Auckland mayor Wayne Brown (right) in conversation with Simon Wilson as he walks to work over the Hopetoun Bridge. Photo / Michael Craig
Look who’s talking now. In this exclusive interview, Auckland mayor Wayne Brown tells Simon Wilson about the ‘screamingly incompetent’ government agency he has to deal with. And he reveals he’s become a fan of light rail.
Wayne Brown has just been to France and he’s got two things he wants to show me. The first is a newspaper with a front-page banner headline: it calls him a former All Black.
Long story. He visited Angers, the small city his great-grandfather came from, and told them he was the mayor of New Zealand’s biggest city. So they made a bit of a fuss. He said he’d played rugby, at Eden Park, and had always wanted to be an All Black but wasn’t good enough.
The reason he’s showing me is not just because it’s a good joke. It’s also an object lesson, especially for me, about how the media get things wrong.
The sun streams into his corner office high in the council building on Albert St, but neither of us takes off his jacket. It’s our first formal interview in more than a year, since he became mayor, and one I’ve been chasing for all that time.
He’s got a list of journalists he won’t talk to, but now, for some reason, I’m off it. This is an exclusive interview, bless him. Fair to say it’s a bit of a moment for both of us.
No cup of tea or glass of water or anything, though. It’s not that special.
The second thing he wants to show me is a promotional brochure about light rail in Angers. Wayne Brown has been converted.
He still hates the ridiculously expensive tunnelled option the Government proposes for Auckland. He knows I do too. But Angers has surface light rail, with more than one line, running along arterial roads on tracks set in grass. It’s minimally disruptive and extremely popular at all times.
“What’s the statistic about short trips?” he asks. (Two-thirds of all car trips in New Zealand are less than two kilometres long, according to the GenLess website.) “It’s perfect for that,” Brown says. “That’s what they use it for. Think of all the cars it takes off the road.”
He’s seen the impact light rail has had in Sydney, too. And as he says, Sydney is much bigger than Auckland, while Angers, with 300,000 people, is much smaller. If surface light rail can work for both of them, “What possible reason is there it wouldn’t work here?”
We gaze at the pictures of modern trams in a medieval city. “They did it for $53 million per kilometre,” he says.
New Zealand dollars? “Yes. You compare that with the $750m/km ours is supposed to cost. Even if it was a surface project, they reckon it would still cost $350m/km.”
Either it’s his understanding of the costings or Waka Kotahi and Auckland Light Rail’s grasp of how to build things, but something, clearly, has gone badly awry. Brown wants to know what.
He paid for his trip to France himself, watched the All Blacks lose and then came home and gave copies of the Angers light rail material to “everyone”. He calls it “a bonus from my trip”.
I have to ask: Is this a new Wayne Brown?
“No!” he says. “I’ve been saying it for ages. People try and shove me in some sort of blue box where they’re roaring around building motorways. But I’m not keen on them at all. We’ve got plenty of motorways and the problem is they get jammed for two hours a day. We just need to unjam them for those two hours.”
Brown lives in an apartment off Karangahape Rd. “I walk to work over the Hopetoun Bridge, and I go past a lot of cars. At my walking speed. And I’m thinking about those cars, ‘Man, what are you doing?’”
I ask him, would the people who voted for him be surprised to hear he’s a fan of light rail?
He doesn’t think so. Even though the National Party has joked often – local MP Paul Goldsmith still does – about tram sets on Dominion Rd? He doesn’t care. “Better, faster, cheaper” is his mantra and if that means trams, so be it.
Does he get on with National’s transport spokesperson, Simeon Brown?
“I do, quite well.”
Even though they’re pushing the RONS, the Roads of National Significance”?
“Roads of National Party Significance, you mean.”
Some of those RONS are in Auckland.
“Well,” he says, “They can do those things outside my city, but within my city they’re going to have to do what I want. By ‘I’, I mean the council.”
Has he said this to them directly?
“Pretty much.”
