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I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel.
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel.

PoliticsNovember 10, 2022

A complete photographic history of Mayor Wayne Brown* meeting people 

I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel.
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel.

Who needs an interview when the pictures are this evocative?

Critics of Mayor Wayne Brown have chided an approach to sharing information with the people of Auckland that eschews interviews in favour of a stream of brusque press releases and imperious open letters. That charge is unfair. He also puts out photography.

And what photography it is. Though the images may not yet have achieved the hallowed status of the Kim Jong-il Looking at Things oeuvre, they undeniably freight an evocative, iridescent power, especially if you squint. Let the exhibition begin. 

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Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large

October 20: Mayor Wayne Brown meets Jacinda Ardern (triptych)

Twelve days after the election, Mayor Brown the Second welcomed the prime minister to his 27th floor office. In a trio of photographs befitting the most important elected representative in the country, and also Jacinda Ardern, a sense of order is evinced. The composition is immaculate. The flowers are in just the right place. The light sings. 

The prime minister is divulging significant matters of state. The harbour glistens in the distance. The future looks more fixable than ever, and that makes the mayor happy, though he’s poised to take the brace position, just in case. 

Above, the prime minister looks on admiringly as the mayor knocks out a sea shanty. The legs of song-loving staffers, both in sailors’ hats and whistling along, bracket the lower corners of the frame. 

If the images look professional it’s because they are. They come with a credit – Jay Farnworth for Auckland Council – and at considerable size: the largest is 6.5mb, sufficient resolution for Auckland’s famous Wayniacs to blow it up and beam it in the sky or print it on their duvet covers.

October 21: Mayor Wayne Brown meets Chlöe Swarbrick (diptych)

 Pray for Jay Farnworth. One day on and either the city outside has been engulfed in a solar flare or the photographer has been fired. The flowers are gone, leaving just the White Table in the foreground. The mayor stares, horrified, at the Auckland Central MP’s extra-terrestrial hand. A lonely foot watches on. 

Also this one. At 123kb, fans of file size will be interested to know that Wayne and Chlöe are roughly 50 times smaller than Wayne and Jacinda. 

October 21: Mayor Wayne Brown meets David Seymour

A big day for the Mayor Meets series. The mayor and the Act leader lend action to the image by holding aloft, respectively, some sheets of A4 and a cup of tea, which is just as well, in the absence of any other obvious signs of life. The white table inches closer towards the mayor and his guest, egged on by the lonely foot, and its unmistakable thirst for violence.

October 25: Mayor Wayne Brown meets elected Auckland members

A departure from the office series, but this official photograph, as supplied to media by the mayor’s team, demands inclusion. It coats your retina in sulfuric acid; it screams into the soul like a drowning cat. The mayoral address is so powerful that the green man in the emergency exit sign will, within a matter of seconds, have completely melted. 

October 26: Mayor Wayne Brown meets Nanaia Mahuta

That’s better. The angry white table is gone, having tendered its resignation after getting a letter from the mayor. The minister for local government loves the new shanty and she loves the socks. If you count the jug, the table now holds three waters. (You’re welcome.) Do the disembodied fingers and knee belong to the same body as the lonely foot? Who knows? Who cares? Nearly finished.

November 7: Mayor Wayne Brown meets Christopher Luxon

For 13 long, uneasy days, no photos came. Mayor Brown sat in his leather chair waiting day and night (9am-3pm, Monday to Friday) with nothing for company but a lonely, angry foot and the corpse of a photographer.  

Sweet relief! The leader of the National Party has paraglided through a 27th floor portal. The mayor is on his feet, suit jacket thrown off, the city restored through the window. The two men tell the story of the future: summery, beaming, ready, and doing all they can to disguise the fierce combat playing out in that handshake for the high-status grip.

* For the purposes of this survey, only photography of Wayne Brown meeting people in his capacity as Auckland mayor has been considered. The Spinoff accepts Wayne Brown may have been photographed meeting people during his time as mayor of the Far North.


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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

PoliticsNovember 9, 2022

Banks really don’t need a social licence to operate. Open banking could change that

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

The idea of open banking is back on the table in light of Westpac and ANZ’s multibillion dollar earnings announcements. If it actually happens, it would be the biggest change to our finance sector in decades, writes Duncan Greive.

