I wanted him to fix the weather but he said he couldn’t. So I asked him what he thinks it means, to “fix Auckland”? After all, we voted in large numbers last year to get that done.
“I approach the question positively,” he said, and proceeded to wax very positively: Auckland is “beautiful, creative, innovative, diverse, it has limitless potential”. You get the idea.
“It’s part of my job, actually, to talk this place up. Not to exaggerate but to talk about how good it is, to live, to work, to invest.”
Yes, but? Michael Wood, Minister for Auckland, immediately named a couple of buts: transport, which boiled down to the underperforming buses and trains; and crime, which was ram raids.
With transport he said the Government needs to “make sure the baseline stuff is reliable” and “make the long-term investments in mass rapid transit, because that is the only way to really decongest this city”.
As for crime, he said, “I know we’ve got more work to do around personal safety. People need to feel comfortable and safe, going to work, working in a small business, going to their local shopping area. There’s work to do there.”
I told him we’d come back to both of those things. I also wanted to ask him about housing, health, water reform, climate action and flood resilience, a new stadium and the Commonwealth Games bid, economic development, education, social cohesion, Supercity reform and how come there are still dawn raids? We’d get to most of it.
On the dawn raids, he said he had “communicated very strongly” to the Department of Immigration that they must manage overstayers in a way that “fully reflects the spirit of the apology for dawn raids made by the Government”.
“I think they have heard that clearly,” he said.
As for the Commonwealth Games, he reminded me the Government hasn’t committed yet. “But we’re positive.”
He’s also positive, also in a general way, about a new stadium. “An international city like Auckland needs a big international-level stadium ... It needs to be in the right place. It needs to be connected to excellent public transport. And you need to get other use out of it.”
That’s all he’d say.
WHEN MICHAEL Wood became Minister for Auckland in February, some commentators wondered if he already had enough to do. But you could argue that as Minister of Transport, Immigration and Workplace Relations and Safety, he was already more than halfway to being the de facto Auckland minister.
Wood is only the second person to hold the job, following Judith Tizard in 2002-2007. What does it mean?
“I’m not all-powerful. My job is to be the glue and the collaborator that gets people in the room to make progress.”
When Wood finished this interview, he was off to spend “most of the rest of the day” being gluey with Mayor Wayne Brown. They’re working on Brown’s proposal for an integrated transport plan for the city.
How does he find it, working with the mayor?
“We have a substantial relationship and we approach it in good faith. I think we both understand the basics of where the other is coming from.”
I think that means they have competing priorities and different ideas about funding streams and possibly even a different understanding of how transport works, but they’re not shouting at each other and they both want to make progress together. Mr Fix-it and The Other Mr Fix-it. That could work.
When he stood for office, Brown was openly sceptical of the City Rail Link (CRL). He’s also said many times he thinks the Government is wasting time and money with its plans for light rail and a new harbour crossing. He wants existing projects to finish before new ones are started.
In contrast, Wood champions them all. He calls the mindset that dismisses or delays long-term projects a “disease”.
“The big stuff does take a long time,” he said, “but we can’t take our eye off the ball. That has been the Auckland and New Zealand disease for too long and it’s one of the reasons that we have these challenges. We’ve got to keep up the momentum.”
He talked about changes on the way. “The CRL opens in about two years. It will transform public transport. The Panmure to Pakuranga stage of the Eastern Busway is open. We’re going to have significant improvements on the rail line … within the next year.”
He meant electrification of the Southern Line to Pukekohe and a third track on that line, to separate freight from passenger trains between the port and the depots and warehouses of south Auckland. Both projects are nearing completion.
The differences between Wood and Brown are real but they’re not all set in stone. That last project is probably one they agree on. “The mayor talks about freight as well as people,” Wood said, “and I agree with him.”
He said something else about Brown. “He’s not the kind of person who agrees with you just because you tell him something. He wants to see the evidence, he wants to hear the arguments and he’ll approach it with an open mind.”
