Wayne Brown with wife Toni. Was it love at first sight? 'God no!' she exclaims. Photo / Jed Bradley
Wayne Brown on avoiding ‘national f***-ups’, banjo-band groupies - and the love of his life. In this new series, Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie sits down with a newsmaker/leading light.
Wayne Brown walks into lunch at one of Auckland’s upmarket hotels in a short-sleeved, blue and beige checkered shirt. He looks relaxed, holding the hand of his wife Toni. The pair could easily be mistaken for being on an overseas holiday or a cruise ship.
“I call her Princess and she calls me Brownie,” says Auckland’s mayor of almost six months.
It’s a weekday, and “Brownie” – “my kids all call me that, and my grandkids” – still has several meetings ahead. He jokes that he needs to be slightly sober for the lunch but seriously drunk for an afternoon meeting with councillor Maurice Williamson.
Brown is in an upbeat mood and he will pepper lunch with this - shall we say - unique style of humour. As the world well knows, he is not a traditional politician. Few escape a skewering over the following two hours, as he paints a picture of himself as a no-nonsense, qualified engineer and board gun, voted in as mayor to get Auckland back on track. Mr Fix-it.
“Well, it’s lovely to be here,” says Brown, surveying his kingdom from the table at the Park Hyatt’s Onemata restaurant, with its waterside views of the Viaduct and Auckland’s cityscape. “Right in the heart as to why I want to be mayor.”
Brown is big on Auckland’s waterfront. Turn left at the bottom of Queen St, he says, and you’re walking through the essence of a “modern” and “wonderful” city. Turn right and you’re in an industrial zone of a “Polish port”.
Brown wants the Auckland port moved. He chaired a government-commissioned independent review which recommended it be shifted to Northland and Tauranga (with the cruise ships staying). The report infuriated Brown’s predecessor, former mayor Phil Goff, who described it as “the worst report I’ve seen in 40 years of politics”.
Brown can barely speak Goff’s name. He brushes him off as the “person who I replaced” and the “ambassador to England” (Goff is the new New Zealand High Commissioner to the UK). Brown holds Goff – and some two-thirds of the present councillors – responsible for the $295 million budget hole which Auckland faces.
In Brown’s view, the former administration was too afraid to raise rates at a reasonable level, especially as Aucklanders’ house prices were rising and interest rates were low. Now, with those trends in reverse - some householders are facing increased weekly costs of several hundred dollars – Brown and his council are left with the crunchy task of balancing cost-cutting, increasing rates and creating more debt.
Brown certainly sees long-term gains for the port land. He says he’s done his own calculation, based on the apartment near K Rd that he and Toni own. There were two apartments on offer in the same complex - he could have bought a west-facing apartment for $500,000 less, he says. So the waterfront view’s worth half-a-million-dollars, he emphasises.
He extrapolates that out. He claims there are 100,000 houses with a glimpse of the harbour. So “that’s $50 billion!” The land itself, he says, is worth a conservative $6b. “That $6b slice of land makes the same profit as a Pak’nSave... $25m – that’s an appalling return.”
Instead of a port, he says the land should be a mix of hotels, apartments, shops and public access to the water.
At our table, Brown casts his eye over the menu. “I need pictures,” he jokes. “I don’t have time to read the words and talk to you.”
He says as an aside: “Whenever I go to an event and they ask ‘any dietary requirements’, I always fill out salmon and champagne – it doesn’t always work, but occasionally…”
He settles on salmon for starters and the scampi risotto for a main. Our table shares a dozen Coromandel oysters as an entrée. After a Peroni each, lunch is devoured with a bottle of Provence rose.
“You’ll have to pay this - I don’t have an expense account,” says Brown. He pulls together his thumb and index finger: “Zero!”
Brown then points at the CBD high-rise tower blocks. “I am very much someone who fits in at all levels of society. I can get into the boardrooms over there and know half of them, and I can go into most of the pubs in South Auckland and know half the drinkers.”
He is trying to work a consensus with the council – he maintains he is socially liberal and economically conservative, and that this helps. “No one is wholly good nor bad,” he says of his council, “although Josephine Bartley is pushing the boundaries, I have to say.”
