Reinvent Auckland, Simon? If Only We Could!

A Safe Pair Of Hands: The whole point of the neoliberal Auckland supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

SIMON WILSON is an odd fellow – with some odd opinions. Here, for example, is the Metro Editor-at-Large's opinion on the general public response to the National Government’s forced amalgamation of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities. “Aucklanders were cynical about everything before he [Len Brown] and the supercity came along in 2010. But we lost that cynicism and we set about reinventing the city.”

 

I would be most annoyed if I thought Simon was including me in that “we”. Long before the legislation setting up the supercity came into force the level of my cynicism was already off the scale.

 

Everything about the supercity’s establishment: from the man chosen to oversee the process (the Act Party leader, Rodney Hide) to the deliberate exclusion of the people of the Auckland region from any meaningful say in whether or not the merger of their four cities should finally proceed; highlighted the profoundly anti-democratic spirit in which the entire process was conceived.

 

The reason for this hostility to democracy wasn’t difficult to discern. Far from being a bottom-up exercise: driven by angry residents’ from across the Auckland region; the supercity was a top-down exercise: the joint creation of local and national elites. Their common purpose? To create a model for local government in the neoliberal era. And the central feature of that model? The almost total disempowerment of the citizens of Auckland and their elected representatives.

 

The full measure of the supercity’s creators’ contempt for democracy was revealed in the proposed size of the supercity’s “Governing Body”. In the equivalent decision-making structures of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities, the ratio of elected representatives to citizens was roughly 1:15,000. In the new supercity it would be 1:70,000! Supercity councillors were being asked to represent more citizens than a directly elected Member of Parliament.

 

My own level of cynicism (and, I suspect, the cynicism of thousands of other Aucklanders) was in no way lessened by the Ports of Auckland dispute. It was during this brutal test of strength between the supposedly municipally-owned Port and its employees that Aucklanders learned just how misnamed their “Council Controlled Organisations” (CCOs) truly were.

 

Aucklanders elected representatives turned out to be equally mischaracterised. Far from being the people’s democratic tribunes, Auckland’s elected councillors proved to be little more than powerless pawns. The real game was controlled by legally cocooned CCO boards of directors – over whom the so-called “Governing Body” (including the Mayor) exercised no effective control whatsoever.

 

Indeed, so politically impotent was the Mayor made to feel in relation to the day-to-day management of National’s neoliberal supercity, that the poor fellow felt obliged to demonstrate his potency “by other means”. A better symbol of Auckland’s vast democratic deficit than Len’s and Bevan’s affair is difficult to imagine. Turned out the Mayor’s Office was good for very little else!

 

Even Brown’s signal achievement: the National Government’s final approval of his beloved City Rail Link; owes as much to the projected massive inflation of property values along its inner-city route, as it does to any rational realignment of Auckland’s public transport system.

 

In his latest Metro article, Simon Wilson opines that the job facing the next Mayor of Auckland is “not simply to produce incremental improvements with greater efficiency and better relations with the government in Wellington. Auckland has fallen into crisis. Growth has far outstripped expectations. Housing policies have had a catastrophic outcome. A big vision is required, all over again, and bold execution has to follow.”

 

Except, of course, the whole point of the neoliberal supercity is to ensure that “big visions” and “bold execution” in the pursuit of anything other than neoliberal objectives is rendered impossible. (That the Unitary Plan was so heavily promoted by the National Government and the Auckland City bureaucracy, both of whom threatened dire consequences should the councillors fail to approve it, tells us all we need to know about the document’s ideological complexion!) As a tried and tested neoliberal himself, Phil Goff gets this. Producing “incremental improvements with greater efficiency” constitutes the outer limits of his political imagination. It’s what makes him the perfect candidate.

 

Poor Simon. He seems to have been both surprised and distressed to learn that in a Citizen Insights Monitor survey released by the Auckland Council in June 2016, “just 15 per cent of us said we were satisfied with the council’s performance. Only 17 per cent of us said we trust it. This is disgraceful.”

