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.
That conference was not the first time he’d gone unrecognised. In the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, security guards didn’t want to let him into the ravaged coastal settlement of Karekare. He’d turned up in shorts and jandals, on his own, and the guards decided he couldn’t possibly be the mayor.
Just recently he visited his local library in Ponsonby.
“Wayne Brown,” said the mayor, digesting the news a council employee didn’t know who he was. He could see there were five Wayne Browns on the computer screen.
“Which one are you?”
“Go on, have a guess,” Brown said.
The librarian wouldn’t do it.
Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau probably doesn’t always get recognised, either. Although quite a lot of citizens do seem to be keeping a close watch on how she behaves in her own time.
Yes, they’re different. Whanau is a millennial Māori woman and Brown’s a white male boomer. She’s a clued-up greenie and a beltway insider, he’s a politician who likes to say he doesn’t care about politics.
She gets in trouble. He doesn’t. Even when he says the silliest things.
At that rail conference, he complained that “mission creep” was making public works too expensive. His example was a section of the railway line in Northland, which they’ve raised because of the risk of flooding.
“When it rains people will abandon their houses and stand on the railway tracks,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
But it isn’t ridiculous and nor is it mission creep. As Niwa’s Rob Murdoch later told the conference, building climate resilience into infrastructure is essential work.
Does it matter? It should do, for an engineer who tells every audience he speaks to that he knows how to build things. It goes to the core of his credibility.
Neither Brown nor Whanau is a smoothly machined politician: they’re both idiosyncratic, their personalities bubbling along in front of them.
And both face the same two barriers to achieving their goals. One is their own council, the other is the Government.
Minister for Local Government, Transport and Auckland Simeon Brown, and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown. Photos / Getty Images
When Brown ran for office, he railed against the incumbent mayor, Phil Goff, even though Goff wasn’t standing again. Goff, he said, had created the problems he was going to “fix”.
Anti-Goff councillors cheered him on and celebrated with him when he won. But since then, Brown has fallen out with almost all of them. He now relies on a loose arrangement of councillors on the centre-left and centre-right: mainly, they are the same councillors who were close to Goff.
It’s not that they’re political allies: deputy mayor Desley Simpson, who is National, and planning committee chairman Richard Hills, who is Labour, are prominent among them. And on the centre-left there are clear divisions, especially about rate rises and asset sales. So they argue and manoeuvre among themselves.
It’s not that they’re loyal to Brown, either. They argue with and try to manoeuvre him all the time.
And they muddle their way through footpath maintenance, cleaner beaches, safer streets, better retailing, climate action, disaster response, coping with growth, engagement with Māori, all the things they should and shouldn’t spend money on and how to resolve the culture clash of car parks and cycleways.
But they’re committed to getting budgets passed, helping communities, doing their best to build the resilience and prosperity of the city and its citizens.
They have different ideas about how to do those things, so they negotiate. Progress is hard and frustration is common. But they treat politics as the art of the possible and they’re pretty good at it. Brown works with them because they get things done.
Then there are the councillors who started the term on his side but now tend to vote no. Some bear personal grudges; one or two simply seem confused.
Some appear to me to be disinterested. I observed Councillor Maurice Williamson spending much of an all-day meeting this month wearing earbuds.
Several seem addicted to being angry oppositionists and their speeches blaze with righteous indignation.
Yet there’s rarely any evidence they’ve tried to come up with a workable alternative to the proposal at hand, let alone build a coalition to support it.
They rage, record their vote against, and then get on social media and into their local papers to say they did their best to stop the villainy.
But they didn’t do their best, because they didn’t do the essential work of politics: doing the deal to get stuff done. They hardly ever get anything done.
There’s a similar array at the Wellington City Council, but Tory Whanau’s opponents have worked harder and been more successful.
They’ve also benefitted from a contextual difference. Wellington is a few years behind Auckland in its urban redevelopment and Auckland is in better economic shape than the capital, where public service layoffs have devastated the retail and hospitality sectors.
In Auckland, there’s no longer much of a campaign against the rejuvenation of Queen St and Quay St, but it’s alive and angry on Wellington’s Golden Mile.
Both mayors used their political skills to get a Long-Term Plan (LTP) adopted this year, with compromises all around and a coalition built for the purpose.
An LTP is a statutory requirement. It’s the most important and often most difficult task a council faces and it’s done every three years. Each iteration updates the council’s 10-year budget, affirming or changing the spending priorities.
In Auckland, after considering 28,000 public submissions and sitting through hundreds of hours of meetings, everyone compromised and Brown declared, “Nobody has compromised more than me”. They got it done.
In Wellington, they also got it done, with Whanau proving herself the arch pragmatist. To create a $600 million kitty to spend on everything from waterworks to cycleways, she won support to sell the council’s shares in the airport.
Asset sales is usually a right-wing staple, but in both cities it has split the left and in Wellington most councillors on the right want to keep hold of the airport shares.
Also likely: much less spent on water. Why would any Wellington councillor vote for that? The answer points to the end game of the whole exercise: to get rid of Whanau herself.
But it was Whanau’s opponents who created the shambles, by overturning the LTP, putting critical waterworks spending at risk along with the very existence of the democratically elected council. I do not use the term “suicide bombing” lightly.
Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has requested a meeting with Local Government Simeon Brown after revelations that the government is seeking advice on potential interventions at Wellington City Council.
Photo / NZME
Never mind that most councils have just been through a rigorous budget exercise with their LTPs. Never mind that the Government professes to believe in localism.
“Wasteful” is code for “projects we don’t like”. Councils are supposed to spend money the way ministers think it should be spent.
