Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown leaving the West Harbour Fire Station after fronting the media in relation to the worst flooding the Auckland region has ever experienced. Photo / Dean Purcell
ANALYSIS
“Don’t f**k me over,” says Wayne Brown, mayor of Auckland, after about 30 minutes of a frank discussion with the Herald.
Brown rang the Herald on Monday night after a request for comment about his message to his tennis group that he couldn’t play on Sunday because he had “to deal with media drongos over the flooding tomorrow”.
“I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” he said. “No one else in New Zealand is going to get 180,000 votes. That was my mandate.
“Last month a guy in Hamilton got into Parliament with 6000 votes (referring to National’s Tama Potaka in the Hamilton West byelection). I got 30 votes for every one of those.”
When talking to Brown, there are times when it feels like there’s an Antipodean echo of Trump-like self-endorsement.
There’s the reflex to self-justify and defend himself. There’s the prickly relationship with the media, the biggest vote count claims and then while criticising Auckland Transport he told the Herald he “could have done better” if he was doing their job.
It’s been difficult for Auckland to get to know its new mayor and these recent days have not helped. Brown refused 106 media requests in his first month, granting only two interviews. His press conferences are few and opportunities to grab him for interviews at events emerge only rarely.
Brown’s awkward and blunt style was evident on the campaign trail. That lack of willingness to be the public face of Auckland has struggled for public acceptance since disaster struck on Friday, forcing Brown to address frustration over a council that appeared to move too slowly and say too little while the city went under water.
The point made to Brown repeatedly during that conversation - and, it seems, missed - was that communication is critical during a disaster and the media is critical to getting necessary messaging to those affected.
In the case of Auckland’s flooding, communication on Friday was poor to non-existent and the question raised is whether the mayor’s abrasive attitude towards media and inclination to keep it at arm’s length contributed to this.
This call to the Herald was to a journalist who has dealt with Brown for 20 years. “I’m only talking to you because you’re a mate,” he said a few times during the call. When it was pointed out both the mayor and journalists had jobs to do, he said: “If you’ve got a job to do, do a job worth doing.”
There will be other stories coming, he said, and if you do me over then they won’t be coming to you. When told there are no deals, he said: “Everyone is a trader, mate.”
Yes, he conceded, you can write about this conversation. “You can as long as it’s balanced. What would you write? ‘Mayor bleats’? Take the story as you like. I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand.”
How to understand Wayne Brown, 76, most recently of Auckland but with a home in the Far North’s Mangonui? How to understand Wayne Brown who is in the mayor’s job because of frustration his predecessor didn’t instantly see sense in the report he authored recommending shifting Auckland’s port to the North.
With the benefit of 20 years of exposure, this journalist would say Brown is not a complex individual. He’s primarily an engineer. He sees everything as a machine that can be “fixed” to work in the most useful way. He has a keen eye to identify those problems and sees himself as the person best suited to fix them.
When it comes to understanding the human element of that malfunctioning “machine”, Brown’s approach is less about coaxing and developing and more about wrestling it into working order with sheer force of will.
And yet, in the conversation, it is clear he does understand there is a human element. He’s been on the ground and seen the damage. He spoke to the son of the man killed on Shore Rd, Remuera, and was clearly affected by his proximity to the tragedy.
He has worked long days and into the night to manage a situation that appeared out of his control on Friday and has yet to settle.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding. Brown himself feels misunderstood. He says he was told not to talk to journalists and blames the media for a lack of competence and a failure to tell his side of the story.
Brown complained about the coverage the All Blacks received on Monday for “just unloading a few boxes” when they and Auckland Blues members turned up to the Māngere Memorial Hall on Monday.
The media, he said, would “fly through the Blitz to kiss their arse”. In contrast, he asks, where was the coverage of his visits - generally unannounced - to relief centres and to view damage? Where was the coverage of what he had done to assist Mangere?
“They (the media) just can’t get over the fact the person they loved, I beat him by a mile.”
That’s a reference to councillor Efeso Collins, who trailed Brown with 124,800 votes. No media outlet declared for Collins yet Brown has consistently painted him as the media’s preferred candidate.
“You are drongos,” he said, repeating the term used in a text message obtained by the Herald showing Brown cancelled a tennis match “to deal with media drongos over the flooding” on Sunday.
