Christchurch Mayor Phil Mauger reflects on his first year in office. Photo / George Heard
Christchurch Mayor Phil Mauger campaigned on a ticket to ‘get stuff done’. He sits down with the Herald’s Kurt Bayer to reflect on his first year in office.
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To understand why the new mayor called for the post-disaster city – and New Zealand - to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games again, daring the still-recovering Garden City and nation to dream big, take chances, just after Melbourne pulled out, claiming it would cost billions, many billions, you need to understand where Phil Mauger grew up.
The east side. The working classes. As a roving teenager, just over the fence from where he tinkered with crazy old cars and operated diggers and loaders, he watched them build the 1974 Commonwealth Games from scratch.
It rose from nothing. A sandy field in Christchurch’s beach suburbs rising into a world-class athletics track, where a streaking black singleted local hero Dick Tayler would collapse, exhausted and victorious, and where they would erect a world-class Olympic-size swimming pool and diving complex where Jaynie Parkhouse would become a golden girl.
Mauger, who was running a car rental business at the family’s New Brighton service station as a 16-year-old schoolboy, hiring out a fleet of Datsun 1200s, saw the impressive Queen Elizabeth II Park emerge from the ground.
“I couldn’t wait to get back from school, throw all my stuff in a heap, and go across the road and see what they’d built that day. I loved seeing how things happened,” says Mauger, speaking to the Herald from his glass-wrapped office on the sixth floor of the city council building, overlooking the CBD noisy with cranes and heavy machinery, still, 13 years after the first tremor which sparked the devastating earthquake sequence.
He laughs now that the QEII complex, wrecked in the deadly February 2011 quake but which serviced the city for nearly 40 years, cost a measly $4 million.
The Victorian government pulled out of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games, claiming that costs had spiralled beyond AU$6 billion ($6.52 billion).
But Mauger, with first-hand knowledge of how the event can boost a city, still believes it could’ve worked for New Zealand, despite its fragile post-pandemic economy. He doesn’t think hosting it on this side of the Tasman would cost anything like Victoria’s projections, citing Christchurch’s new post-quake infrastructure including the convention centre, Metro sports complex, and underway covered stadium.
“You’ve got to have dreams and aspirations,” the father-of-five says.
“Unfortunately, what happens with the Commonwealth Games is it becomes a pissing competition between [cities], to do more and more and more.”
Mauger – a distant relation of All Blacks’ brothers Aaron and Nathan Mauger, but no direct link to six-time world champion Ivan Mauger, whose gold-plated bike is housed at Canterbury Museum – wants Christchurch to become the Melbourne of New Zealand – the country’s sporting and events capital.
When Canterbury’s Multi-Use Arena Te Kaha is completed – due to open in 2026 – Mauger hopes it won’t just host the Crusaders, All Blacks, and major concerts like Ed Sheeran, but many sports and events, like the Warriors NRL team and the Wellington Phoenix, but also all club rugby final across all ages and grades.
“It’s no use having it locked up with no one using it,” he says.
With Christchurch having a major seaport and international airport, booming university, and relatively low property prices, while being the gateway to the South Island, the mayor bills the city as being the best place in New Zealand to “live, work, invest and play”.
The region has certainly suited Mauger well.
Born in 1958, he enjoyed an idyllic childhood, with many more freedoms than his grandchildren’s era has today. He grew up around cars, with his family owning many vehicles over the years, including classics with powerful engines that were used in races, hill climbs, rallies, and even New Zealand land speed record attempts.
One of the most famous cars in the Mauger collection was the 1953 Stanton Special. Fitted with a supercharged aircraft engine, it was nicknamed ‘The Cropduster’ and raced in the 1954 New Zealand Grand Prix and even held a New Zealand Open Speed record of 173.8mph (279.9kmh) for 38 years. The Mistral bodywork which covered the car during its speed attempts would later lie in the Mauger’s yard and was used by a young Phil and his mates as a hut.
It led to a lifelong obsession for Mauger who himself has owned some of the finest racing cars in New Zealand motorsport history, including 1967 Formula One world champion Denny Hulme’s old McLaren M23/1, which won the Swedish Grand Prix in 1973.
Mauger still keeps an impressive collection, including the Stanton Special, a Group A Holden Commodore, his parents’ old 1922 Fiat, a Ford Escort rally car, a replica of a 1930s Auto Union race car, as well as a Tillings-Stevens fire engine from the 1920s which was even used during the Ballantynes’ fire tragedy which killed 41 people in 1947.
While his love of cars seemed inevitable, so did his move into the family business once he left school.
As the Commonwealth Games wound up in the city, Mauger left school at 16 to operate machinery in his grandfather’s company, Maugers Contracting, building roads, drains, and sub-divisions.
It is the only company he has worked for and he would eventually, in 2000, become its owner.
He knows Christchurch as well as anybody, having helped build much of it. When he drives around his old stomping grounds, he likes to point out when things were built, or how they came about.
And he notices small parcels of land, and knows who owns them, and becomes frustrated if they aren’t being utilised – particularly if they are owned by the city council.
He’s been in the news lately for comments over the potential sale of council assets. But he says, if the city wants to keep rate rises low, then something has got to give.
Mauger would rather think laterally on these issues – and looks at those underutilised pockets of council – bare, odd-shaped street corner sections – and wonders why the council can’t build social housing there. Provide some cheap housing and get some money back on their return?
But as much as he’d like to crack on and do the job himself, he’s fast learning that he can’t do it alone, despite being mayor.
“I thought I could get more done. I’m learning very fast,” he says. “And it’s taken three years as [a city] councillor and a year as mayor to [understand] you’ve just got to corral everyone around and massage them in the right way. And you’ll always have different points of view - that’s democracy.
“But if you take the gang with you … you’ve got to use the system to get what you want. That’s not a nice way of saying it but... you use the system. It has its challenges [but] four days out of five, this is the best job in the world.”
- Kurt Bayer is NZME South Island Head of News based in Christchurch. He is a senior journalist who joined the Herald in 2011.
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