After the election, the CRL people gave Brown a full briefing and tour, and now he’s a fan. He was in Sydney recently, at his own expense, and before he went, he got Tommy Parker, the Auckland Light Rail boss, to hook him up for a briefing on the new light rail service there.
Parker did that. Brown hasn’t yet revealed what he learned.
WHEN I asked Wood again about ram raids, he said, “Everyone deserves to be able to come to work and be safe. The fear and uncertainty is real and it’s a priority for the Government.”
Then he talked about how it wasn’t simple and “the chest-beating you get in politics with this stuff is just designed to win votes. It doesn’t fix anything, so we’ve got to get down to the causes”.
A senior police officer had told him, “Michael, some of these kids have never had anything to feel proud of in their lives. They’ve never been told they’re good at anything. And they can do this thing through TikTok, they get a bit of fame, a bit of, ‘Wow, you did an exciting thing.’ So it’s about getting into the families and communities and helping them to fix that.”
Which most people probably understand, but hang on. It doesn’t help the dairy owner who’s frightened they could be ram-raided tonight.
“Yep. So there’s a lot of work going on there. And it’s important to say that it is working. One ram raid is one ram raid too many, but the numbers are materially coming down now since the peak we had at the end of last year.”
He said that with the Covid pressure off, the police have been able to get back to “good community policing” with “low-level nip-them-in-the-bud interventions in families”.
Also, shop security is up, with bollards and smoke cannons “now rolling out at pace”. And, Wood added, he initiated talks between the police and council to work out what else they can do on the streets and in local communities.
“It’s a priority for me in this role,” he said.
AUCKLAND HAS 33 per cent of the country’s population and 36 per cent of the national GDP. Is that good enough? Shouldn’t the main city have an even bigger share of the economy?
Wood said it should. “There’s always more work to do in this area. One of the benefits of big cities is that companies, thinkers, innovators, highly-skilled workers come together. The ugly word is agglomeration. And you get more economic benefits than if they’re dispersed.”
He said he’d been at the launch last week of another “integrated plan”, this one for southern Auckland: the area from Papakura and Drury south to Pukekohe. The plan brings together land use, transport, utilities, social services and manufacturing and was developed by the council’s economic agency Tātaki Auckland Unlimited.
“It links to the advanced manufacturing plan the Government launched with tripartite partners last month,” said Wood. “Some of the pathways we’ve been on for the last 30 years, which involve a low-wage, low-skilled economy, are not the way of the future. It’s not what drives prosperity. So we’ve got to shift up the value chain. Sectors like advanced manufacturing, medical stuff, pharmaceuticals, that’s the kind of stuff that really drives us forward.”
Southern Auckland has some advanced manufacturing now, with more planned. The road and rail links are being upgraded and there are several extremely large housing developments. Wood said the Government wants “to really put economic development on the map in southern Auckland. That’s the kind of thinking we need, to drive more jobs, growth and better incomes”.Well, okay, even if the economy prospers in Drury, it doesn’t help the people crowded into the city’s hospital emergency departments. Everyone knows frontline health services are understaffed, underresourced and desperate. How does the Minister for Auckland think the health reforms will help Aucklanders this winter?
Wood said he knew from his constituents that the Waitematā District Health Board, which served the city’s west and north, “invested in capacity, relationships and services for ethnic communities” much better than Auckland or Counties-Manukau DHBs.
The benefit of combining them, he said, was that “you pick up the best of what was being done and you make sure that everyone gets the benefits of that. Right across the city.”
He said this would be true for accessible services, clinical expertise or simply managing the pressures of “getting overloaded”. It will be, he said, “much smoother and easier to share services”.
Why does Auckland need water reform? Isn’t the council-owned Watercare already acclaimed for its efficient management?
Wood said yes, the Watercare set-up works well but “it doesn’t address the balance sheet”, by which he meant that Watercare and council, on their own, would struggle to manage future debt and investment requirements.
