The Auckland Council’s vote to pull out of Local Government NZ is interesting from a range of perspectives. Although Mayor Wayne Brown’s casting vote was necessary to carry the motion, the narrowness of the result, 10:10, is proof that the body he presides over is by no means the hot-bed of anti-Brown sentiment some were hoping for. The mayor’s intolerance of the woke orthodoxy that has settled over an alarming number of New Zealand institutions is, very clearly, shared by at least half of Auckland’s councillors. The other half will have to lift their game considerably if Brown’s cost-cutting bulldozer is not to flatten everything they hold dear.
That’s a real prospect now – providing the ten councillors who backed Brown’s withdrawal from LGNZ remain loyal. The Anniversary Weekend deluge, Cyclone Gabrielle and – most importantly – the massive cost over-runs associated with the Central Rail Link, have all combined to blow out the council’s budget. Brown and his allies now have a very good excuse for butchering the expensive ‘nice-to-haves’ of the Auckland elite.
The gasping and pearl-clutching of the city’s art-lovers will be music to the ears of a militant old philistine like Brown. There may, however, be considerably more method to the Mayor’s cost-cutting madness than his left-wing critics will allow. Faced with the possibility (fast growing into the likelihood) that everything from the Auckland Art Gallery and Library, to the city-wide network of Citizens Advice Bureaux is in for a No 1 haircut, to whom are the Good and the Great most likely to turn? The Labour Government – that’s who.
Nothing would suit Brown better than that the elites start banging on the doors of Labour’s Auckland MPs demanding that central government come to the rescue of New Zealand’s largest city. It’s been a consistent theme of his mayoralty that Wellington pays altogether too little attention to the needs of Auckland. The CRL project is a case-in-point. Its stuttering progress and soaring cost notwithstanding, Finance Minister Grant Robertson insists that the original 50:50 financing deal remains in place.
Well then, perhaps the spectacle of Auckland’s cultural institutions being hacked to pieces, along with its social outreach programmes for Maori and Pasifika, will cause him to reconsider. After all, a political party that cannot hold its position in Auckland has no chance of retaining the Treasury Benches.
If Brown makes good use of his $5.2 million Leader’s Budget, then he can ensure that the blame for swingeing cut-backs and closures falls squarely on Labour’s shoulders. No Polyfest – exit the Pasifika vote. No Diwali – exit the Indian vote. No Lantern Festival – exit the Chinese vote. Not enough trains and buses – exit the working-class and student vote. Insufficient funding for the arts – exit the Remuera and Grey Lynn luvvies vote. Not exactly a difficult brief for the ace opinion-shapers at the Topham-Guerin agency!
The inconvenient truth that Labour and the Auckland left, in general, have yet to fathom is that Brown is unlikely to seek a second term. He sought the office because he’s one of those men who refuse to sit still when they discover that the institutions their businesses rely upon to work efficiently and effectively are chock-full of fuckwits. His mission is brutally simple: put enough stick about for three years to get Auckland working properly – and then leave. If that produces the side-effect of fatally disrupting Labour’s political client-base, then so much the better.
Labour’s problem is that it’s had it way too easy in the Auckland super-city from the get-go. Demographically, the enlarged city has always been a slam-dunk for a Labour candidate with an acceptable back-story and a half-way credible pitch. Len Brown, popular Mayor of Manukau, and Phil Goff, former cabinet minister, both filled the bill admirably (apart from Brown’s unfortunate trouser malfunctions). With the South and the West and a good half of the old Auckland City more-or-less welded-on, Labour could sneer at all but the most outstanding of the right’s mayoral candidates – and for 12 years the right has been embarrassingly light on outstanding candidates.
Had David Shearer been willing to fill Goff’s shoes, Labour would probably have continued on its winning ways. But, he wasn’t, and suddenly Labour, too, was light on credible and acceptable candidates. Efeso Collins had neither the machine nor the money to break out of his rather narrow political niche. More to the point, he was out of tune with the times. Jacinda Ardern had worn out the ‘kindness’ trope. Those still interested in voting (mostly old, mostly white) weren’t in the market for ‘kind’, they were in the market for ‘angry’. Wayne Brown read the preliminary polling data and said: “That’s me!”
And Auckland’s mayor had every reason to be angry with the opaque operations of his own city, as well as those of the local government sector generally. Councillors could push every one of the buttons on what they were told was the control panel – and nothing happened. What Brown had discovered over many years of working for the neoliberal machine is that those buttons weren’t connected to anything. Whoever ran things at the local level (and, for all he knew, at the national level) it certainly wasn’t the elected representatives of the people.
Small wonder that he targeted Local Government NZ for termination. This was, after all, the organisation that had pledged itself not to oppose the Three Waters project no matter how bad it was or how many of its local authority members opposed it. A pressure group that refuses to pressure the government of the day over a scheme that was threatening to expropriate its members’ assets without compensation – oh yeah, that’s worth $600,000 of the Auckland ratepayers’ money. Abso-bloody-lutely!
Auckland’s withdrawal from LGNZ is reminiscent of the Auckland University Students Association’s (AUSA) withdrawal from the New Zealand University Students Association (NZUSA) back in the 1990s. NZUSA, supposedly an organisation dedicated to advancing the interests of university students had, over a period of nearly 20 years, grown increasingly detached from the people it was established to represent. While students had been a radical force for change in the 1960s and 70s, the economic reforms of the 1980s and 90s left them dangerously out of sympathy with the mostly left-wing student politicians who took advantage of their respective associations’ politically-inert memberships to preserve NZUSA’s radical credentials long after they had ceased to have any real political reference points. Eventually, AUSA – the largest of the constituent associations called ‘time’ on NZUSA and withdrew. It’s funny how these little events turn out to be curious prefigurements of bigger things to come.
LGNZ – for many years an institution that faithfully reflected the conservative temper of its membership – has somehow contrived to transform itself into yet another biddable inmate of the woke Wellington zoo. The deal with Labour over Three Waters was only the most egregious example of LGNZ’s far-too-close alignment with the policies of the Ardern-led Labour Government. When your paid advocates start issuing political style-guides – setting out what is, and is not, an acceptable way of campaigning for public office – it’s time to go.
As Councillor Mike Lee remarked during the debate over Mayor Brown’s motion to withdraw: “LGNZ has become part of the elitist Wellington beltway and is not acting in the interests of Auckland.”
An opinion shared by half the Auckland Council and its mayor – and not just in relation to LGNZ.