Cam Slater: Wayne Brown Is the Left’s Night Mayor

Wayne Brown is fast becoming the left’s night mayor. He has set about taking heads and demanding accountability from Auckland Council’s numerous boards and statutory authorities. He got a scalp on the first day after the election with the chair of Auckland Transport. Now he’s after the whole organisation:

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown says he wants a “complete change in approach” from the city’s transport agency, better recognising the current need to “rely on the roading and carparking networks”.

“You appear to have been focused on changing how Aucklanders live, using transport policy and services as a tool,” Brown wrote to Auckland Transport acting chairperson Wayne Donnelly on Wednesday.

“Instead, AT must seek to deeply understand how Aucklanders actually live now, how they want to live in the future and deliver transport services that support those aspirations,” he said.

“Aucklanders do not always have the choice of using an e-bike, a bus or even a train but rely on the roading and car parking networks to make their life functional.”

Stuff

Finally, Aucklanders have a mayor who is voicing the concerns of the ratepayers. The bureaucracy of Auckland has swollen to more than the total numbers of all the councils it replaced. Organisations like Auckland Transport are infested with cycling hippies who bizarrely want Auckland to be like Copenhagen or Amsterdam, without pausing to realise that both are flat, while Auckland is extremely hilly.

It is high time we had a mayor and a council that listened to ratepayers instead of dictating to them. Wayne Brown is making lists and taking names. If the bureaucracy doesn’t like it they can leave. The swamp is being drained and the rivers of liberal tears are delicious.

Brown said he wanted Auckland Transport to “clean up Auckland’s roads, by getting rid of unnecessary road cones and lane closures”.

He called for an end “to the sale of council-owned car-parking buildings, with any such plans referred to the governing body or its committees” – even though the proposed sale of the Downtown Carpark Building is a council decision.

Brown also asked Donnelly to “invest in cycle lanes only where the per-kilometre construction cost is on par with costs in other jurisdictions, nationally and internationally”.

Stuff

Wayne Brown needs to start ripping up the cycleways. Only about 50 people will be inconvenienced by that and tens of thousands of road users’ lives would improve. Then AT can stop diverting road maintenance funds into pet projects and start fixing the dilapidated potholed roads that 12 years of lefty womble councils have left us.

At the rate Wayne Brown is going he is likely to have the totalitarians in government move in commissioners if he keeps on dismantling their pet bureaucracies.

More power to him. He’s already poked Nanaia Mahuta in the eyes by declaring Three Waters dead to Auckland.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has called for Watercare and council chief executive Jim Stabback to stop all work on the Government’s Three Water [sic] reforms, which he says are “doomed”.

In a letter to Watercare chairwoman Margaret Devlin he said the previous council and incoming mayor and governing body oppose the reforms.

“In more than 300 campaign events, I detected no support for it at all among Aucklanders. I promised in the election campaign to stop it,” he said in the letter.

In a statement issued just after 5pm, Brown said Auckland households are heading into an economic and fiscal storm and Watercare and Auckland Council must keep water charges and rates as low as possible.

NZ Herald

This is all good stuff from Brown, who is honouring his promises. He’s made a great start. Let’s hope he keeps on dismantling the bureaucracy and the red tape.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE