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Simeon Brown, Wayne Brown and their most hated objects in the whole world: speed bumps and road cones (Image: Tina Tiller)
Simeon Brown, Wayne Brown and their most hated objects in the whole world: speed bumps and road cones (Image: Tina Tiller)

PoliticsSeptember 4, 2024

Hate/Off: Simeon Brown vs Wayne Brown

Simeon Brown, Wayne Brown and their most hated objects in the whole world: speed bumps and road cones (Image: Tina Tiller)
Simeon Brown, Wayne Brown and their most hated objects in the whole world: speed bumps and road cones (Image: Tina Tiller)

The transport minister hates speed bumps. Auckland’s mayor hates road cones. But whose eternal flame of hate burns brightest? We looked at the facts.

For a man making an announcement about the future, Simeon Brown spent a lot of his press conference on the government’s transport priorities on Monday looking back. In a stinging rebuke of the Key administration, he criticised previous governments for funding “nice-to-have” walking and bike infrastructure, which only serve to unclog our roads, reduce emissions, and save pedestrians’ and cyclists’ similarly nice-to-have lives. Past efforts to set speed limits at survivable levels were also vexing, as was the construction of several in-lane bus stops. 

But nothing riled the transport minister like the small strips of raised concrete that dot some of our more dangerous roads: speed bumps. His press release dripped with venom over the hated humps. The country, he said, had become “infested” with them. Brown only reduced funding for cycling from a whopping 4.1% of the transport budget to 1.4%, which could save enough money to build up to 17cm of the East-West Link. He promised nothing would go toward speed bumps. Not one blue cent.

In fostering a deep-seated hatred for an inanimate object, Brown has a lot in common with another politician, Wayne Brown (no relation). Auckland’s mayor harbours a similar resentment to the transport minister, only the target of his ire is brighter and more conical. He sees road cones wherever he goes, and he seethes. He complains to AT’s chief executive. He complains to the Herald. He threatens to go feral.

There’s no question about the sincerity of either man’s distaste. But whose furnace of anger burns most strongly? We fed the evidence into The Spinoff’s in-house hate matrix to find out.

Hate matrix quadrant #1: Spiritual agony

Both Browns are tortured by their inert, lifeless enemies on an existential level. Wayne Brown has devoted large amounts of time and social media bandwidth to barracking about cones. He’s commanded the council’s comms staff to call out “road cone mania” and commissioned reports into cone overuse. But when no cones are in sight, he appears to loosen up. He surfs. He cheers on the Warriors. He has a slice of birthday cake and tells his staff to go back to work.

The transport minister’s pain appears to linger. His language is foreboding. The bumps aren’t just annoying; they’re a plague. Even in an ostensibly fun video about how he does have a driver’s licence, he can’t help barking about how he’ll raise the speed limit on Pakuranga Rd

Edge: Simeon Brown

Hate matrix quadrant #2: Obsession 

Though he’s clearly haunted by bumps, Simeon Brown has other concerns. Labour. Cyclists. People who say he doesn’t have a driver’s licence. His mayoral counterpart is more single-minded, texting 12 individual road cone complaints to AT’s chief executive in six months. “WTF is this? Dugan St west, Wayne,” he texted, along with a picture of some cones, after attending a meeting at council last September. “T8 traffic management on Queen St, Victoria St is rude, slow and excessive and everything that is wrong with this city,” he wrote last June. The texts are revealing as an unfiltered glimpse into the mayor’s personal angst. He’s not waging a culture war or performing for the media. He’s genuinely passionate about the cone-killing cause.

Edge: Wayne Brown

Hate matrix quadrant #3: Anger 

Wayne Brown may talk tough about plagues and mania, but there’s a note of fun to his campaign. He’s hamming it up, revelling in his role as the cone grinch.

Simeon Brown’s rage seems to come from a darker reservoir. It’s less loud, but more violent. Multiple candid pictures show him standing arms crossed on the side of the road near Howick, alternately glowering at a slightly reduced speed limit or the unrealised possibility of a bump.

Edge: Simeon Brown

Hate matrix quadrant #4: Direct action

Simeon Brown has wielded the cold sword of budgetary allocation against his inexpensive concrete enemy, guaranteeing no central government money will go toward speed bumps. That’s a significant blow not just to the bumps themselves, but also to the bodies of the pedestrians who will now be struck at speeds of at least 50km/h, inflicting almost certain death.

Still, the transport minister has never actually pulled a Lisa Prager and taken an axe* to a speed hump. He’s never driven a digger over a block of raised asphalt. The mayor, on the other hand, has waged literal physical violence against cones, ploughing them down in a bus, and in one widely viewed social media video, dumping several of them straight into a Green Gorilla skip.  

The hate matrix spits out a draw at two apiece. Perhaps that’s right. Brown and Brown are two sides of the same coin. Yin and yang. Rubber and tarmac. The objects of their wrath seem different but in reality they’re the same: a shared hatred of having to slow down. 

Life for the Browns should be an open highway stretching to the horizon. Nothing should be in the way. Not cones. Not bumps. Not potholes. Certainly not road workers, cyclists, pedestrians, or schoolchildren. Lately it seems we’ve become too concerned with stuff like whether people can do things like “get through a shift without being run over by a Ford Ranger” or “survive a short walk across the road”. Those days are over. It’s time to put the pedal to the floor and drive. 