 

Really, Simon? Disgraceful? Frankly, I’m astounded as many as 17 percent of Aucklanders place any trust at all in National’s neoliberal supercity. I do, however, understand completely why 83 percent of us find little, if anything, to like about the “governance” of the unresponsive bureaucratic monstrosity into whose tender care we were delivered without so much as a confirming referendum.

 

Nor am I surprised that only 35 percent of eligible voters bothered to return their ballots in 2013. Not when the people elected by those ballots are so bereft of power that – even if they wanted to – it wouldn’t be “within the purview of their lawful governance function” to make the trains run on time.

 

In terms of empowering the people who live within its boundaries, there’s nothing I’d rather do, Simon, than “reinvent” the Auckland supercity. It’s why I’m voting for Chloe Swarbrick. Not because she stands the slightest chance of winning, but because, alone of all the Mayoral candidates, she demonstrates some understanding of just how much we have lost.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 September 2016.

Laughing-Stock City?

Testing Times: Auckland's Mayor, Len Brown, not only faces the certainty of being formally censured by his Council, but will also have to contend with a concerted effort by councillors to pare down the considerable executive powers granted to the "super-city's" leader by its principal political architect, the then Local Government Minister, Rodney Hide.

 

IS AUCKLAND about to join Toronto? A city with a mayor some would dearly like to be rid of but cannot sack?

 

Auckland’s Len Brown may not have smoked crack cocaine or clean-bowled an elderly councillor in the council chamber, like the rampaging Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, but he is fast engendering a very similar sort of cringe factor.

 

Like Toronto, Auckland is its country’s commercial heart. Politically, it plays a similarly pivotal role. Who leads a city like Toronto or Auckland matters. Getting stuck with a laughing-stock mayor would be but a short step away from becoming a laughing-stock city.

 

That Auckland could finds itself contemplating that possibility is due to a peculiar constitutional anomaly.

 

At the national and regional levels of government in New Zealand our leaders are chosen from representatives elected by the people. The prime minister serves at the pleasure of a parliamentary majority. Regional chairs are similarly answerable to a majority of their fellow councillors.

 

 At the level of our districts, towns and cities, however, the position of mayor is filled by direct election. It is a very curious constitutional arrangement, because, with the exception of Auckland City, the people elected to lead our local bodies are vested with no special executive powers, do not control their council’s budget and may not even enjoy the support of a majority of their fellow councillors.

 

Quite how New Zealand ended up with these popularly elected but essentially powerless mayors is a bit of a mystery. We certainly didn’t inherit the practice from our colonial forebears. In the United Kingdom – and Australia – the mayoral chain goes around the neck of the council’s majority leader (or his or her nominee).

 

Certainly, the British and Australian practice makes for a much more powerful and coherent style of local government. Mayors chosen in this fashion know, from the very beginning of their terms, that the numbers are there around the council table to carry forward the plans they announced during their election campaigns. Majority support also protects them from having the council’s budget wrested from their control.

 

Most importantly, if they suddenly start behaving bizarrely – like smoking crack cocaine – or embark on an orgy of unauthorised spending, then their fellow councillors can simply bust them back to the ranks and elect a new mayor.

 

The new Auckland “super city” was intended to be something else entirely. Its principal political architect, former local government minister Rodney Hide, wanted a city that could get things done swiftly and efficiently. That ruled out the parliamentary model of the UK and Australia which, being dominated by local political parties, was prone to pork-barrelling and horse-trading. Not being a conspicuous fan of either pork-barrelling or horse-trading, Hide opted instead for a lean, mean governance machine presided over by a mayor equipped with unprecedented executive powers.

 

No doubt the sort of figure Hide had in mind as the first mayor of his new super-city was a charismatic business tycoon; someone who could transform the Office of the Mayor into the workplace of a tough-minded, no-nonsense political CEO.

 

But that was not what he got.

 

Auckland’s first “super mayor” turned out to be a rather daffy family lawyer from South Auckland. A great emoter and prone to random outbursts of song, Mayor Len Brown did not, in my view, appear to be either tough-minded or no-nonsense. He was, however, possessed of a keen legal mind and very quickly appreciated the possibilities inherent in the “executive mayoralty” Hide had bequeathed him.

