The Boomer King promised to Fix Auckland, he drowned it instead – why you should be angry at yourself
Watching people attempting to defend Wayne Browns response is the most disturbing thing you’ll see today.
The argument that Wayne Brown wasn’t responsible for the rain is such a bullshit response – there was no communication with the communities being impacted for 4 fucking hours! That is on him, I’m not demanding he stops the rain, I’m demanding he lead in an emergency!
Let’s be very, very, very clear about what happened here.
You had a Metservice whose forecasting was woeful (and needs investigating).
You had Auckland Council Emergency Bureaucracy who had pretty much signed off for the day on Friday for the long weekend and who were very shitty about being dragged back.
You had a grumpy inexperienced Mayor who was pissed off his tennis match had been cancelled because of the rain.
The Auckland Council Emergency Bureaucracy spent most of the afternoon justifying doing nothing.
You had a Mayor who doesn’t do social media at all and so didn’t understand what was going on in real time.
As the enormity of what we were confronting starts to build, both the Auckland Council Emergency Bureaucracy and the Mayor were spending more time and energy justifying doing nothing than actually doing anything.
By 4pm we knew the rainfall was unprecedented, we knew houses were being flooded and we knew emergency serves were already in high demand.
The Auckland Council Emergency Bureaucracy and the Mayor began seeing attempts to push them into action as a political blame game as opposed to actually saving Auckland.
There were shouting matches between the Mayors Office and everyone else desperate to call the event an Emergency so they could take over.
While this argument and blame game is occurring with an incredibly embarrassed Auckland Council Emergency Bureaucracy and the Mayor, the people of Auckland had no communications whatsoever between 6.14pm and 10.30pm.
Because NZ is a cheap country, our civil defence funding has been reduced to a messaging system to tell people what to do, that messaging system was utterly missing when Auckland needed it most.
The following press conferences where Wayne’s only concern is to defend his own incompetence and inaction were a slap in the face to every Aucklander.
Wayne argues he has to be informed by the Auckland Council Emergency Bureaucracy to declare an emergency, but because Hooton left a couple of weeks ago, Wayne has no more Brains left in his Brains Trust who would have argued to be on the phone every 20minutes demanding an update.
As of Saturday, Hooton was brought back inside the Mayor’s Office to run things and you’ve seen an explosion of communication coming out because Hooton isn’t a fucking idiot.
I think NZ became so used to Jacinda reacting effortlessly in a crisis that we forgot how difficult leadership is and why when we vote it matters
The Mayors incompetence in the face of the worst weather event in Aucklands history demands reflection from us the voters.
It was clear Wayne Brown was very very very old during the debates and lacked the real qualities of leadership Auckland required.
Our rigged Mayoral Election System is designed to be as cheap as possible and is subcontracted out to a private company who only has a dozen polling booths for a city of 1.7million in what is the must successful voter suppression scam of all time.
Wayne Brown won with a pittance of the voting population actually voting and he was elected by reactionary right wing self interest boomers who are now very quiet.
Efeso Collins sure as hell wouldn’t have waited until 10.30pm to declare an emergency but unfortunately Auckland will vote for a candidate called Brown, they won’t vote for a candidate who is Brown.
If you want to be angry, be angry at yourselves, be angry we elected a fool, be angry that we haven’t taken climate change seriously, be angry that your 7pm Current Affairs shows are shallow circus’s that don’t focus on the real issues.
This unprecedented weather event must be an inflection point to our political apathy and refusal to take climate change seriously.
Our infrastructure can’t cope with what its coming, our economy can’t cope with what is coming and our communities can’t cope with what is coming.
We must urgently understand the need for climate change adaptation and what that must mean for us all.
Welcome to your future, stop being angry and get involved.
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I don’t think its age related Martyn. I think Wayne Browns persona would have been the same 15 years ago.
He was probably just as useless too! I heard he wasn’t exactly a much-loved mayor in the Far North as well.
FFS it was Jacinda’s going away present and Labour hasn’t done anything about sorting out Auckland’s stormwater system.
Watercare and the Auckland Council have not asked government for any help and say they are good to operate as they are – do not need Three Waters.
Oh, so Auckland want the help of central Governments 3 Waters concept now. Well Brown didn’t want a bar of it, remember that to those who voted him in, you get what you deserve.
FFS
Ngungukai I beg to differ. This was God conveying displeasure to Carmel for brutally abolishing the Commissioner for Vulnerable Children.
In other words, a bunch of highly paid Auckland council permanent employees had decided that they would bugger off early on Friday arvo.
The mayor maybe a dick, but he’s been served poorly by the council employees. The buck stops with the mayor and the Auckland City CEO, or whatever the town clerk is called these days
The mayor can only declare a state of emergency on advice of certain officials in the council. Unfortunately these guys were, at the batch, in the pub, out for dinner on Friday night & had to sober up first.
“The mayor maybe a dick, but he’s been served poorly by the council employees”
As are most local body and central gummint employees. But be careful, We need to differentiate between the council and central gummint grunters at the coal face, and their multiple overpaid line manager-gate keeper-ideologically neoliberal/3rdway ticket clipper ‘officials’, schooled in the art of rrrr’s licking and deception, and buck passing.
I suspect (and hope) the likes of Chippy, Wood and McNulty, among others have begun to realise where the problems and road blocks are. We’ll know soon probably. Possibly/probably it’ll be down to whether or not they call for some “Independent” advice from the likes of EY, Deloittes, or some other ticket-clipping, template driven advisers.
