I was thinking the other day that in nearly one year, Wayne Brown has proven himself to be the worst Mayor Auckland has ever had.
- His complete failure of leadership during the Anniversary Flooding.
- His desire to blame everyone else for the Anniversary Flooding.
- His attempt to ban Simon Wilson from hosting an Election debate.
- His refusal to sell Golf courses to cover the shortfall in Budget.
- His use of threats to cuts in Arts and Culture to get agreement to privatise off the Airport.
- His never ending abuse of Journalists and refusal to be interviewed by them.
- His never ending abuse of Councillors who don’t agree with him.
- His decision to privatise our Airport.
- His attempt to ban media from his announcement to privatise the airport.
And he is doing this damage because we have a Mayoral Electoral process in Auckland run by a private company that is rigged to suppress voter engagement!
We have the worst Mayor from a voting structure designed to suppress turnout!
Watching this Mr Magoo hock off our Airport while actively attempting to censor media coverage of his attempts to hock off our Airport is an unbelievable abuse of power.
Most older supporters of Wayne Brown care more that he is shitting on the woke media and serving them up abuse than they do about him privatising our fucking Airport!
The irony of the Boomer King privatising Aucklands assets to save his Boomer voters from a rates rise is made more outrageous when considering his Boomer voters don’t care about the sale of those assets because they won’t live long enough to see the damage that will cause!
Thanks Boomers.
This is Generational class war being waged but in a very NuZilind passive aggressive manner.
The manner in which the lies about how much of a blow out the Council is facing alongside the deceitful way a sale of the Airport is occurring all show a Mayor prepared to sneak a privatisation agenda through while Auckland suffers.
Wayne Brown said he would ‘fix’ Auckland. Turns out he is going to flog it off.
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Nah. He’s great! Hes doing what should have been done year’s ago but the losers of the last 3 terms went on a spending spree that created this Crisis!!
$12b of debt!!
If you Go Woke! You Go Broke!
If that was true, he’d be trying to break up the ‘Not-So-Super City’ and handing control back to the old boroughs and outer counties.
He can’t. That’s central government legislation.
He doesn’t have the power to do that. That was and is a central government cluster f%$k.
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/national/roger-ruth-wayne-and-tina/ar-AA1ceegI?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=71b94d3cc9e94715acb746293c51477a&ei=9
I refer to more intelligent people than tanty Tane
Squirrel Nutkin tickles Old Brown with another nettle.
That’s just cope. Financialisation, privatisation, and deregulation are tools to reduce government sector borrowing. At a million dollars a house to you honestly think Auckland ratepayers can sevice higher rates he’s just ideologically driven this wonderful Wayne Brown who has got all the words of Roger Douglas but non of his brains.
Who decided that the ratepayers of Auckland pay $11,700 annual Golf membership fees for 800 wealthy folks at the Remmers Golf Club for a 100-year contract Sam??
I like Brown as Mr Magoo. He had big spectacles and still stumbled into disaster – made a spectacle of himself!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8GTHXTEvIc
Ha!
We have had worse mayors. The only beef I have is selling the airport shares – the rest is I think overblown and more a failure of council management executives and policy over time aka flooding. You can’t blame someone who just arrived for decades of bad decisions and a massive bloat of council staff/consultants and growing poor services.
I also like how he does not suck up to woke media or protect the council staff – NZ media seem to mostly be woke/neoliberal networked, waste of space. I have heard he is generally popular amoungst the council staff as he wants to improve things.
No, he fucking doesn’t. He hates parks, libraries and council amenities that help the poor and working class and wants to close them all down, to keep rates down for the rich pricks. And from the looks of it, you want to get rid of libraries as well. Fucking Tory prick.
He doesn’t ‘hate’ any of those things. He ‘hates’ the idea of running up huge debt for future generations.
We guess what, we need parks and libaries, and we need to do what it takes to preseve them.
Well guess what, we need to make sure people can afford their rates.
Do you think that parks and libaries should be closed down then?
“We have had worse mayors”.. Name one.. And by that, I mean one that has shown the utter incompetence and lack of leadership the current cretin has..
Your memory seems to be tainted with a tory blue wash, and we are left with the assumption that your comment is more an admission that you were stupid enough to vote for him, and can’t face the consequences any better than the cretin who would be mayor can…
Phil Goff. 1. Oversaw an enormous growth in wasteful expenditure and council debt. 2. Enabled a thoroughly conflicted situation to arise at Panuku.
Len Brown. 1. Started this horrible mess off. 2. Shagged a young woman on council property.
So now many libraries and parks would you close down then?
At least Aucklanders will own 18% shares in the airport.
More houses in parks and homeless can live in libraries.
I agree with you SaveNZ is off his rocker.
Seems like he has one hell of a mess to tidy up from Phil Goff & Len Brown’s days in Office. Seems like we have a bloated Council with No Direction ???
Ngungukai, sacking everyone and then having to re-employ them as a contractor seems a strange reuse of a human resource
To be perfectly honest the solutions are far outside councils remit. We are just going to have to get super creative in how we fund nationally significant projects. there’s a 5 year and growing wait list for all modern sustaining technology like electricity substations and water sub stations thanks to the destruction of Ukraine. The solutions will be extra ordinary, and mighty expensive.
Seems like you haven’t done even the most basic research into this developing clusterfuck that used to be Auckland.. Why did Wellington roundly reject the creation of their own “supercity”? Because they had time to understand that it was nothing more than an asset grab by the tories corporate owners, and all Len Brown, and Phil Goff could do was fight a holding action… Even Goff, who was one of Roger Douglas’ boys spent most of his time fighting to get anything done..