Keep going!
Image: The Spinoff
Image: The Spinoff

ĀteaSeptember 4, 2024

‘Undoing years of progress’: How the Treaty Principles Bill breaches te Tiriti

Image: The Spinoff
Image: The Spinoff

In the third of a three-part series on Ngā Mātāpono, the Waitangi Tribunal’s report on the proposed Treaty Principles Bill and Treaty provisions review, Luke Fitzmaurice Brown explains what the tribunal says about specific breaches of the Treaty/te Tiriti, and the damage those breaches will cause.

Read the first part of the series here and the second part here

The tribunal begins this section of its report by summarising what the Treaty Principles Bill represents, stating that “the Crown has agreed to a proposal that will unilaterally redefine the manner in which the constitutional status of the Treaty/te Tiriti is applied in law, and it does so in favour of a distortion of the Treaty/te Tiriti and its two texts.” It describes this as a breach of the principles of kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga, representing “an unbridled exercise of kāwanatanga power”.

The failure to consult with Māori, the failure to take advice and the determination to pursue the bill in spite of the harms it will cause constitutes “a breach of the duty to act reasonably and in good faith, and the duty to make informed decisions”, says the tribunal. The reliance on misrepresentations of the te reo text of te Tiriti, and the reliance on the myth that the current Treaty principles lack clarity, are also heavily criticised. 

Echoing the earlier comments about an unbridled exercise of power, the tribunal says the Treaty Principles Bill “would unsettle the constitutional dynamic between the Crown and Māori – between kāwanatanga and tino rangatiratanga – by unilaterally asserting the Crown’s dominance and undermining the guarantee of tino rangatiratanga”.

The tribunal also finds that this breaches the principle of partnership, and the extinguishment of the Crown’s current Treaty obligations constitutes a breach of the principle of active protection. It describes breaches of the principles of good government, and points out that under the “new” principles, Māori would no longer have access to the courts and the Waitangi Tribunal for breaches of their rights under te Tiriti (ie, their actual rights, not the fictional ones the bill would provide for), in violation of the principles of redress and equity.

‘Revolutionary constitutional change’

Reiterating its view on the damage the Treaty Principles Bill is already causing, the tribunal restates that even if the bill were only supported to select committee, “the Māori-Crown relationship will be damaged, possibly undoing years of progress in restoring the relationship through Treaty settlements and other measures”. Again, this bears repeating, given that “only as far as select committee” has been the most common refrain of the prime minister in “defence” of the bill so far. Warning of the dire consequences that may occur if the bill is taken beyond the select committee stage, the tribunal predicts that “if it is enacted, a revolutionary constitutional change will be the result”.

As for the legal impacts of the bill, the tribunal says it “would remove Crown obligations under the existing Treaty principles, and remove Treaty/te Tiriti guarantees, rights, and protections for Māori at law, replacing them with statements about the rights of the Crown and all New Zealanders”. The government’s actions to date “have made the claimants feel like second-class citizens in their own country”, it adds.

On the breadth of the damage legally, the tribunal notes that “the bill will completely change the meaning and effect of every Treaty clause in legislation… in a manner that is highly prejudicial to all Māori”. This would create uncertainty in the law, lead to enormous costs in terms of litigation, and entail a complete reshaping of the constitutional foundations of this country. As noted earlier, it would also undermine the Treaty settlement process, given that the basis of Treaty settlements has been Crown apologies based on the established Treaty principles. 

So what happens next? 

The tribunal makes four overarching recommendations, the most relevant of which for the purpose of the Treaty Principles Bill is that the proposal be abandoned entirely. The tribunal is unequivocal about this, unsurprisingly given how comprehensively it dismisses the government’s stated rationales for the bill. It also recommends that the planned review of Treaty principles in legislation (which this article has focused less on, but which has the potential to be just as damaging as the Treaty Principles Bill), be put on hold and reconceptualised, in partnership with Māori. It suggests the Māori-Crown Relations Cabinet Committee be reformed, and that the government begin a process (again, in partnership with Māori) “to undo the damage to the Māori-Crown relationship and restore confidence in the honour of the Crown”.

Good luck with that last one. So far, the prime minister seems intent on making things worse, with his repeat of the claim recently that Māori ceded sovereignty to the Crown doing further damage to a relationship under more strain than it has been since the Foreshore and Seabed debate of 2004. On that note, further Waitangi Tribunal hearings got under way last week on the government’s proposed changes to the Marine and Coastal Area Act, which would severely restrict the ability for Māori to be awarded customary title over the foreshore and seabed. Nine months into the parliamentary term, the government’s relentless assault on Te Tiriti o Waitangi shows no sign yet of abating. 

Returning to the Treaty Principles Bill, it has been reported that Cabinet may consider the draft bill as early as next week. In doing so, will Cabinet take heed of the tribunal’s warning about the damage that may be done should the bill be introduced? So far, sadly, that appears unlikely, but either way we should hear more soon. We await the government’s next steps.

But wait there's more!