I ask if he is enjoying the mayoralty. His answer, as usual, is unconventional. “In some ways I do. If I hadn’t had a go at it, I would have sat there and thought, Brownie, you could have done that.”
With 181,810 votes at last year’s local body election, he’s the most popular individual politician in New Zealand. He boasts about it, Trump-like, but in another breath is sensitive about some of the coverage he’s received in the months since.
He couldn’t believe some journalists didn’t recognise or acknowledge him as he and the Prime Minister surveyed flood damage after the first weather event in Auckland in January.
His beef with Herald senior writer Simon Wilson is legend and - in his mind - ongoing. “He has tried to suggest I am some old cripple.” That is his word, not Wilson’s.
He is especially sensitive, it seems, about his age and his fitness. He plays tennis and still surfs “and I surf well”. He and Toni have a yacht at Westhaven and are planning an Easter escape. He walks to work, and to a lot of meetings and functions. “I have the lowest carbon footprint by miles.”
The oysters arrive, and Toni warns her husband to watch his decorum. “No double-dipping, Brownie”, as the mayor drowns an oyster in mignonette sauce.
The pair met more than 50 years ago. Toni had just returned from her OE, and she and her girlfriends organised a dance at the Tāmaki Yacht Club to liven up a “slightly boring” Auckland social scene.
Toni had brought along another partner that night, and Brown also trundled in - either invited or as a gatecrasher, no one seems too certain - after hearing about the event through a mutual friend.
The pair did not meet that night, but Brown - jokingly self-described as a “tall, noisy, aggressive bearded person with no empathy”- certainly noticed the petite brunette. He organised a date through his friend in the following days; they met for the first time when Brown knocked on her front door. They went to an inner-city bar and carried on in the nightclub under the Civic Theatre.
Was it love at first sight? I ask Toni.
“God, no!”
“Toni doesn’t think it will last,” Brown laughs.
“It’s never been boring,” she replies.
Fifty-two years on - and with two children, Sean and Lucy, and two grandchildren, Stella and Isaac - the pair are inseparable, in spirit if not physically. Mayoral duties are certainly keeping them apart at times.
It’s clear Toni is not enjoying some of the spotlight on her husband. She finds social media comments “awful”. She’s steering clear of that now, and most media. She worries about “Brownie”.
“I wouldn’t say it’s exciting,” she says of being mayoress. “It’s always nerve-wracking; I never know what he’s going to come out with next.”
Brown says 95 per cent of Twitter is five people going round in circles. “That needs to be exposed,” he says, using a French fry to scoop up some risotto sauce.
Brown fidgets with his phone and leather case on the table, slightly repositioning it as he makes his various points. Suddenly it shrills to life. It’s a call from a journalist. He’s not a bad guy, says Brown, ignoring the call and promising he’ll get back to him. Later that day, I see Brown quoted in an article by the reporter – the near freeze-out with media seems to be thawing. He hasn’t used the word drongo to describe journalists all lunch.
One-to-one, Brown is captivating company - but there are horror stories of people who have worked for him. He clearly does not suffer fools, nor does he seem to worry about the next staff engagement survey at the council. He has said “every person should be concerned” about their jobs at the council in light of the budget pressure.
In front of press conferences, he’s been awkward. While Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson has stepped up to the microphone in recent weeks, Brown now seems ready to snatch back the spotlight.
He basks in the brand of Mr Fix-it and the belief he can cut through red-tape. He is critical of professional directors - “people who go from meeting to meeting” - and the lack of engineering expertise on boards. Some of them, he says, have no idea what’s going on in their businesses. It’s an interesting position for someone who ran the Auckland DHB, but had a particularly fractious relationship with some senior doctors.
He recalls being brought in to run the Land Transport Safety Authority in 1999, to help sort out the shambolic introduction of new digital driver licences.
“That was a case of overbearing Wellington politicians overpowering weak Wellington bureaucrats, creating a national f***-up.”