 

Using the super mayor’s budgetary independence and patronage powers, Brown very rapidly constructed what I believe was a well-nigh impregnable political position within the governance structures of Auckland City. So much so that he could, without the slightest trace of irony, instruct his councillors to “leave their politics at the [council chamber] door”.

 

One of the greatest dangers confronting politicians who, like Brown, have been successful in protecting themselves from just about every kind of political attack, is to mistake impregnability for invulnerability. Those who believe themselves safe from their enemies’ attacks are all-too-often un-done by their own personal weaknesses.

 

So it proved with Toronto’s Rob Ford, and, in a very different way, I believe Auckland’s Len Brown has suffered the same fate.

 

In both cases, it is their council and their city that is being forced to pay the price.

 

So eager was Hide to set up his new and streamlined governance structure for the super-sized Auckland City that he neglected to include in its constitutional design any mechanisms for bringing a wayward super mayor to heel.

 

Even the president of the United States is subject to impeachment. But, short of being convicted of a serious crime, adjudged a bankrupt or declared insane, the mayors of Toronto and Auckland are effectively unsackable.

 

A bad mayor could, potentially, do a lot of damage in three years. The people of Toronto and Auckland deserve better mechanisms for keeping their elected Mayors on the straight and narrow.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 17 December 2013.

Low Turnout Won’t Be Fixed By “Online Voting”

Hackers To The Rescue? Professor J. Alex Halderman (second from right) and his merry band of hackers showed just how vulnerable online voting is to outside interference. According to Halderman, "it’s going to be decades, if ever, before we’re able to vote online securely".

 

THE JUNIOR WOODCHUCKS GUIDEBOOK was one of the comic-book artist’s, Carl Barks’, most prescient gags. Whenever the hapless Donald Duck’s adventures with his three nephews and his squillionaire Uncle Scrooge went awry, it was to this extraordinarily handy little book that Huey, Dewey and Louie – Woodchucks all – invariably turned. You’ve fallen from a plane without a parachute? Need a quick course in basic Lizard? Want to know how to lull a dragon to sleep? Then - quick! Consult The Junior Woodchuck Guidebook!

 

For those of you wondering what a Junior Woodchuck might be: they are Carl Barks’ gentle send-up of the American scouting movement. What makes the master comic-book storyteller’s creation of The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook so prescient, however, is that in 2013, nearly 60 years after its first appearance in 1954, practically everyone carries the equivalent of the Woodchucks’ Guidebook in their pocket.

 

Our smartphones, with their connection to the Internet and its vast, inexhaustible search-engines, can now transform us, just about instantly, into experts on just about everything. Who needs The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook when they’ve got “Google”?

 

This increasing reliance on the Internet and its wonders is worrying. Carl Barks may have relied upon The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook to get himself and his cartoon creations out of innumerable tight spots, but we would be extremely unwise to do the same.

 

Writers, dramatists and comic-book storytellers are allowed to bring in a deus ex machina to keep the narrative moving along, but politicians and administrators have no such licence. Though we might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, the conduct of democratic elections is not the stuff of comic-books or classical Greek tragedies.

 

And yet we are subjected to constant claims from politicians, challenged to “do something” about the declining participation-rate in national and local government elections, that the solution lies “online”.

 

This is what the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city, Len Brown, told reporters on Saturday after being re-elected by barley a third of Auckland’s eligible voters:

 

“We will do online voting next time, there is no doubt about that. I think that maybe postal voting has had its day. People really don’t do much in the way of sending mail anymore.”

 

Not a good idea, Len, as a moment’s consultation of your electronic Junior Woodchucks Guide would have told you.

 

According to the Professor of Computer Science specialising in cyber-security at the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman, putting the electoral process online would be extremely risky:

 

“In order to vote online safely, we’re going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in computer security. How do you secure servers against remote attackers? How do you secure people’s home computers against spyware? How do you prevent people from being tricked into visiting the wrong website and giving away their passwords? All of these things are subjects of active research, but it’s probably going to be many, many years until we solve them. That’s why I think it’s going to be decades, if ever, before we’re able to vote online securely.”

 

And Professor Halderman knows what he’s talking about, because three years ago he and three of his top computer science graduates successfully (and perfectly legally) hacked into an online election pilot set up by the District of Columbia’s Board of Education.

