OPINION:
What’s Christopher Luxon planning for Auckland? What do his putative coalition partners think? We’re not hearing much about it, but if I was the Lord de Luxe, I’d call Steven Joyce and ask him to fix the city.
Remember Joyce? He was the “minister for everything” in the Sir John Key Government and more recently he’s been burnishing his fix-it credentials as a columnist in this newspaper.
Joyce had a big rep for getting things done. Luxon likes guys like that.
To be clear, I’m not saying I want Steven Joyce to get the role. If he tried to repeat the things he got done for Key, I think he’d be a disaster. He’d build more roads, which would mean more congestion. He’d put a stop to social housing, hospitals would be ignored and so would the changing climate.
Joyce is not my choice. But for some strange reason, Luxon sees things differently from me. And Joyce has the skills he surely believes he needs.
So Luxon will have to tell him to change. The hospitals do need to be fixed and we need a much smarter approach to transport, among many other things.
There is a wee problem. Joyce is a consultant now, and many MPs, including some destined for Cabinet, like to say consultants have their snouts in the trough. Luxon will have to tell them this is one consultant they can trust.
Potentially a bigger issue: Auckland already has a “Mr Fix-it”. The title is taken.
But Mayor Wayne Brown hasn’t really done much fixing to date and anyway it’s the Government, not the council, that controls most of the money. So maybe Brown’s claim to the name should be quietly retired.
Still, Luxon won’t want to make an enemy of Brown, so here’s another suggestion. The new PM should establish a high-powered Fix Auckland group, with direct access to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. And he should make Wayne Brown the chairman.
I don’t mean a committee to produce a plan. We’ve had enough of that. This would be an action group.
Joyce would be on it and answerable to it, along with some of National’s Auckland MPs, like Erica Stanford and Simeon Brown.
The group would also need at least a couple of senior Auckland councillors who are a) functional and b) on speaking terms with the mayor. It’s a shorter list than you might think.
Everyone knows deputy mayor Desley Simpson would qualify. So, among a few others, would the chairman of Brown’s planning committee, Richard Hills. He’s Labour, but would that matter?
Act’s Tāmaki MP Brooke van Velden could join the group. She’s an economist, as her boss David Seymour never tires of telling us.
Iwi must be there. They tend to know, far better than most corporates, how to focus on both the economic imperatives and community development. People like Ngarimu Blair from Ngāti Whātua and Paul Majurey representing all the Auckland iwi that are not Ngāti Whātua would be invaluable.
And if Luxon wanted to be truly brave, he could invite Carmel Sepuloni, David Parker and Chloe Swarbrick along for the ride. That would be a lot of fun, and totally in line with the needs of the city. Bipartisan planning is long overdue.
Serious question, though. Will the new Government get serious about Auckland? The city clearly voted in the hope of it.
The swing from Labour to National was stronger in Auckland than in almost every other part of the country. Voters in Mt Roskill, Takanini, Northcote, Upper Harbour, Mt Albert, New Lynn, Te Atatu and elsewhere made the shift in their allegiance extremely plain.
Although, to be fair, Auckland also swung from Labour to the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and even Act. It was an ABL election – Anyone But Labour – and Aucklanders were the most ABL of everyone.
So what will the new Government do for the city? Does anyone know? To date, none of the parties engaged in the coalition talks has made a lot of sense about this.
Instead, at various times one or more of them has promised to put an end to crime, eliminate traffic congestion and hospital waiting lists and take Father Christmas seriously. I may have made up one of those. But only one.
All of them seem to think the solutions are easy: we just do this wonderful thing, instead of that idiotic thing the last lot tried. But Auckland’s problems are complex and solving them requires, not squawking populism, but courageous leadership and commitment over time.
Many of those problems are easy to list: crime, traffic congestion, overloaded hospitals, struggling schools, a housing crisis that stretches from outrageous property values to rising homelessness. The likelihood of more catastrophic weather events.
But there is another kind of problem the incoming Government will have to confront, whether or not it calls in a new Mr Fix-It. It’s the corrosive effect of complaints, often from people who should know better, about every little proposal for change.
Take just one example among a great many: last week’s brouhaha about car parking on Karangahape Rd.
The mayor complained that Auckland Transport was “getting ahead of itself” with plans to remove 27 on-street car parks, so that buses would have dedicated lanes at all times. Local businesses feared for their survival.
There are many objections to make to this ridiculous turn of events.
First, on any given day many thousands of people walk along K Rd, buy things in its shops, work in its offices, visit its galleries, eat in its restaurants, drink in its bars, dance in its nightclubs and go home to its apartments. To suggest they will not do so if 27 parks on the street are removed borders on the hysterical.
Second, not all businesses think this. I know K Rd retailers who fully grasp that their future depends on having a lively pedestrian precinct, not on-street car parks.
They have, perhaps, visited almost any other city in the world in the last 20 years, and seen the value of pedestrian-friendly hospitality and retail precincts. Places where cars are not welcome and certainly don’t get to park outside the shop.
Third, those 27 parks do nothing to attract shoppers. What they attract is people who drive up and down, in growing frustration, looking for a park they cannot find.
Fourth, the mayor should not be bullying council agencies with such public attacks. He undermines his own council policy and they can’t answer back. AT buckled under the pressure, although they hardly had a choice.
But the biggest objection is the fifth. K Rd is an arterial bus route, an essential street for buses from many points to the west of the city centre. For our bus services to become more popular, they need faster travel times.
This goes to the underlying issue. It’s easy to focus transport planning on mega-projects. But we could make real progress, right now, for a tiny fraction of the cost of expensive new infrastructure, if we do everything possible to shift the balance between private cars and public transport.
The latter has to be as efficient and attractive as possible, and to achieve that it should be given priority over cars in the use of the roads.
But somehow, this cheap and easy little plan is the hardest thing of all.
Those 27 parks on K Rd stand in the way of much-needed improvements to bus services and a busier and buzzier street life. All because the mayor is pretending that one of Auckland’s most important streets should offer the same parking “convenience” as the main street in Kaikohe.
It’s preposterous and Brown should be ashamed of himself, because he already understands the problem well. Many times, he’s called for buses to get the priority they need. But he’s got a few misguided businesspeople in his ear and he’s panicking.
Transport planning gets derailed by fear of change all the time. Perhaps it will be different, with the new combo of a mayor who wants to “fix things”, a PM who believes he can “get things done”, and – who knows – Key’s old fixer Joyce along for the ride.
Or perhaps a Joyce and Brown Roadshow would keep bowing to the supremacy of the motorcar and, therefore, keep making the city more dysfunctional.
That handful of car parks on K Rd is emblematic. If they stay, for want of a bit of political courage and clear-sightedness, what chance for any real progress on the tough decisions anywhere?
Simon Wilson is an award-winning 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.
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