I was round at Gerry Hill’s and Sally James’ place on Ponsonby Terrace the other day. As everyone knows, over the last two years Gerry has been courageously battling motor neuron disease (MND). He’d just returned home after a spell in hospital, some of it in intensive care, but in better shape than I expected. Cheerful as ever, despite difficulties with his breathing, he was in full flight, discussing politics with a room full of well-wishers. There was general dismay expressed all round at the way the so-called ‘Super City’ is going. A growing concern that ordinary ratepayers are being marginalised and citizen’s rights’ increasingly over-ridden by an all-powerful council/CCO bureaucracy – with mayor Phil Goff and too many councillors and local board members going along with it all. Those politicians fail to understand that the primary role of an elected representative is to represent the public to the council – not the other way round.
Gerry’s friends were also convinced, like many Aucklanders, that the council is selective in the way it enforces planning rules. The bureaucrats can be enfuriatingly pedantic when it comes to ordinary Aucklanders seeking consents but certain people, especially johnny-come-lately developers and the super rich, seem to get a free pass. The non-notifed Duke helicopter landing pad in Herne Bay and council’s failure to enforce helicopter consent rules, come to mind – as does the destruction of century-old villas without even need for a resource consent.
Gerry’s friends were also not particularly impressed with the mayoralty contest, and the huge sums of money donated by wealthy interests being thrown about.
Ponsonby resident Richard Howard summed it all up very succinctly: “Whose city is it anyway”?
It seems this conversation, or something very much like it, is taking place all over Auckland. In a series of opinion pieces in the NZ Herald , the latest on 29th July, senior writer John Roughan, deplored the loss of our local government, putting much of the blame on the ‘corporate model’ given to the ‘Super city’ at its creation. Roughan observed that this corporate model and the sheer size of the ‘Super City’, has made genuine local government in Auckland a thing of the past. Like Gerry and Sally’s visitors, Roughan evidently draws not much comfort from the prospect of either mayoral candidate winning in October. He instead proposes another solution: Auckland councillors stepping up to take more responsibility in the governing of Auckland. He wrote:
“So how can we change it? …There might yet be time for enough candidates to get together and promise that if elected they will take control of their agenda.
They need to declare they will not spend most of their days in the council chamber wading through windy reports of no particular consequence. They will organise themselves into smaller committees, call for reports on things they want to know, meet once a week and spend more of their time with constituents.
They will assign themselves a portfolio and get alongside staff, keeping tabs on what is done and reporting results to the council.
I hoped Phil Goff might do something like this. I thought he’d be appalled to find he’d become mayor of a staff-driven organisation. But he appears to have done nothing about it. Surely there is something determined councillors can do, their role cannot be restricted by legislation. If it is, we need to look to national politics for a solution.
Next year the Super City will be 10. National, having set it up, should admit its mistake and put a review in its platform for next year’s election…We need 12 candidates determined to reclaim local democracy”.
I completely agree – and I’m not the only one. It’s time the council’s Governing Body, which has since its inception been overly dominated by the mayor, lived up to its name – whoever wins the mayoralty. More democratic government, better accountability to the public, and checks and balances in Auckland Council are well overdue.
As for the widespread disenchantment with Phil Goff, as mentioned, I haven’t found that much enthusiasm for his only realistic challenger John Tamihere either, but that appears to be changing. Tamihere’s candidacy hasn’t been helped by his bizzare pronouncements about selling the Ports of Auckland and Watercare. But I was at a community meeting recently when a woman, who runs a business on High Street, and was evidently so frustrated with Goff and the council that she told the meeting, “I don’t like John Tamihere or his track record – but I intend to vote for John Tamihere.” There was momentary silence in the room as we all took this in.
Politics is a funny business and so it may be wise not to write Tamihere off. Many Aucklanders are so disallusioned with the apparent front-runner Goff that they may just vote for Tamihere – to make a point about what they think about the ‘Super City’ – and to use their once-in-three-year-opportunity to remind the powers-that-be just whose city this is.
Mike Lee is an Auckland City Counsellor
Good on you Mike for personalising this column with reference to Gerry and Sally and other actual people. That is what the Supercity and CCOs–ACT’s corporatist dream after all–lacks, it is impersonal and hostile to the very people that should be participating in it.
Everything in this article is sadly accurate.
Auckland is no longer a city run by and for residents, but for an all-powerful council/CCO bureaucracy who no doubt are backed by selected corporate interests and increasingly influenced by countries like China’s interest in ‘trips’ for Mayors and supporting mayoral electoral donations, and who knows how many other local and international conflict of interests are operating in Auckland, in other ways!
The Bella Vista failures show that even to this day it seems possible to consent an entire subdivision in NZ on faulty or missing engineering and judging by the ease of paying for planning ‘expert’ reports that often are just to support a planning application and not in any way independent, which is fully supported in our planning processes of applicants who lie and cheat and mislead being able to walk free after wards with their application even when the reports are incorrect or misleading or the land is unstable like Bella Vista,
Clearly this is highly lucrative for the millions in developments to be made! The leaky building syndrome and the environmental degradation of Auckland is directly coming from in many cases, the councils themselves not being willing to stand up to, greedy consents outside of the planning rules and good community behaviour (aka helicopter pads in built up CBD areas, live in Coatsville on a large block for fucks sake if you own a helicopter!).
Also the role of misleadingly called environmental lawyers who have skewed the consenting process to create a highly selective process in the way councils enforce their planning rules to the detriment to ordinary rights of communities and the environment and planning risks.
It ain’t long before we won’t even by able to swim in NZ beaches and rivers and lakes with the amount of sewerage and diesel run off going into them, which every five minutes another paved surface is dug up in Auckland for a council COO contract or repaved unnecessarily, or another oversized building is consented, which all contributes to more run off going into our water supplies and beaches, with less and less permeable surfaces to absorb water and stop it going into waste waterways with runoff, as well as removing more trees and flora that filter the air quality as a bonus!
Hear Hear! Mr Lee!
People didn’t vote for Trump because they liked him, they didn’t vote for him because he would make a good president.
They voted for him because they wanted change – any change.
Anything that would break the country out of the rut it was in, that would drain the swamp.
Those who weren’t sure voted anyway – “what more can we lose?”
I suspect there’s a similar movement afoot here – regardless of whether you like Tamihere or not, he stands for change, be it good or bad.
It’s a Special Administrative Region of the Han Chinese master race dicatorshit, obviously…
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