OnceWasTim. The guy’s an engineer, not a professional politician or pr type posing meaningfully all over the place in a windswept raincoat – boomer’s a crap word patented by Chloe and as silly as Marama’s cunt. Engineers plan and problem solve – he might be able to send the costly hangers-on packing.
The same people going into bat for Brown attacked Ardern for poor leadership. Oh the irony!
All the emergency response staff were at their jobs.
The bureaucrats – who do comms etc (and others who facilitate civil defence support – set up refuges for the homeless etc) could have been asked to stay on to keep people informed if Mayor Brown had thought of it …
Boris. It’s standard for Govt Dept managers to toddle off for the weekend at 4pm on Fridays, so Auckland council’s likely no different. Service managers are usually lacking in initiative and any sort of nous, and queries get left to the call centres operators with queues kept long in the expectation that many callers will hang up and go away, which they do.
Came a hot Friday with things happening very quickly and little to indicate how massively it would escalate. It may have been better on a Thursday or Tuesday, but not on a Monday, which is the worst day for call centre absentee sickies, as the front line folk recover from their own weekends.
The mayor shouldn’t have referred to the media as drongos though, even if they are. Should go have gone to Charm School.
Really Bomber?? …” As of Saturday, Hooton was brought back inside the Mayor’s Office to run things”…. hardly surprising.
But gee I wonder where Wayne “Austerity” Brown has found budget for that?
Every other arm of Council has been instructed to tighten their belts, freeze staff recruitment, ditch external consultants and find ways to reduce expenditure…. except of course his own Office!
Again, exemplary Leadership from this incompetent bafoon. The contempt this man displays for the organisation he claims to lead, not to mention the people of Auckland is staggering.
Stand down now Brown!
“Efeso Collins sure as hell wouldn’t have waited until 10.30pm to declare an emergency but unfortunately Auckland will vote for a candidate called Brown, they won’t vote for a candidate who is Brown”
That’s really the whole point of this invective: the Mayor of Auckland isn’t a leftist.
“Wayne Brown won with a pittance of the voting population actually voting and he was elected by reactionary right wing self interested boomers who are now very quiet.”
Perhaps if the left wing had turned out to vote in October, then Brown wouldn’t have been elected. Democracy isn’t perfect, but we all understand perfectly well how it works, so can’t complain too much if the “wrong” decision was made by voters. Moreover, “reactionary right wing boomers” are entitled to place a vote based on their own perceived self-interest, surely, just as left wingers who spend all of their time fretting about the climate continuing change (as it always has changed) are voting in what they perceive are their interests.
Finally, Brown was only elected three months ago? Fellow Boomer Phil Goff surely had all the time in the world to devise a plan for use in such circumstances, a plan that council staff were already well versed in, one that Brown could have simply pulled out of his top draw.
You simply proved you are a scientific retard with this :
” …. fretting about the climate continuing change (as it always has changed)”
I don’t live in Auckland .
I don’t know anything about Dave Brown.
When I saw him being queried on TV, I thought they had just dragged some random old bloke off the street to ask what he knew what was going on.
Bang on.
*Wayne* Brown. Dave+Brown is a TDB commenter 🙂 He does carry a certain unkempt look to him, a little odd for an Aucklander of his position imo. Looks like he’d be more at home tinkering in the shed or on a farm kicking the sheep.
Or rest home,
We elected Wayne Brown to fix the financial mess Auckland is in, not look pretty.
Yet Kempton is a far cry from pretty
*kempt*
‘unkempt’? Who is Kempton? Is he/she good, bad, or indifferent?
Kempton was the auto-correct demon of the moment.
Kempt: kɛm(p)t/
adjective
(of a person or a place) maintained in a neat and clean condition; well cared for.
“she was looking as thoroughly kempt as ever”
Well it’s clear you made the wrong choice tinderdry6, Kia kaha Auckland.
The council CEO and staff are to blame. They train for civil defencr emergencies, but we’re all at pub.Would not matter who the Mayor was.
It was pissing down all day and the weather reports were quite clear it was going to keep raining. Every single emergency appliance in Auckland was directed to assist people.
After what we saw with Covid we shouldn’t be surprised that the media and some of the public feel like they need a leader that treats them like children. Did they want Wayne Brown to start tweeting out heart emojis and hashtags or just do a live press conference full of propaganda?
If you can’t work out not to go kayaking in the flood waters or that higher ground is safer than poorly draining residential valleys then I don’t think Wayne Brown needs to pulled away from the “war room” for a bit of political theatre.
You’re being a bit harsh on Metservice I think. They did predict heavy rain, just because they didn’t phone you personally the information was out there and even then they can’t tell you exactly which areas will flood or which houses will collapse.
Yet they themselves conceded they could have done better, last night. Let’s not forget the late hour Elton John show was canceled either, with him due to go on stage in 20 ish mins with 11,000 people gathered and the rest on their way. I’m sure hundreds of vehicles wouldn’t be write offs now if the forecast had been more accurate and the show canceled earlier. Time accurate info can make all the difference.
While in a parallel universe reached by the Tardis, Gordon Campbell considers how it would have been perhaps if Mr Efeso Collins had been elected Mayor by a sufficient number of wise thoughtful Aucklanders capable at decision making.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2301/S00042/gordon-campbell-on-counting-the-ways-auckland-was-failed-by-its-mayor.htm
He’s fallen down the same rabbit hole of politics. No policies so go opposite to everything the government has to say.