The governing body of the Super City’s fifth term of council met for the first time last night at the Auckland Town Hall, where new mayor Wayne Brown had some portentous words for the city
The newest term of Auckland Council under the mayoralty of Wayne Brown launched last night, with the mayor and his 20 councillors sworn in as representatives of the people at a ceremony at Auckland Town Hall.
Brown took the opportunity to warn Auckland of tough times ahead, and promised a new council that wouldn’t be afraid to shave off excess cost.
“Our collective problem is that, without tens of millions of dollars in savings, Aucklanders’ rates won’t just increase by inflation but by much much more,” he said. “And that is unacceptable too. That means our new team needs, collectively, to radically rethink how Auckland Council and its council-controlled organisations and other entities are run.”
Brown has used the odd weather metaphor before when talking about Auckland’s fiscal climate, but in past speeches it has generally been warnings of an incoming storm for the city.
Last night he said he was sorry to announce that the wind and rain are already here, after what he has previously called the 12-year experiment of the Super City.
“Together, as a team, we need to protect through the dark times, the Auckland Council services that Aucklanders value,” he said.
His answer to these portents of dark days comes in the form of streamlining or making certain things more efficient, but he said there would not be cuts to essential services.
“We need to apply the test less is more,” he said. “We need to ask ourselves about every activity and line of expenditure: If we stop doing this, would anyone notice?”
Now with the mayoral chains weighing on his shoulders, Brown stuck to the script that got him in power with 181,810 votes, levelling his sights at costs accrued by Ports of Auckland.
He said Ports of Auckland had spent $24 million and $27 million on ‘other expenses’ in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
“That’s not salaries, wages and contractors, or repairs, maintenance and finance costs, or anything like that,” he said. “It’s unknown other stuff.”
He said those figures are just one line from a report on one council-controlled organisation, and he intends to go through them all to find similar costs he promises to be able to cut down.
“That $25 million is just one number from one line of one annual report of one of the entities we own,” he said. “We need to go through them all line by line. That’s how we’ll keep rates low.”
According to the new mayor it’s a storm that requires a storm shelter rather than just an umbrella.
“It can’t be achieved by asking people to pay another dollar to visit the zoo.”
However while he said 2022 was not the easiest year to win an election in, it provided an opportunity to reimagine the council.
With fiscal dire straits projected to continue into 2023, it seems the new mayor's political mandate to follow through with cutting costs is unlikely to be going away.
"The reality is that big major restructuring and savings are needed for the first time since the Super City began 12 years ago – and it needs to happen fast.”
Brown’s warnings of tough times ahead rubbed a little roughly with his promises on Thursday that this was a night for celebration, when he told reporters that he had already given his vision for the council term.
Nevertheless both he and the councillors sworn in were in high spirits.
Brown’s face erupted into a wide smile as he looked out over the couple of hundred Aucklanders who had turned up after working his way through a Lonely Planet guidebook’s worth of greetings in foreign languages.
“I even said a couple of words of French in there,” he said.
Technically it was an official council meeting, but most meetings of the governing body aren’t punctuated by performances of song and dance.
Bollywood and Cook Islands dancers, with not one but two different drummer troupes performed in front of the councillors, who were gathered for the first time and lined up in alphabetical order.