He’s not happy about the text message being leaked, likening it to rifling through people’s rubbish bins. “It’s not surprising you guys are hated.”
Brown detailed another encounter with the media as evidence of the cause of his frustrations. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins flew to Auckland on Saturday and was then toured in an NZ Defence Force helicopter.
“I paid for a helicopter. Me. I paid for it. The taxpayer paid for his. There’s some balancing stuff. Just think about that,” Brown said.
The two leaders - one civic, the other national - surveyed damage and flew to Whenuapai Air Force Base in west Auckland where Hipkins was speaking at a press conference. Brown gets out to join the Beehive contingent, is elbowed aside by a camera operator and finds some present don’t recognise who he is.
“Later it’s reported I’m not there. That’s why you’re drongos. It’s hard for me to have respect for people who don’t know who you are when you’re standing next to the Prime Minister.”
On Thursday, a Today FM producer texted Brown to ask for an interview. At some stage in the exchange, Brown was told he should front up because “taxpayers pay your wages”.
No they don’t, he responded, ratepayers do. “That’s the level of press I have to put up with, with you people.” No interview, he said, because he’s playing tennis the next morning. And then that got cancelled because of the rain.
Brown knew it was raining because he couldn’t play tennis. He told the Herald he knew it was raining because he could see it from his 27th-floor office but it appeared to be simply a “wet Friday”.
“On Friday I was at my desk and the first we knew of it was Shane Henderson.” The Waitakere ward councillor called in a flood alert, followed by one of Brown’s commercial tenants who had been flooded.
Find full coverage of the Auckland Floods here.
A few more calls followed and Brown said he contacted emergency management staff for guidance. At that point, he said he was told to wait - they needed more information and were coming up with a plan.
“On Friday night, I didn’t engage because we weren’t told anything. They told me ‘stand by your desk and wait for the paperwork’.” Brown is focusing on the “state of emergency” declaration - the decision was made around 9.30pm, announced by press release at 10.17pm but not communicated by Brown himself until 11.15pm when he signed it formally in front of the media. “And the forms are complicated as well.”
Brown said there were emergency management officials with national responsibilities working alongside Auckland’s team who told him “we don’t want you to sign this yet”.
“The emergency management people have had years of being paid to get ready for an event like that. They couldn’t tell me anything.”
Criticism aimed at the council goes beyond the formal state of declaration. Those experienced in emergency management have told the Herald it is critical to have a channel of information to people and to share not only what is known but what is not known.
How, Brown is asked, is it that Auckland Transport is literally having buses being washed off the road without using social media - or press releases - to warn travellers over what’s happening on its network. The agency tweeted information about the Elton John concert being cancelled at 7.16pm and then nothing until a list of road closures more than three hours later.
“And they weren’t telling the mayor about it,” Brown said. “I could have done better I suppose but I was inside an office with people telling me what I could and couldn’t do.”
There will be an inquiry, Brown said, and it will examine everyone’s role including his own. It will also examine what was done to prepare for the disaster. “This city wasn’t prepared.”
And here’s the fight back. It’s not about the poor communications on Friday but harks back to Brown’s campaign slogan: “Let’s Fix Auckland.”
He has adopted over the last 24 hours a point of reference for the weather event, describing it as the equivalent of 25 New Lynn floods, linking it to the 2017 washout which devastated the main street shops and saw an enormous hole open in the ground.
There is a reason he has made reference to this and one he said would become public in the coming days. There was an inquiry into the New Lynn flood, Brown said. “Not one of the recommendations was put in place.”
That would be unsurprising given the huge associated expense and the political capital burned to cover the required rates increase to pay for it. There has been need across the city for decades with some parts well-familiar with flooding and even sewage when heavy rain falls. The hills around Titirangi have long been marked as prone to subsidence.
It could be here that Brown is able to lean into his strengths - an engineering brain and an inclination to make quick decisions are good skills to carry into the aftermath of a disaster. It might be that he is willing to burn political capital - or do deals - to get the money needed to put in system-wide improvements.
If Brown is the right man for what is coming, his immediate difficulty - as it has been since Friday - is communicating that to Aucklanders.
The 19-year-old disappeared without her wallet or mobile phone.