He comes back to this later, with a line that sounds well-rehearsed. “I’m kind of worried because the Nats are a bit close to the trucks lobby. But they’re going to have to realise this is the ‘W Brown Most Voted for Person in NZ Lobby’ and you’re going to have to listen to me.”
What about the tunnels that National and Labour both want to build under the Waitematā harbour?
“I reckon I know more about choreography than they know about tunnels.”
Better, faster, cheaper, and no new harbour crossing? “We don’t need it. You don’t get jammed on the harbour bridge. We’ve got the wonderful Northern Busway, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done in this place.”
Some of the more prominent themes of his election campaign remain active.
“Hopefully, you’ll see not so many road cones. Auckland Transport are listening. We’re trying to get a system of managing the streets that doesn’t allow people to shove out cones just so they can park their utes behind them.”
Better, faster, cheaper also means dynamic lanes on the arterial highways, so some lanes shift in direction depending on demand.
“I want dynamic lanes on Remuera Rd, Mt Eden Rd, Dominion Rd, Sandringham Rd, Lake Rd, all those main roads. In the morning there’ll be a bus lane on one side, with car lanes in the middle, and parking on the other side for the businesses. And in the afternoon it flips over.”
Wait, did Wayne Brown just invent Clearways?
AT has also been trialling transponders on buses, to activate priority signalling at traffic lights. “It actually makes a difference.”
Other transport plans may surprise. “I want to have more income from parking. Not just parking charges. Bigger fines.”
And congestion charges: fees or tolls for driving in the busy times and/or in the busy places.
The trouble is, all these things, even parking fines, require law changes. The balance between government and council is way out of whack.
This is not our first face-to-face since the election. We chat at council meetings and public events and he texts me from time to time with comments on this and that. In May, we bumped into each other at Karekare, where I was talking to locals for a story and he was inspecting the washed-out engineering.
But all of that has been informal. This is an interview, a format in which Brown is rarely comfortable.
He’s a strong thinker rather than a quick one. He gets words wrong: Kāinga Ora becomes Kaingaroa; the Auckland Light Rail group are “not reading the table, they’re not reading the tea rooms”.
He’s famously happy being Browny, propping up the bar with mates. Naturally a very friendly bloke who loves to make jokes. But you sense he prefers being a boss on his own, not a team leader. He likes to tell people what to do and I’ve never seen it occur to him he might be wrong.
But he’s an enormously ambitious mayor and he’s been pushing hard for an Integrated Transport Plan for Auckland: a joined-up plan, with Auckland Council in the driving seat.
This will be a first. Previous plans, like National and Labour’s Auckland Transport Alignment Projects, have basically been the government telling the council what it’s going to do, with the various transport agencies hardly even bothering to cooperate.
And last week he produced a “Manifesto for Auckland”. Subhead: “The deal Auckland needs from the next government.”
This is also a first. The document comes from the Office of the Mayor, not the council, although Brown says all the councillors have been involved in writing it.
“It’s been word-smithed and fiddled around with, you wouldn’t believe.”
In it, he declares: “The solution is not for Auckland to be planned from Wellington. We need to be allowed to plan for our own region.”
Decision-making by Auckland, for Auckland. It was always important to him and now it seems to have become his central purpose as mayor. Is that why the manifesto?
“I wanted to prepare them. Basically, I want to say if it’s not in the integrated transport plan, don’t dream it up in Wellington. We know Auckland better than you do and the transport plan has got to include putting freight onto rail.”
That, he tells me, is the best way to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
After the interview, I asked for responses from Labour’s Minister for Auckland, Carmel Sepuloni, and National’s spokesperson for Auckland, Simeon Brown.
Through her office, Sepuloni said: “We welcome Mayor Brown’s vision to see Auckland flourish – we will always look for opportunities to work closer together with Auckland Council, and to ensure we are both focused on Auckland’s future. There continues to be collaborative conversations happening with the mayor across multiple portfolios, including my own.”