The whole proposal and implementation by Rodney Hyde was designed with the assumption of the re-election of John Banks, who was going to be “their boy” in the mayors office to rubber stamp the exploitation..
So leave the trite and inaccurate “theories” out and do some real research (if you know how) and then someone may actually listen to you..
Cut thousands of council jobs, cut the hundreds of roles paying 100k for nothing specific, cut hundreds of management roles at 100+ a person, then the council will run just the same whilst leaner
How many consultants, policy analysts and PR people does the council actually need?
If the government (which is 30+% of the economy) didn’t pay all of that dead wood, they wouldn’t have a reason to exist. Oh wait.
He’s shaping up to the best mayor the supercity has ever had, not that that is much of an accolade when considering the track record of his two predecessors.
Points:
>Anyone who give Simon Wilson a shove is automatically my best mate. 🙂
>He must end the debt-based funding of the council with this budget, even if the increase in rates makes us all wince. Ratepayers are ultimately responsible for the disastrous financial circumstances the Council finds itself in: It’s the cost of voting for stupid councillors.
> Next, he must hoe into the staffing levels of each of the council departments. I want to see at least a couple of thousand council employees (I won’t say workers) made redundant because overspend on salaries is the Council’s biggest problem. One department at a time. First AT then Panuku…
Andrew – Great points
Well said.
Your idea that the baby boom generation all think and vote the same way and support the sale of airport shares is ridiculous.
The baby boom generation are pissed about the council bureaucracy, slow building permit issue, council failures that caused leaky buildings and then rates rises to pay homeowner compensation, the waste on recreational noncommuter cycle tracks, the fact that roads and pot holes used to be fixed without paying millions to traffic management companies for road cones, that council financial managers cost ratepayers a $100million by not hedging council borrowings, that layer after layer of neoliberalised council management are paid excessive salaries. Boomers know the airport shares are a great investment and ought to be kept by the council and it’s not something Brown campaigned on but The Fix was in.
With you on this!
The best thing he has done is to crystallise the issues over (all, not just Auckland) councils becoming bloated whilst also borrowing to the max. Interestingly, for all the complaints about Brown’s idea of cutting staff and selling shares, there isn’t a huge groundswell of ratepayers saying keep staff & shares and please give me a 50% rates rise instead.
The media ban was stupid. All he had to do was invite all, do a “Jessica, then Tova” and then leave. Or am I being too critical of our newly honoured ex-PM?
In a spirit of goodwill to Mayor Wayne Brown, there are numerous useful hints amongst some jokes in this tv episode about a practice trialling response effectiveness in Pawnee to an emergency. This one is the bit about an attack of Avian Flu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CryNV8V-ZDU 0.55m
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi951500057/?ref_=tt_vi_i_2 1.21m
It would be a good way of Mayor Brown easing himself into an understanding of the difficulties that can arise in a real emergency which he needs to ‘bone up’ on.
Some of those ‘reasons’ overlap quite a lot.
Boil it down and Brown is rude to some journalists, trying to sell a Council asset, and wasn’t everything and everywhere on the night of the wholly unexpected flooding because the Emergency Management staff had gone home for a long weekend.
“Mayor happy to horsetrade so long as airport shares sold”
Bernard Orsman, NZ Herald, (hard copy), Friday June 2, 2023
Basically Brown is holding the public and Council employees to ransom unless he gets his way with the sale of the airport shares.
Orsman notes that the Council’s income from the airport shares is greater than the interest payments on the Council’s debt.
Orsman writes;
“Brown is offering to reinstate funding for social services and the arts, as well as a $16m budget cut for local boards and increase the pay of bus drivers to $30 an hour to restore suspended services.
But if councillors want the lollies on offer, Brown said they will have to offload the council’s 18 per cent shareholding in the airport….
“….his reasons for the sale, which is to the proceeds to lower debt, saving $100m a year in interest costs, a lot less than dividends from keeping the shares.”
Brown’s promise to retain services if the shares are sold, means all these services will be run on less income.
Eventually when the money from the one off sale of the Airport shares runs out, the council will again have to take on debt to run its services and Aucklanders will be no better off. And possibly even worse off.
Wayne Brown’s mission on becoming Mayor of Auckland. is to privatise the airport shares in the interest of his wealthy backers, or anything else they can get their hands on, even if it bankrupts the council or cuts funding for services.
To paraphrase Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sax, Wayne Brown’s backers are like a vampire squid sticking their blood funnel into anything that smells of money. Wayne Brown is just their scabby front man.
That is economic nonsense.
Just to demonstrate how dodgy this old coot is. When he does (rarely) acknowledge that other gold mine Auckland Council is sitting on, he claims he doesn’t have the mandate to sell some of the $2.6Billion of golf courses.
Yet somehow after finding a giant budget blackhole that no one else including international credit ratings agencies hadn’t found, he suddenly has a mandate to sell the airport shares… despite not campaigning to do so.
Meanwhile the Management Plan for AC’s golf courses will go through Public Consultation for the 2nd time in 3 years….you guessed pretty much staight after his lordship’s emergency austerity budget has been rammed through….Funny that… Coincidence?
Boomer Brown is either an incompetent moron, or up to something very dodgy, or more likely both.
Definitely will go down in history as the worst Mayor Auckland has had. The only one that could have done a worse job is that gaudy self indulgent clown Leo Molloy
Lets all see the truth here, brown is a grumpy old fuckwit.
Wait until you get NACT in the Beehive in October 😉
You’ll love it, big smiles all round.
Mayor Brown doing a great job,look at who he has upset.
I’ll repeat martyn is there a difference between ageism, sexism, racism and homophobia, you obviously think there is….please explain why.