 

The Board, supremely confident that their online voting system was secure, cockily challenged anyone who thought they could hack into their software to go ahead and give it a try. Professor Halderman’s team more than rose to the challenge. Not only did they successfully hack the Board’s system, but they also made sure that the test election was “won” by “writing in” the fictional robot anti-hero, Bender, from Fox-TV’s animated sci-fi series Futurama. (The runners-up were HAL from 2001 – A Space Odyssey and the Master Control Programme from Tron.)

 

Those wishing to learn more about Professor Halderman’s slam-dunk demonstration of the dangers of online voting should watch the YouTube video – just search “Hacking the Washington DC Internet voting system”. I would heartily recommend that Mayor Len Brown treat himself to repeated viewings.

 

And before all the computer geeks out there respond with the example of Estonia: permit me to point out that the Estonian on-line voting system relies upon the fact that every Estonian citizen is required to carry an identity card bearing a unique identity number. Personally, I’m not so sure that New Zealanders are ready for mandatory identification cards. Not after all that passionate debate over the GCSB surveillance legislation. But, I could be wrong.

 

The other problem with Estonia is this: if the Estonian government decided to elect its own “Bender” – who would know?

 

Online voting, warns Professor Halderman, is no different from any other system reliant upon computer software. (Novopay? WINZ? ACC?) “Small mistakes” can lead to “huge problems.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 October 2013.

The Duty Of Care

The Good Samaritan: When someone is being attacked, or is in need of our help, we all have a duty of care to those afflicted. Whether it's on the road to Jericho or down on the Auckland waterfront, we are never justified in passing by on the other side.

YOUR BEST MATES are being attacked by a gang of thugs – what do you do? Most of us wouldn’t need to think twice. We’d pile on in, fists swinging, to back them up. It’s the most human of responses: defend your friends and protect your loved ones from harm.

What sort of legal system would expressly forbid people from standing up for their mates? What sort of law-maker would try to stop us helping our fellow citizens?

Nobody would do that – right? I mean you hear about cases of mothers being charged with failing to provide their children with “the necessities of life”; or for failing in their “duty of care”. Because that’s a universal duty – isn’t it? To care for each other?

Well, no. It isn’t. Not when it comes to people being attacked by their employers. Not when a Board of Directors is beating up their own staff; stripping them of their livelihoods; impoverishing their families.

If you see that happening, and you try to do something about it, you’ll end up in court.

New Zealand prides itself on being a good international citizen, but when it comes to the rights of working people we are seriously delinquent.

Convention No. 87, Article 8, of the International Labour Organisation (of which New Zealand is a member) clearly states that:

1. In exercising the rights provided for in this Convention workers and employers and their respective organisations, like other persons or organised collectivities, shall respect the law of the land.

2. The law of the land shall not be such as to impair, nor shall it be so applied as to impair, the guarantees provided for in this Convention.

The guarantee provided for is, of course, the right to organise with the intention of  furthering and defending the interests of workers.

How, then, are we to account for Section 86 of New Zealand’s Employment Relations Act (2000) which states:

Participation in a strike or lockout is unlawful if the strike or lockout relates to … a dispute.

It is this section of the Act which prevents workers from taking action to protect and defend other workers – by means of “secondary picketing” and “sympathy strikes”. We have seen this section of the Act in operation at the ports of Tauranga, Wellington and Lyttelton, where workers attempted to prevent the unloading of ships serviced by non-union labour at the Port of Auckland. These men were subsequently forced by the Courts to do violence to their own consciences, and the interests of fellow union members, by obeying their employers’ “lawful” orders to unload the ship.

Interestingly, this is not something we ask citizens to do when their country goes to war. If a person can demonstrate a genuine “conscientious objection” to bearing arms he or she is excused from active service. Strange, then, that when ordered to do something that he or she knows is bound to hurt a fellow worker, citizens are afforded no such opportunity to conscientiously object. On pain of losing their jobs, paying a fine, or even being sent to prison, working people are obliged to put the boot into other working people.

Which brings us back to our earlier question: What sort of legal system, what sort of legislator, requires people to behave in this way? The answer, of course, is a legal system and legislators dedicated to facilitating the accumulation of private wealth. It is Capitalism which tells us that we cannot go to the aid of our mates; and that, when ordered to do so, we must put the boot into our comrades.