She pointed to investments in public services, hospitals, schools and transport projects and noted the challenges arising from rapid population growth and extreme weather events. Transport and water reform were both areas where the Government and the council have been “working well” together.
Simeon Brown said he had received the manifesto and is “pleased to see the Mayor of Auckland has put forward his views on how the relationship between central government and Auckland Council can be enhanced”. He’s talked with Brown several times about many of his ideas and looks forward to working with him and councillors.
The mayor has been slowed in his progress by ministerial changes.
“One of them trod on a land mine.” That’s Michael Wood, former minister of transport. “And the other one is not going to last, although he’s quite good.” And that’s David Parker, the current minister.
I ask Brown what he would do if he was King of Auckland. He doesn’t nominate any projects or outcomes, but says he’d make Wellington do what Auckland wanted. Which is what he’s trying to do anyway.
Then he says: “I’d tell them, ‘Appoint a good minister of transport and, whoever it is, he’s got to work with me. That’s all I need. Nothing else.”
Brown values people he can rely on to get the job done. He doesn’t care about their politics, or possibly anything else about them.
Right now, he has two big and closely interrelated projects on his hands. The first is managing the imminent arrival of a new government – whoever gets to form it.
His strategy is to dictate terms. It’s a direction reversal of the usual cap-in-hand approach, even though he doesn’t have any legislative power or control of the money.
Will it work? Brown had staff in Wellington this week talking up the manifesto with government officials.
There’s a lot at stake besides transport. Auckland is acutely affected by government policies on healthcare, education, water and other infrastructure, policing and crime, welfare, climate action, the environment, business regulations, you name it.
Also, revenue. Brown wants the GST on rates returned to the council and he wants schools, hospitals and all other government properties to pay rates. “Why don’t they? They use a lot of toilets.”
But transport is where he’s decided to have the big fight.
“Waka Kotahi [the government’s transport agency] have a dreadful track record. They’re keen on wasting money, they’re shocking at it. That new road from Puhoi to Warkworth is $400m more than it should have been and I’ll show you why.”
He gets out his pen and draws a cross-section of how the motorway looks as it nears the Orewa turnoff: three lanes each way with a grass median and narrow shoulders.
“As you get further away from Auckland,” he says, “axiomatically there is less traffic. But have a look at the new holiday highway.”
He draws a road with three lanes, a wide sealed median, wide shoulders and four cuttings through the hills, “each of which cost $100m”.
I assume he’s told Waka Kotahi what he thinks. What did they say?
“They’re embarrassed. Because it’s bloody hard to answer. Those cuts serve no practical purpose other than to burn through $400m. That money could have taken the motorway to Wellsford.”
And there’s more.
“The road between Warkworth and Wellsford is slower now than it’s been for the last 20 years. So you save 10 minutes getting to Warkworth to lose 10 minutes getting to Wellsford, and that was apparently for the benefit of the businesses of Northland.”
Brown, you may remember, also lives in Northland. He drives this road a lot. And he’s a roading engineer: he believes he knows what he’s looking at.
“Waka Kotahi is just a screamingly incompetent organisation. They do everything for only twice the cost that I could do it for, and I could do it in a 10th of the time.”
So there.
The second big project right now is the Long-term Plan (LTP), a 10-year budget that the council is required by law to refresh every three years. It’s their single biggest task. Drafting is underway and the debates will start publicly later this year.
Everyone knows there’s not enough money to cover existing services, let alone contingencies for more wild weather or any other shocks.
This will impact rates: even if there are service cuts, it’s widely expected rates will rise by well into double figures.
Brown won’t put a number on it. “I think we should look at the building blocks and see what comes up. If we just carry on the way we were, the rates look horrible.”
The pressure is worse, he says, because he couldn’t persuade enough councillors to vote for a full sale of the council’s airport shares.
“And I still have the same boneheads who don’t want to do it again.”
He says they’re taking a new approach to the LTP. “In the past what they’ve done is just add inflation to everything they’re doing. We’re starting again.”
