What is this strange feeling? Could it be hope? About Auckland?
Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung’s latest campaign meeting ended with the crowd yelling incoherently. They yelled at anyone who brought up Chung’s weird emails. They yelled at someone for wearing a mask. They yelled at a woman for asking how Chung would stop councillors yelling at each other.
“I’m not even sure I understand what I just witnessed,” wrote The Spinoff’s Joel MacManus after blinking slowly and backing out into the comparative safety of Courtenay Place. I do. It was classic council politics in action. Local government is almost perfectly calibrated to drive the people who care about it to the brink of their sanity, and into the roiling pool of despair beyond. Progressives are constantly frustrated by ancient villa-dwellers who protest at any hint of time progressing beyond the 1950s. Conservatives get rabies from even thinking about a bike lane. Elected officials are tasked with building expensive infrastructure and also not charging people any money ever. Achieving anything is an eternal battle, and the last time I spent any amount of time thinking about it I was reduced to gibbering nonsensically about how traffic is made of cars.
All this is to say, I’m confused, disoriented, and frankly a little frightened by a strange feeling I’m experiencing right now, which I think may be something approaching hope. On Tuesday last week, Auckland Council’s Waitematā Local Board endorsed a new design for the area outside the under-construction Karanga-a-Hape train station in the central city. Auckland Transport (AT) had reneged on many of its initial popular, pedestrian-friendly plans for the space, seemingly deciding that being able to drive to the doorstep of a small number of nearby buildings was more important than people exiting the new station not getting run over. The feedback was intense. Greater Auckland published an estimated 156 blogs protesting the move. Councillor Richard Hills took AT leadership and reporters on a tour of the area, where he pointed out that the agency’s new plans were, to paraphrase, “very dumbassed”.
At the board meeting, AT backtracked on many of its changes, reinstituting a cycleway on East Street, restoring pedestrian spaces, and committing to remove a random trench on Cross Street.
It doesn’t stop there. The intoxicating scent of moderately acceptable political compromise is wafting across the isthmus. Over in Takapuna, Auckland Council has released its design for a new wetland covering roughly a third of AF Thomas Park. Its proposal would mean, at the least, cutting the existing park tenant, Takapuna Golf Course, down from 18 holes to nine. Getting rid of a single golf course is the hardest task in local government, and has proved impossible for the council in the past. I expected howls of rage to echo across the North Shore and swirl on the winds to all corners of Auckland, including the mysterious bit in the east where no one ventures.
Instead the reaction has been muted. The news reports have been mostly dispassionate. The labrador who faces a lifetime of hoovering up duck droppings is now all but resigned to her fate.
Milford Residents’ Association spokesperson Debbie Dunstan told the Herald locals were keen on the project, mainly due to their preference for not having their homes destroyed in future floods. “We didn’t want any more delay. Our priority has always been people, homes and businesses. Anyone who’s seen the images of what happened in 2023 will know how large this problem is.”
Bigger changes are on the way. The City Rail Link will open next year, and the government has ordered Auckland Council to massively upzone the areas around its most-used train stations. Great North Road is getting an upgrade. The heritage gravel pit on Karangahape Road looks set to be redeveloped. The council may yet avoid sabotaging the rail upgrade it has spent billions on.
It could all go wrong. Auckland’s planners and councillors may uncover another loophole in the dark recesses of the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021 that allows them to scam their way out of allowing apartments to be built in Kingsland. Golfers might start burning effigies of Richard Hills on the Takapuna greens. More incoherent yelling in dimly lit halls could be on the horizon. But for now, a hazy vision of a slightly better city is swimming into focus, and if a few things break right, it could become reality. Let’s just hope a low-turnout, demographically skewed local election dominated by a misinformed rates debate isn’t coming up on October 11, 2025, because that could really put a spanner in the works.
