekend were just such a sign. WayneBrown's victory in the Auckland mayoralty was expected but not the scale of it, and nobody realised the tide had turned nationwide.
Christchurch had two impressive mayoral candidates and the one leaning right beat a well-liked former health board chair. Three of the main cities went right and so did normally Labour-voting Rotorua. Only the capital swam against the tide, which is no consolation for a government.
There has been a sea change. It has obvious implications for the general election a year from now but it will have an impact on politics much sooner than that. In fact, its effect is evident already.
The Prime Minister was markedly more conciliatory in her remarks on Three Waters at Monday's post-Cabinet press conference. In Auckland media, left-wing commentators were softening their treatment of Brown, finding merit in some of his plans to reshape the way the council works.
News media need to speak to the temper of the times and election results are their best guide. Even with low turnouts, local body elections are many times better than an opinion poll.
As one who cares for the survival of newspapers, it has long worried me that the 2017 election result, distorted by Winston Peters, has led them to misread the zeitgeist. Most people are not woke.
Brown's first week in office has been a breath of fresh air. It's refreshing to get a mayor who's blunt, whose utterances are not scripted by professionals, and who's too old to waste time.
He has already put some heat on Auckland Transport, whose chair has resigned, and the development agency Panuku, having seen its poor returns on the council's books. The elections have given him a council less left-wing than the previous one. Someone who knows them better than I do estimates eight of the elected 20 lean right, eight left, and four could go either way.
His four include Desley Simpson, who should become deputy mayor, and a resurrected Mike Lee who was a thorn in the flesh of Auckland Transport years ago and could be again.
Brown wants to give all councillors more practical things to do than spend their days in "committees of the whole" discussing issues in the abstract.
He says he will give local boards more power too, as he should. Local boards contain some of the most genuine, sensible, dedicated people in local government.
Wayne Brown is blunt and too old to waste time. Photo / Jed Bradley
All deserve better than another very low voter turnout for local elections. But nobody should be surprised at that, least of all parliamentarians who have steadily eroded the powers of councils.
No wonder few residents vote when they see elected representatives become little more than lobbyists of council staff for decisions that matter in their locality, and they see the Government in Wellington overriding their council's urban plan.
Then there's Three Waters, the egregious takeover of council assets that would remove power from those who pay water bills. Councils' distant influence would be diluted by "co-governance" with mana whenua whose democratic credentials are not clear.
An inquiry into the low turnouts at local elections needs to range far beyond questions about postal voting and other technicalities. Interest in local government has declined as councils have become less local and less able to govern anything.
Every Labour government has been hell-bent on amalgamating them into bigger subsidiaries of central power. Three Waters continues the trend. The "Super City" was conceived by Helen Clark and adopted by John Key. Its big decisions have not been great, especially the rail tunnel construction that has just about killed the inner city.
Now we discover the tunnel is not all that will be required to make the rail network sing as an earlier mayor Brown convinced the city it would be. Much more will need to be spent on the tracks to bring the trains up to speed. Meanwhile, the city's visionaries have moved on to light rail.
Auckland Council is too big to be a local government and too small to be initiating big infrastructure projects that require national finance and risk a serious misallocation of the nation's economic resources.
Neither the national Treasury nor the national transport agency thought railways were suited to Auckland's commuter travel patterns until they were overruled by national governments seeking Auckland votes.
If Wayne Brown can stop the city pressing for more of these massive poor investments the whole country should be glad.
