A Sorry State Of Affairs.

Apology Accepted? “I dropped the ball on Friday, I was too slow to be seen …The communications weren’t fast enough – including mine. I’m sorry for that.”– Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown.

HOW OFTEN do politicians apologise? Sincerely apologise? Not offer voters the weasel words: “If my actions have offended anyone, then I apologise.” That’s the apology politicians offer when they don’t believe they’ve done anything to apologise for. The question is: how often does a politician offer voters an apology like this?

I dropped the ball on Friday, I was too slow to be seen …The communications weren’t fast enough – including mine. I’m sorry for that.

The politician speaking those words is Wayne Brown, the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Justifiably criticised for his inadequate initial response to the torrential rainstorms that deluged his city on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 January 2023 (since described by meteorologists as a one-in-200-year weather event) Brown has publicly owned-up to his personal failings and said “I’m sorry.”

Not that Brown will receive the slightest positive acknowledgement from his many media critics for stepping-up and accepting his share of responsibility for the multiple failings of public agencies that occurred on the night of Auckland’s devastating rainstorm. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward: Brown is male. Brown is white. Brown is over the age of 65. Brown is also known to be openly contemptuous of journalists. And, most importantly, Brown defeated Efeso Collins, the mayoral candidate many (most?) Auckland journalists wanted to win.

Before examining Brown’s relationship with the news media in more depth, a word or two is needed concerning the shocking level of ageism to which he has been subjected from the very beginning of his campaign to become Auckland’s mayor.

It is remarkable how adept – and shameless – young and supposedly well-educated New Zealanders have proved to be at discriminating against their fellow citizens on the grounds of age. Journalists who would lavish barrels of ink on any person writing disparagingly about the personal appearance of a female politician, nevertheless feel free to dwell upon the ravages time has wrought upon the features of a “grumpy old man”.

That discrimination on the basis of age is outlawed in New Zealand cuts almost no ice with the sort of journalists who glibly describe Brown as “The Boomer King”. It is almost as if the journalists responsible for such ageist slurs are unable to recognise in themselves the same, deeply-ingrained, discriminatory impulses that they condemn so bitterly when manifested by racists, sexists and homophobes.

One can hardly avoid the conclusion that these ageists’ hatred for older human-beings is every bit as visceral as the racists’ hatred for people of colour, and the misogynists’ hatred of women. That they nevertheless feel free to express their prejudices openly is as worrying as it is shameful. Where is the Human Rights Commission when the “hate speech” it condemns so vigorously – and promptly – when directed at Māori, women, Muslims and the LGBTQI community is aimed, instead, at older New Zealanders?

The oddest thing of all about ageism is that every single person who indulges in it will one day (absent the worst sort of bad luck) grow old. How much racism would there be if every White person slowly became a Black person? How much misogyny, if every man turned gradually into a woman? When old age is humankind’s common destiny, ageism makes no sense at all.

The propensity of old age and guile to defeat youth and idealism, is also a common feature of human experience – especially in the field of politics. That Wayne Brown proved the accuracy of the aphorism, by soundly defeating his younger opponent, Efeso Collins, in the mayoralty race of 2022, did little to improve his already poor relationship with “progressive” Auckland journalists, many of them a whole generation younger than himself.

Jacinda Ardern’s “Politics of Kindness”, and her Government’s strong support for Māori and Pasifika, encouraged the Prime Minister’s generation to look forward to Collins becoming the Auckland super-city’s first Pasifika mayor. If Auckland voters had been willing to elect Labour-endorsed has-beens like Len Brown and Phil Goff, then surely, Efeso would be a shoe-in? That Aucklanders might elect a “grumpy old man” like Wayne Brown struck Ardern’s generation of activists as preposterous. They were confident that their assumptions about the nature of contemporary politics and the shape of Aotearoa’s political future were unassailable.

That Brown won the mayoral race easily – principally by applying basic electoral principles to the structuring of his campaign – threw into sharp relief the organisational deficiencies of a generation encouraged to accord bold declarations and positive intentions the same ontological status as actual achievements. As an engineer, Brown is only interested in what works. So instructed, his advisers told him to target only those Aucklanders with a proven track-record of participating in local government elections. These tended to be older, and considerably less tolerant of political dreams and visions, than the younger, typically non-voting, Aucklander.

As it became increasingly obvious that Brown’s pragmatic, non-ideological, “Mr Fix-It” pitch to the active Auckland electorate was going to overwhelm Collins, the active dislike of “progressives” – most particularly those located in the younger generations – grew. Among the least successful at hiding their animosity towards Brown were the city’s journalists – a failure that convinced the newly-elected Mayor that he would be better off not engaging with them.

Brown was right. The reaction of the New Zealand news media – especially those elements of it based in Auckland – was depressingly similar to the United States’ news media’s reaction to Donald Trump’s “impossible” presidential victory of 2016. Unable to accept that it was the political incompetence of “their” candidate that made a Trump victory possible, the American media instead abandoned completely its cherished principles of fairness and balance. Henceforth Trump was the enemy to whom no quarter should be given. Brown, who had also won on the votes of “deplorables” and, like Trump, held most journalists in contempt, would be treated as a reactionary interloper.

It should not be thought, however, that journalists were alone in their animosity towards Brown. Across the entire Auckland City bureaucracy similar misgivings were growing at the prospect of Mr Fix-It telling the Council’s highly-paid managers and professionals how to do their jobs. It would certainly explain why, when the deluge struck, and many of the Supercity’s bureaucrats failed to respond effectively to the emergency, their first instinct was to make the Mayor the scapegoat for what was clearly a system-wide failure. And why the first instinct of the city’s “progressive” journalists was to help them.

Hence Brown’s all-too-public frustration and anger at his inexplicable early exclusion from a number of crucial informational loops. That exclusion in no way excuses Brown’s failure to be seen and heard by Aucklanders as the floodwaters rose and the crisis deepened, but it most certainly does explain them.

And Brown, at least, has had the decency to say he’s sorry. It would be most unwise, however, to hold one’s breath in anticipation of Auckland’s anti-Brown journalists and bureaucrats doing the same.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 February 2023.