A new LTP document, called Direction to Council Group from the Mayor and Councillors, says they’re “making stop, start, change choices about services”.
I ask him to explain the term, and initially he doesn’t seem to know what I mean. A staffer mutters at him.
“Oh. Well, we’re going to look at everything and say, should we be doing this? Stop. Should we be doing it better? Change. And should we be starting some new ones that we don’t do?”
He doesn’t seem hopeful. In June, councillors blocked most of the cuts he proposed for the annual budget.
“History is very hard to defeat in local government. If you’ve been doing it in the past, people want to keep going. I’ve got councillors who are demanding [he shouts the word] we reduce costs, but we’re not allowed to touch the funding for the local Boy Scouts.”
The LTP paper says, “Sometimes it is better to do fewer things really well rather than lots of things poorly. We need to overcome well-intentioned but unjustifiable calls to keep services just because they were there.”
I ask him what and he talks about the Citizens Advice Bureau and “some very local youth training facilities that might be better done by corrections or justice”. It all adds up, he says, before adding: “I should have refreshed myself for other examples, but there’s plenty of them.”
Then he adds: “Some of the cycleways seem to cost an unbelievable amount of money.”
He’s also critical of the very existence of the LTP. “Even just the fact that it’s 10 years strikes me as wrong. The most successful companies plan for five years and they have a vague view of the next few.”
Isn’t it really a three-year planning cycle, with some longer-term goals?
He tells me it doesn’t take 10 years to build infrastructure, “It takes 10 years to decide and two years to build.”
He’s got a bunch of other ideas for Auckland.
More Māori wardens, on patrol with “some mental-health people”. Encouraging business associations to spend more on street security. He says the police have been opening “hubs everywhere” and he’s all in with that. “They should have done it years ago, frankly.”
He wants cleaner harbours and has long been involved with the Sea Cleaners group. To help fund marine clean-ups, he suggests a levy on incoming containers.
“Fifty per cent of what comes through the Auckland port is $2 Shop junk and it gets thrown in the harbour a year later. And we go on and on about how important it is to have all this stuff in.
“Mate, a lot of it we don’t need. If we make those plastic dolls a bit more expensive that’d be good for the economy, in my view. I’d like to put a plastics charge on things. Plastic’s not good, mate.”
Is he enjoying the job?
“On days. Not every day.”
Is he enjoying it enough to think about standing again in two years?
“I’m not thinking about that for another 18 months or so. I’m not ruling anything in or out. If I can really start to get some runs on the board and everyone loves the idea, I’d think about it. But it’s very hard if a government is determined to oppose you on everything. And I don’t know what’s coming.”
Phil Goff had this office decorated with gifts and mementoes from his time as an MP and his desk was large and formal. Brown’s furniture is merely functional and the desk is surprisingly small.
It’s not an inner sanctum of power, just a working space for getting stuff done. The papers in the desk are cluttered.
One year on, how did I find him? I’d say he has a deeper understanding of how council works and a new appreciation of what needs to be done. One example: He told me he thinks the CRL is “potentially a very good enabler of Auckland”, although he railed against it during his election campaign.
But despite all that, he’s still never wrong. And still extremely cheerful. It’s his default, and it makes him likeable. Provided you’re on his good side, that is. We met again on Friday and he told me then, “You may not know, but I carry grudges for a long time.” The one he told me about was sort of a joke, sort of not, and it was from 1979.
He wants to be powerful, especially in relation to Government. He’s still working out how to do it, but he’s pretty determined.
He says one of the things that amazes him about Auckland is that despite the success of the Northern Busway, which opened in 2008, there still aren’t any more rapid transit services like it.
Construction of the Eastern Busway is underway now, after a funding shortfall was finally plugged.
“Yes, but I had to go and bang on the minister’s door to get the missing $200m. I got that money in my first month. I went and stood at the guy’s door and he gave it to me. Which does show that I have some grunt.”
Will he go and stand at the door of the new Minister of Transport?
“He’ll be in here, mate. He’ll be in here.”
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.