Is such a system morally acceptable? I would argue that it is not. Any more than the old “Jim Crow” system which (quite legally) denied African-Americans their basic human rights was acceptable. The laws that kept white Southerners in a position of social and economic dominance were fundamentally immoral, and they were laid low by the direct action of ordinary people who simply refused to obey statutes deliberately framed to oppress them.

It has long been understood by students of democratic theory that the citizen is not obliged to co-operate in his or her own oppression. As Thomas Jefferson put it in the American Declaration of Independence:

[W]hen a long train of [government] abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

The train of abuses of New Zealand’s working people has indeed be a long one, and perhaps its most depressing aspect is that when the party ostensibly dedicated to the rights of “labour” had the opportunity, it did not abolish the legal prohibition against sympathy strikes. Through nine long years in government, the New Zealand Labour Party declined to allow even its own voters to come to the aid of their mates.

Even now, in 2012, Labour’s new leader, David Shearer, declares his anxiety not to “take sides” in the Ports of Auckland dispute – not even as members of MUNZ, a trade union affiliated to his own party, are being stripped of their livelihoods. And, in spite of the fact that ILO Convention No. 154 stipulates that:

In order to secure the greatest social advantage of new methods of cargo handling, it shall be national policy to encourage co-operation between employers or their organisations, on the one hand, and workers’ organisations, on the other hand, in improving the efficiency of work in ports, with the participation, as appropriate, of the competent authorities.

Auckland’s Labour Mayor has very publicly elected to “pass by on the other side”.

For the sake of our mates, and our own consciences, the sooner we provide “new guards” for their “future security” the better.

How else can we honour our duty of care?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

For the Love of the People

More than a rhetorical flourish: Harry Holland, the left-wing journalist who led the NZ Labour Party from 1919 until his death in 1933, demonstrated what "for the love of the people" meant to the first generation of Labour leaders by giving away much of his meagre parliamentary salary to his poverty-stricken constituents.

"FOR THE LOVE of the People." Who says that sort of thing anymore? Surely not a politician!

Though some might object to including the words "Len Brown" and "politician" in the same sentence, it was indeed the Mayor of Manukau City, and front-runner in the race for the new Auckland "supercity" mayoralty, who declared his love for the voters.

Responding to criticism that he had misused his mayoral credit card, Brown asked a special meeting of the Manukau City Council:

"Do you think I got off that bloody bed and came back here because I was worried I could spend some more money on the credit card?

"You know why I came back here. You saw me when I walked back into this place, I was a bloody skeleton. I came back here for the love of the people and you know that’s damn right."

Brown’s near-death experience following a massive heart attack, his determined recuperation, and his triumphant return to office, are all key elements of his personal political narrative. And according to his friend, the popular broadcaster and talk-back host, Willie Jackson, the people of South Auckland reciprocate Brown’s love, and admire his gritty dedication to their service.

"Len Brown is an honest man," Jackson told TV3’s Campbell Live, "people know that."

A clear majority of Manukau’s city councillors agreed. After four hours of what the NZ Herald described as "testy" debate, and a powerfully emotional appeal from Brown, his apology for misusing the credit card was accepted and all the relevant documentation (or lack of it) passed on – at Brown’s insistence – to the office of the Auditor-General for final judgement.

"If I survive this savaging, and end up in another mayoral chair," Brown reassured the meeting, "I can assure you I have learned from this experience."

There is something endearingly goofy and sentimental about Brown that makes all his talk about getting into politics "for the love of the people" and of having "learned his lesson" entirely believable. Careless to a fault he may have been, but only his most venomous political opponents are willing to argue that his actions were inspired by simple venality.

Was there poor judgement? Yes. Was there an excess of naïve enthusiasm and insufficient attention to detail? Absolutely. But, now that he’s been called to such public account, few are willing to predict that Brown will make the same mistakes twice.

The same almost certainly applies to past, present and future ministers of the Crown. Like Brown, cabinet ministers from the Clark era – and even a few from the present government – have been forced to suffer the ignominy of having their errors of judgement exposed and held up to public scrutiny.

