Auckland mayor Wayne Brown went to a mayoral debate filled with reliable Wayne Brown voters, and proceeded to annoy as many of them as he could.
Wayne Brown kicked off the Grey Power North Shore mayoral debate with an ingratiating joke. “It’s good to be back again talking to a demographic in which I fit quite nicely,” he said, as he looked over the gold-card-toting crowd at the Barfoot & Thompson Netball Centre.
Auckland’s mayor spent the next 30 minutes pissing off as many of his peers as possible. When a woman stood up with a lengthy, slanted question on plans to build a wetland at Takapuna Golf Course to prevent future flooding in the Wairau Valley, his answer started prickly, and got more aggressive as the questioner tried to interrupt. “You went on and on and didn’t declare that you’ve obviously got some interest in this, so I will answer the question,” he shot back.
Earlier, Brown’s main rival Kerrin Leoni devoted a large part of her speaking time to trying to win over the ageing assembly. Though she wasn’t against housing intensification, she’d like to go away and research a “staged approach” to it. She would try to get rates increases down to 2.5% if she could find savings. She would actually turn up to mayoral debates, unlike the incumbent, who’s missed all but four.
Brown didn’t bother sucking up. He backed Golf Warehouse’s bid to redevelop Takapuna Golf Course with nine holes, and finished his answer mocking those who thought that insufficient. “For those few golfers who played 18 holes on the last course – go round twice,” he yelped.
Maybe the mayor was feeling bulletproof. Polls show him with a commanding election lead. Maybe he just didn’t care. When he wasn’t speaking, he spent a lot of time texting or staring slack-jawed into space, and at one point told everyone it was time to go home. Maybe he was just steamed after seeing his carpark outside the venue reserved with a pair of detested road cones.
Whatever it was, it made for a forthright Q&A. Though Brown couched his answers as simple common sense, they weren’t tailored to the occasionally grumbly and change-averse audience. Several could have come straight out of a pamphlet of progressive policy. The most compelling came in response to someone asking what he’d do about climate change. “OK, that’s a pretty good question,” he began, before reeling off a laundry list of ideas. He’d get freight out of trucks and into trains, electrify public transport, introduce congestion charging, build apartments close to trains, and ensure jobs were incorporated into new developments so residents didn’t have to commute. Most shockingly, in an aside likely to send a shiver down Simeon Brown’s spine, Brown said he’d keep building cycleways. “Only they’re going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than the ones that have been done in the past. We’ll carry on with those sorts of things because they’re good.”
Normally when candidates get asked that question, they make like Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon during the general election campaign, and talk about recycling, trees and electric cars. None of those things have anywhere near the impact of actually building apartments next to existing infrastructure, or getting people out of their cars and onto bikes, trains and buses.
Though road cone rage remains a distinct possibility, there’s another potential reason behind Brown’s bout of urbanism. He travelled to the venue with his planning committee chair, North Shore councillor Richard Hills. The pair are almost opposites. Brown’s famously old and crotchety; Hills is in his 30s and campaigns under the slogan “positive leadership for the Shore”.
Still, they’ve become close allies. Given the option of leaving the event after it switched over from its mayoral section to a council ward debate, Brown opted to stay to support “my mate Richard”. He spent the next 40 minutes muttering about the negativity of Hills’ council ward rival John Gillon, who complained about townhouses and at one point called the almost complete $5.5bn City Rail Link the “worst mistake the council has made from a North Shore perspective”.
After the event, Brown left pretty quickly, pausing only to take a few photos: one with Hills and his other preferred North Shore council candidate Danielle Grant, and another with Leoni’s road cone in front of his EV.
Hills hung around. When quizzed about where the mayor’s answers on climate change and the Takapuna Golf Course came from, he broke into a knowing smile. “Not bad eh,” he said. The mayor may have his gold card, but he’s open to new ideas, and this term, they haven’t always come from those you’d expect to be his natural allies. Just ask the stunned crowd from Grey Power.
