OPINION
Wayne Brown stuck a finger up at the entire rest of the country last week. On our behalf.
The mayor withdrew Auckland Council from Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ). The vote was 10:10. That’s nine councillors plus the mayor in favour, and 10 against, with councillor Christine Fletcher absent. Brown then used his casting vote to break the deadlock.
He said it was costing the council money and, in his experience in the Far North, LGNZ conferences were “an excuse for a piss-up”. He also said Auckland would be stronger for dealing with central government directly and his own relations with ministers were good.
On the face of it, he’s cutting waste and undermining bureaucratic entitlement. But the other councils will now find it harder to borrow money, harder to negotiate with central government and its agencies, harder to work together on infrastructure, crisis planning, financial planning and resource sharing. And they will be less inclined to share with Auckland any gains they do make.
We don’t care about any of that, Brown was effectively saying. We don’t need you and we don’t care about you.
Why would he do that? Isn’t one of the lessons of recent times, through Covid and the terrible wild weather, that we’re all in this together, civic institutions and citizens alike, and that we need to strengthen the ties that bind, not abandon them?
As for the crack about people getting drunk: what a cheap shot. All conferences have a dinner and some people get drunk, sometimes on expense accounts. So what? Is that the way to measure a conference’s success?
Several councillors spoke about the value of LGNZ last week, often from their prior experience as members of local boards. Andy Baker, whose Franklin ward is centred on Pukekohe, reminded his colleagues that in addition to its urban importance, the Auckland Council is also one of the largest rural councils in the country.
LGNZ, he said, provides a valuable community of interest for representatives like him.
Councillor Kerrin Leoni reminded them she was the only wahine Māori councillor: LGNZ provides her with a community of interest too. Julie Fairey and Lotu Fuli both talked about the value of LGNZ meetings, which they’d managed to benefit from even without lubrication. Neither of them drinks.
No one had the nerve to mention that the mayor had ended his own inauguration speech in the town hall last October with the declaration: “I need a beer.” And that he had complained, in his very first email to his chief executive, that he couldn’t get his beer fridge stocked.
And those supposed cost savings? Brown says LGNZ was costing Auckland Council $640,000 a year. But LGNZ chief executive Susan Freeman-Greene says the decision will cost Auckland about $1 million a year in lost funding for a programme to dim street lights. Besides, she also says, last year the membership fee for Auckland was just over $350,000.
On financial grounds alone, the decision to withdraw is specious.
This isn’t about the get-togethers of a bunch of officials. The governance landscape in this country is changing in some big and complex ways. Water and transport are under review, along with Treaty relations, resource management, climate action, the role of rates and taxes and the role of local government itself.
How will Auckland play an effective role in the debates about all this, if it’s not helping shape the local government perspective? And how will the rest of the country achieve the strength it needs, without Auckland?
Which political leaders think these things are unimportant? My answer: the ones who don’t understand the value of belonging to a community.
This disdain for community resonates throughout the council’s draft budget for 2023-24.
It allocates $3.6 billion to operating costs and $2.8b to capital works: a total of $6.4b. In that context, LGNZ membership is very small beer. So to speak. Although the impact of not belonging will be significant, the decision is hardly relevant to the big numbers.
Arts funding is also small beer. From numbers provided by the mayor’s office, it seems about $36 million of council spending on the arts will be cut. That’s 22 per cent of what it says is a total arts spend of $166 million.
Brown told me during the election last year that in the Far North, the way he dealt with councillors who didn’t support him was to give them something in the arts to look after. It kept them happy and out of the way.
That’s happening right now. It’s good there’s an outcry about the proposed cuts to arts funding, but the big questions in Brown’s budget, in financial terms, are about income. In particular, about rates and debt.
The message, as articulated by Brown’s ally, councillor Maurice Williamson, is that poor struggling families cannot afford higher rates or more debt. And the council, they say, is in the same “financial crisis” as everyone else.
This is nonsense. The Auckland Council has excellent credit ratings: AA from Standard & Poor’s and Aa2 from Moody’s. Those ratings are an assurance from independent experts that the council is not in a financial crisis. To say otherwise is financially illiterate.
It should not be a surprise. The council’s self-imposed debt ceiling is 290 per cent of revenue, but at present, it’s sitting under 250 per cent and is projected to track down to 220 per cent. And the ratio of debt to assets is on track to be lower than at any time since 2012.
If they want, they can take on quite a bit more debt without going anywhere near “crisis”.
We got proof of this recently when the council announced it may use debt to meet $1.5b of new demands caused by storm damage and increased CRL costs. No one has suggested this will endanger the council’s strong credit ratings.
The mayor is proposing cuts because there is a shortfall of $295m in the existing budget. But those big new bills put this into sharp focus. To put it bluntly, if the council can accommodate another $1.5b with debt, there should be little reason to keep the panicky, petty-minded and harmful cuts being forced on community spending.
And rates? Brown wants to increase household rates by an average 5.5 per cent, but inflation is running at 7.2 per cent.
Why let rates fall behind inflation? It means services must be cut and it will inevitably lead to much higher and more harmful rises in later years.
This is the reason Wellington and many other cities are now proposing very high rates rises: in their smug “frugality” in previous years, they let things slip and created a crisis.
It’s true inflation is higher than it has been for many years, but it’s not “rampant” and it’s certainly not the “hyperinflation” some people talk about. New Zealand’s inflation is very much in line with inflation in comparable countries in the OECD.
Price rises hurt, I know that. But cuts in spending hurt too. It’s poorer communities who suffer most from reduced bus services, shorter opening hours at the local pool and fewer activities for the elderly at the local community centre. Those communities will suffer most from the cuts and delays to environmental spending proposed in several parts of the budget.
The council is charged with building the resilience of the city and its citizens and with helping to bind us together as communities.
Will the mayor one day grasp this? Or will it be like his perceived view of LGNZ: community doesn’t matter much, mutual obligations don’t exist, working together for the betterment of all isn’t a thing that happens.
Today’s the last day to have your say on Auckland Council’s draft budget for 2023-24. Visit the council website for details.
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