Some, like the former Building & Construction Minister, Shane Jones, have accepted the resulting public opprobrium with disarming frankness and humility. Others, like the former Conservation Minister, Chris Carter, have recklessly challenged the public’s judgement with, in Carter’s case, entirely predictable and disastrous consequences – as far as his political future is concerned.

But none of the politicians who’ve been subjected to the disinfecting sunlight of public exposure over the past fortnight have responded with words even remotely akin to Brown’s "for the love of the people". And very few, if any, voters would have believed them if they had.

It was not always so.

As Dr Bryce Edwards, of the University of Otago’s Political Studies Department, pointed out on his "Liberation" blogsite on 11 June, Labour’s first prime minister, Michael Joseph Savage, was extraordinarily sensitive to the expectations of the working-class voters who had carried his Labour Party to victory.

"Being a representative of workers to him meant that he shouldn’t just take on the material comforts of the ruling class once he was elected to represent those workers. The extravagance and luxuries of office were to him associated with the interests of right-wing politicians. Hence he refused to live in Premier House on Tinakori Road, near Parliament."

According to Edwards, Savage regarded such a "mansion" as "inappropriate for any politician, let alone one representing the proletariat". Instead, he purchased a modest bungalow in the Wellington suburb of Northland.

Premier House itself was converted into a large dental clinic as part of the Labour Government’s public health programme. (Helen Clark’s aunt later trained there.)

It required the election of a very different kind of Labour Government in the 1980s before the prime-ministerial residence was finally restored to its former opulence – at a cost to the taxpayer of $1.8 million.

And Savage was by no means the only Labour hero to abjure all the trappings and perquisites of office. His predecessor as party leader, Harry Holland, gave away a large portion of his meagre parliamentary salary to needy constituents. "For the love of the people" was more than a mere rhetorical flourish in the 1920s and 30s.

It is, perhaps, no accident that the first Labour Prime Minister to occupy Premier House was Sir Geoffrey Palmer – the politician largely responsible for modernising and professionalising what had formerly been the vocation of politics. When Palmer got through with it, the role of the people’s representative had become indistinguishable from that of any other highly-paid civil servant. Small wonder that talk-back hosts began referring to MPs as "our employees in Wellington".

Except, of course, they’re not our employees, they’re our representatives: a very important difference. Ideally, the bond between Members of Parliament and their constituents should go much deeper, and be infinitely stronger, than the relationship between a master and his servants.

Besides, if we, the people, are sufficiently competent to look upon parliamentarians as mere employees, it raises the question of why bother with them at all? Why not heed the urgings of the anarchists and libertarians and do away with the state and its minions altogether? Why not cut out the middlemen and rule ourselves?

We all know the answer to that.

In the end, only the rich and powerful possess the effrontery to treat politicians as their hirelings, and wherever that occurs the rights and needs of the poor and the weak must inevitably suffer.

We value democracy so highly because it is the only system that allows men and women to serve not merely for the love of money, but also – if we’re lucky – "for the love of the people".

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 24 June 2010.

Brown & Dirty

Not waving, but drowning? With John Banks lagging well behind Len Brown, the Left’s candidate for the Auckland Super-City mayoralty (above), the Auckland Right has only one viable strategy for victory: Get Len Brown! Go negative!

THE AUCKLAND ‘SUPER-CITY’ is a prize worth fighting for. It is also, as the strategic exposure of Mayoral front-runner, Len Brown’s, personal spending problems confirms, a prize worth fighting dirty for. The next five months will reveal exactly how dirty.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The story of Auckland’s unification was supposed to end with the triumphant coronation of the region’s commercial, administrative and political elites. The people who knew what needed to be done, and the people who knew how to do it, were about to take their rightful places around the Super-City’s council table.

The age of puffed-up mayoral popinjays, ponderous city councillors, and tiresome community-board busybodies was over. Replacing the cacophony of competing municipal voices would be the soft susurrus of murmured expertise and the quiet assurance of accumulated wealth. Finally, power would be the hands of those who merited it.