Toni was running an Automobile Association outlet in Northland at the time; she gave Brown all the information he needed to know about the real-life experiences of customers. Sixty per cent of them were coming into the AA with the wrong paperwork and information.
Brown equates the City Rail Link - which has seen a $1 billion budget blowout - along the same lines. “It’s not a bad project but they set up contracts naively.”
And he reflects on his days as Vector chairman, called in to sort out Auckland’s power cuts in 1998. Forget the America’s Cup, he says, that was the only event that put Auckland on the global map, and front pages of newspapers around the world. “They mocked us,” says Brown.
With all this experience, Brown’s on a mission “to get Wellington out of Auckland”.
It started with Auckland Council’s exit from Local Government New Zealand. Officials and politicians can come and see him, he says, rather than him trudging to the Capital. “Just send the money.”
The civil service, he says, has the ability to “make something sensible, stupid”.
He remonstrates for the next five minutes on the Ministry for the Environment’s Hazardous Activities and Industries List (HAIL) test – designed to identify land contamination from past or future activity. Developments aren’t happening, he says, because small, harmless traces of elements – such as arsenic – are found on land, he says. You’d need to eat four cubic metres of soil before 63 parts of arsenic became hazardous – by then, you’d be in bigger trouble, he says.
“Nothing on this table wasn’t mined. There’s 57 elements in that,” he says, pointing at the iPhone. “Try explaining that to a green person; they aren’t growing on a lettuce plant. You can’t be green without mining.”
And then there’s what he calls the safety-at-all-costs mantra of Government agencies, rather than safety-at-a-reasonable-cost.
Brown has been praised for his stance on road cones, estimating he can save the city on its $145 million traffic management spending each year through the more judicious use of lane closures, and other road-work processes.
The idea of zero road deaths, he says, is “completely ridiculous”. If the Government was serious about it, they’d be adding speed governors to cars and spending millions to eliminate P, a major cause of road deaths and accidents, he says, in Northland.
Brown’s not getting much time to get back to his home at Mangonui, but it’s clear Northland still holds a special place.
When he met National Party leader and former Air NZ boss Christopher Luxon recently, he wanted to get one thing off his chest first – Air NZ’s predatory pricing, he says, which eventually killed a North Shore-Kaitaia air service.
“John Key would have said ‘piss off Brownie, get over yourself’ and laughed it off.”
He fears that Luxon doesn’t yet have that “laugh-it-off characteristic”.
On the independent inquiry into the council’s response to January’s weather-related event, Brown says he wants the report out as soon as possible. He’s seen parts of the draft report as they pertain to him. The report is due any day.
On the wider issue of compensation for homeowners, he says he will resist any suggestion the council is responsible for homes being built on clifftops. He says there are cases where the Environment Court - “the Government appoint the judges” - has overturned council decisions and allowed people to build in precarious positions.
He says he has seen this himself with his own engineering firm and was always cautious. “Cliffs grow backwards. If you want to build here, your views will continuously improve until you are part of the view. You are taking the risk. Don’t expect to pay me a bill for $5000 and then sue me for the rest of my life. We aren’t going to do that.”
Homeowners are already lawyering up, he says. “When you have done something stupid, you would blame everyone else. Deep down they all go ‘what was I doing spending $10m building on top of a cliff?’.”
As well as sailing, tennis, and surfing, Brown famously plays the banjo, for a five-piece band, the Hangi Stones. “I’m the token white guy.”
They haven’t played since election night, an impromptu performance at the Ponsonby venue where they were celebrating Brown’s big win. He played and sang “Hit the Road, Goff”, a new take on an old hit.
They play Elvis, Coldplay, all the oldies and goodies. They brought Toni to tears one night when they sang Fix You as she was recovering from a health battle.
The band might come together for a Cyclone Gabrielle fundraiser.
“There’s quite a few groupies,” says Toni.
“The quality wasn’t amazing, but the volume was excellent,” says Brown.
On that note, lunch is drawing to a close. “Brownie” and his “Princess’” move off, through the labyrinth of the hotel to a waiting driver (no walking today, Maurice Williamson and other appointments await). Tonight, Brown will attend a function for the Chinese community. Toni will stay home.
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