And the flood response? Auckland has 1200 households that were displaced by the summer storms and still can’t return home.
Wood said the really tough work is under way now: they’re trying to create a framework for deciding what gets rebuilt and how that’s done, and what should be subject to a managed retreat. And how that’s done.
“None of this will be easy,” Wood said, which won’t be news to anyone.
BACK ON transport, I suggested that for all the long-term value of the big projects, the city needs relief from congestion and lower emissions now.
Wood agreed, and talked about the Transport Choices package in last year’s budget, which included a “major expansion of bus services in the northwest and a huge expansion of bus services around Manurewa and Takanini”.
The trouble is, despite that funding package, bus services haven’t been expanded. The acute shortage of drivers and Covid-related cancellations have reduced their scope. Was the Government too slow to recognise the problem?
Wood said they’re making progress and bus patronage in Auckland is now up to 85 per cent of pre-Covid levels.
But it’s still well short of Wellington, which has reached 100 per cent, not to mention many cities overseas, where public transport use has surged past pre-Covid levels.
“We’ve been working really hard on this,” said Wood. That includes reform of the Public Transport Operating Model (PTOM), a framework for contracting public transport services introduced by the National-led Government in 2013.
“PTOM,” Wood said, “incentivised bus operators to drive down costs.” They couldn’t do it with the quality of the buses or the range of services, because most of them were prescribed in the contracts. So they did it with wages and conditions.
“Lo and behold,” said Wood, “you do that for 15 years, bus drivers get treated like rubbish and they leave the industry. We’re fixing that: we put $60 million in the budget last year. That is now flowing through to bus drivers in Auckland and around the country.”
Together with a rethink on immigration, it means the shortfall of more than 500 drivers has shrunk to about 350 and is on track to fall much further, as new drivers finish their training.
But, Wood added, there is still “much more work to do to make sure Aucklanders feel confident that the services are going to be reliable”.
It’s not just about reliability, though, it’s also about efficiency. The question is this: How will bus travel times be shortened?
Wood and Wayne Brown, along with the new chief executive at Auckland Transport, Dean Kimpton, all say it’s a top transport priority. But it’s far from clear if they agree how to do it.
Kimpton has committed to restoring 100 per cent of pre-Covid passenger numbers within a year. Wood said the Government was going to “lean in hard” to help make that happen.
And what about the port? The mayor wants some action on that and the next step is for the Government to produce a supply-chain strategy for all aspects of freight handling. But where is it?
“The supply chain is enormously complex,” said Wood. The Ministry of Transport has been “doing the groundwork across the stakeholders” for a year, “meeting intensively with the sector”, and “I think we’re going to come out with a very good plan.”
He expects to receive the strategy in about a month and will release it soon after. “It won’t answer every question, including the specifics around the port. But it will give us a strategic framework for how we move that sector forward.”
NO OTHER part of New Zealand features the extremes of inequity you can find in Auckland, although, because it’s so big and sprawling, it’s quite easy not to see the contrasts up close.
Does the Minister for Auckland think the Government is doing enough to help Aucklanders who get left behind or are at risk of it?
“Are we there yet?” he said. “No. But there is real progress.” He talked about reductions in child poverty, “across all of the measures that we have”, and higher benefit levels, an indexed minimum wage, a massively expanded social-housing programme.
And fair-pay agreements: “This city runs on the work of cleaners and bus drivers, checkout workers, retail. They’ve kind of been forgotten about for 30 years. The whole economic system said we don’t value your work.” The new fair-pay law is intended to address that.
Also, said Wood, meals in schools. “Principals tell me that’s been the biggest gear change in 30 years, kids just being able to have a decent meal each day, for their learning and their wellbeing.”
The Other Mr Fix-it. “You can always look back and say what about this, what about that, there’s more you could do, and probably the answer is yes. But all you can actually do is say we’re going to keep doing more.”
Oranga Tamariki agreed to make changes in response to the feedback.