Auckland would be ruled by a twenty-strong board of directors – one for every 71,000 residents. The board chairman – still rather quaintly referred to as The Mayor – would preside over the board’s deliberations and be the city’s principal spokesperson. The role of the Board itself would be limited to receiving and approving the reports of seven "Council Controlled Organisations" (CCOs).

To all intents and purposes these CCOs would operate as independent, stand-alone businesses dedicated to the efficient provision of core municipal services. They would be governed by experienced business leaders who, having gone through the motions of public "consultation" and endured whatever slings and arrows the news media contrived to cast in their direction, would be free to make operational decisions in an environment that was, essentially, "democracy-proof".

The fiction that the new ‘Supercity’ offered its residents genuine "local representation" would be maintained by a score of powerless "Local Boards" whose unenviable duty would be to convey the demands of the hapless citizenry to the all-powerful and constitutionally imperturbable Council, which, like all good boards of directors, would respond to the cavilling of its small shareholders with a judicious mixture of condescension and contempt.

The venerable promise of "More Business in Government, less Government in Business" would, at last, be fulfilled.

That was the Plan.

But, from the very start, things started going wrong.

The natural enemies of the Plan, the Left, were supposed to have been neutralised – they weren’t.

Because it was the Labour Government of Helen Clark which had set up the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance it was simply assumed that the standard neoliberal prescription presented by its carefully selected members would be endorsed without demur by the Labour Opposition. And yet, somehow, and without actually repudiating the Royal Commission’s fundamental principles, Phil Goff’s Labour Party managed to position itself as the defender of local democracy against the ruthless "Gauleiter of Auckland" – Local Government Minister, Rodney Hide.

That was unfortunate, but even more unsettling was the fact that the Left – against all expectations and precedent – threw its weight behind a single candidate. The Citizens & Ratepayers (C&R) group were confident that at least two, and possibly as many as three, left-wing candidates would emerge to contest the mayoralty and split the progressive vote.

The best qualified was Mike Lee, Chair of the Auckland Regional Council. Lee was the darling of the old Alliance Left, and for that reason alone was bound to be challenged by the Manukau Mayor – and Labour Party flagbearer – Len Brown. There was even a chance that the former Green MP, Sue Bradford, might throw her hat into the ring.

With the Left’s votes going all over the place, the C&R choice, Auckland Mayor John Banks, would romp home.

Only slowly did it dawn on C&R that the Left had more-or-less amicably decided upon Brown as its candidate and that Lee had no intention of breaking ranks. Bradford, unloved and unwanted by the Greens, backed away too. For the first time in a long time the Auckland Left was demonstrating some old-fashioned political discipline.

It was rewarded with a string of poll results that showed just how well this unified approach was being received. Backed by a small but strong campaign team, Brown had opened up a healthy lead on Banks – the most recent UMR survey placing him 14 points ahead of his right-wing opponent.

Labour’s assault on National’s and Act’s handling of the Super-City (brilliantly led by the Party List MP, Phil Twyford) melded seamlessly into Brown’s campaign, making it the preferred vehicle for all those voters in the Auckland region who either opposed outright, or had serious problems with the implementation of, the Right’s Super-City Plan.

Far from securing a council of commercially-savvy philosopher kings to preside over the long-awaited neoliberal transformation of the Auckland region, the C&R Group is faced with the terrifying possibility that the whole, immensely powerful political instrument which John Key’s government had created for them will fall into the hands of people with a very different social and economic agenda.

What’s left for the Right to do – except resort to dirty politics ? Even if C&R had a better alternative (which they do not) it is now far too late to ditch their candidate. Their neoliberal vision is not saleable in anything remotely resembling a mass political market but they can offer Auckland voters only minor alterations to the grand Super-City blueprints. When it comes to devising a winning strategy, digging the dirt on Brown is the only play they can make.

Will it work? The answer lies in Brown’s hands. If he borrows from Bill Clinton’s 1992 playbook and sets up a high-speed response unit, staffed with hard-hitting counter-punchers, then C&R’s blows will probably not connect with sufficient nerve and tissue to secure a knock-out.

But, if he behaves like the Democrat’s 2004 presidential candidate, John Kerry, and gifts his opponents the time and space required to negatively frame him, then not only will he lose, but so will the Left. For Labour and City Vision to win control of the first Super-City Council, Len Brown's going to need some very long coat-tails.