The prime minister made her feelings perfectly clear. “We’ve seen them consistently taking record profits,” Jacinda Ardern said, in response to Westpac and ANZ’s multibillion dollar earnings announcements. When asked whether she thought there was something wrong with that occurring against the backdrop of a broader cost-of-living crisis, she replied unequivocally: “yes”. Central to all this was a question of her own. “Are they demonstrating social licence and commitment to the communities by taking the profits that they are?” 

It’s worth unpacking the concept of social licence here, along with a sense of why it’s hard to apply it to banking. It refers to the idea that while there are regulations which provide a legal framework governing how a business must operate in a country, there is in fact a broader dimension of public and political approval upon which that rests. 

The social licence concept was first coined in 1997, born in the mining industry, which was facing considerable pressure to reduce its negative environmental impacts. In this context it makes obvious sense: if mining in a nation or region becomes sufficiently unpopular, it becomes plausible that a government might curb or even ban it. New Zealand’s deep sea oil drilling ban can be seen as the loss of a social licence that ultimately led to the loss of the actual licence to drill more oil. 

Why banks don’t need a social licence

Here’s the thing, though: there is no social licence to operate a bank. You can ban mining, and switch to importing the commodity from elsewhere (whether that’s a net positive for the world is a different story). But our whole society is organised through our banking system as a facility for trading goods and services, and much as we might resent aspects of it, we also rely on it to prevent a swift descent into chaos. Put simply, if you wish to live in New Zealand, whether as a private citizen or multinational corporation, you have no choice but to use the banking system. 

(Incidentally, this is part of what’s driving the libertarian / utopian elements of the DeFi crowd in crypto – the allure of a new decentralised finance system, beyond the banks’ control. Given crypto’s disastrous year, let alone the past few hair-raising days, that still feels a long way off.)

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Currently one of the big advantages banks have is how hard it is to leave. All payments made from you are set up and would need to be cancelled and then revived, which is a hassle. Any payments made to you need to come smoothly across to a new account – which is both a hassle and of life-or-death importance. This is hard enough for an individual – for an institution it’s orders of magnitude harder. Perhaps this partly explains why the government doesn’t even use its own bank – it’s still with Westpac, even after 20 years of Kiwibank.

This gets at one of the biggest barriers to the social licence theory applying to banking. Not only is the system impossible to leave, and the big four players largely interchangeable, but moving is extremely difficult. So even if you were appalled by what was found in the Australian royal commission into banking, you have to be both very brave and extremely committed to change your bank.

The promise of open banking

So if not the ultimately futile attempt to cancel its social licence, what might provide meaningful change to our banking sector? Within hours of the prime minister’s comments, Newshub had a scoop which might point the way. 

It’s called open banking, and has become a global movement since originating in the UK and Europe. It plugs your data into APIs which are portable, and theoretically makes changing bank as simple as changing mobile phone provider, while allowing startups to innovate with new services built on top of the technology. The deregulation of telecommunications is essentially the model – true competition only really arrived with number portability and the creation of Chorus in the 00s. 

That meant you stopped leaving all your relationships and connections behind when you switched from Telecom to Vodafone, which also enabled the rise of 2Degrees. Now all our digital service providers persistently advertise different plans, competing on price and service – fostering innovation, allowing consumers to pick the brand which aligns with their values and needs, while also keeping profits in check. The likes of Kiwibank, which differentiates on values and ownership, has long believed it to be the only way the entrenched big four Australian-owned banks might be meaningfully disrupted.

Simplicity’s Sam Stubbs, one of the great disruptors of our age, has run the numbers, and thinks open banking would save New Zealanders around $2m a day. For scale, that’s twice what the Commerce Commission thinks supermarkets are taking in excess profits.

This isn’t just an interesting piece of esoteric international policy – Newshub says an announcement from the government is imminent. The crucial thing is actual legislation to force it through, because the idea has been in the air since National was in power. In fact, it’s almost exactly five years since then-commerce minister Kris Faafoi talked it up as a “massive opportunity”. Now Faafoi is a lobbyist and the big banks (who have a powerful incentive to retain the status quo) have made no tangible progress on bringing open banking to market voluntarily.

If the government is able to bend the banks to open up, it would be the biggest change to our finance sector in decades. And do much more for New Zealand’s bank customers than the vague threat of a loss of social licence ever could.

But wait there's more!