So, hold onto your hats, because the race for the Auckland Super-City is about to get down – and very dirty.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 17 July 2010.

Browned Off

Len Brown: An ambitious, overconfident and woefully inexperienced political parvenu.

WHEN will Labour ever learn? A party whose membership now numbers less than 5,000 nationwide, and probably less than 1,000 north of Taupo, has decided – unilaterally – to select the Left’s mayoral candidate for the new Auckland "supercity".

"Cheek" is too small a word to describe this sort of behaviour. Why? Because, if we accept the well-established rule-of-thumb that only ten percent of any organisation’s paper membership should ever be considered active players, fewer than 100 people took it upon themselves to choose the person aiming to represent 1.4 million.

For the sheer, jaw-dropping arrogance of this pre-emptive strike against democratic procedure, Labour deserves a hefty political smack – to say nothing of the "good parental correction" required for putting its own, narrow, partisan interests ahead of Auckland’s future.

The creation of the new "supercity" offered the old political players of Left and Right a rare opportunity to come up with new ways of choosing their respective flag-bearers.

They could, for example, have adopted the "primary election" model operating in the United States. Surely, in the age of Facebook and Bebo, it’s not beyond the wit of Auckland’s political geeks to devise a secure system of on-line primary voting? And, for the voters who prefer to judge their political horseflesh up close, what stopped Citizens & Ratepayers and City Vision from organising a region-wide round of public meetings and straw-polls?

The answer, of course, is that there was nothing stopping either group from doing one, or even both, of these things – except the over-riding fear of having the choice of political flag-bearers taken out of their hands.

That the Right was reluctant to let its own supporters choose their candidate did not, I have to confess, surprise me. After all, the whole "supercity" plot was hatched by a cabal of right-wing Auckland businessmen intent on making the city’s "governance" much more efficient – and much less prone to interference from "interest groups" unsympathetic to market forces.

Of Labour (and City Vision, its front organisation) I did, however, expect something more imaginative (and democratic) than an old-fashioned "deal", hammered out in a variety of smoke-free rooms, between a clutch of anonymous party hacks and the Mayor of Manukau City.

Strategically commissioned opinion polls, notwithstanding, Mr Brown has long been the Auckland Right’s preferred opponent. He comes across as an evangelical social-worker, who, when he’s not mouthing bogus Pasifika street-slang, delivers earnest speeches in which the buzz-words "vision", "passion" and "community" are endlessly repeated. Up against a ruthless political veteran like John Banks, Mr Brown will be made to look exactly what he is: an ambitious, over-confident, and woefully inexperienced political parvenu.

I do, however, give Labour points for staking its claim so early and with such clarity. The other potential candidates: be he Waitakere City Mayor, Bob Harvey, or the Chairman of the Auckland Regional Council, Mike Lee; can now be intimidated into withdrawing from the race – on pain of "splitting the Left vote".

The truth, of course, is that the only splitters operating in the broader Auckland Left are Labour and its allies. By dividing the field of mayoral hopefuls into Mr Brown and "the rest", they have very foolishly, and selfishly, made the best candidate the enemy of the first.

How much better things would have looked – both ethically and strategically – had Labour held off throwing its weight behind any candidate until progressive Auckland had been given the opportunity to test all of the potential candidates in circumstances not too dissimilar from the conditions prevailing during the campaign proper.

In Mr Banks, the Right knows exactly what it’s getting: a successful business entrepreneur; a former National Party cabinet minister; and the twice-elected Mayor of Auckland City. They can be confident (because he has done it before) that Mr Banks possesses the political grit to drive through a radical right-wing agenda.

But, if the Left accepts Labour’s fait accompli, what will it be getting in Mr Brown? A Palangi lawyer from Manukau, with a very thin portfolio of municipal achievements (unlike his illustrious predecessor, Sir Barry Curtis) and a rather goofy grin.

At stake is the economic and cultural future of our largest city – a city well on its way to encompassing half New Zealand’s population.

Given the prize, I believe Auckland, and New Zealand, deserves a better choice than either Mr Banks – or Mr Brown.