Auckland will have a new mayor after the local elections later this year. The Detail talks to the three frontrunners for the job - waterfront bar owner Leo Molloy, South Auckland councillor Efeso Collins and Heart of the City boss Viv Beck - about what's wrong with the city and how they'd fix it.
Free public transport, higher rates, a shake-up of the Auckland waterfront and a clean-out of some of the highest-paid council workers.
These are some of the promises being made by the three frontrunners for Auckland mayoralty: Efeso Collins, Leo Molloy and Viv Beck.
Collins caught the bus from his home in Otahuhu to get to our interview at the Sylvia Park shopping centre. It’s a 10-minute bus ride away, but he says it’s slowly becoming his local because many cafes closer to his home are shut or only doing takeaways.
Free public transport is one of Collins’ campaign promises. He explains where he’d find the money to fund it, with its estimated price tag of up to $250 million a year.
“I think we can move money around within our current council budget to cover all of that. We spend nearly $50m on consultants, we’ve also got road improvement budgets in excess of $200m.”
Sitting in his campaign office overlooking his bar at Viaduct Harbour, Molloy talks about a one-year trial of free public transport, funded by the money already raised from Auckland’s regional fuel tax.
Beck, who meets us in the colourful but empty Freyberg Place near the city centre, is against free public transport, but supports concessions to ensure it’s accessible for everyone. The biggest issue to be tackled, she says, is traffic congestion.
“If it wasn’t a big barrier to them people would feel better about the city.”
All three candidates say they would cut what they call wasteful spending at council and push for more money from central government. Molloy says he would get rid of the middle layer of council staff - 20 percent of all administrative workers.
“The middle layer is the layer of clay where good ideas go to die. That will be gone,” says Molloy.
They also give their views on the Three Waters reforms, what they would do to boost voter turnout (in 2019 just over 35 percent of Auckland's eligible population voted) and how they would get councillors to back their ideas.
Collins and Beck say they have collaborative leadership styles.
“I love to listen, I love to sit down and have tea or coffee or in this case a smoothie” says Collins at the cafe. “The ability to find a sense of consensus, some agreed ideas around the vision of Auckland, that’s the way we're going to get a genuinely progressive agenda.”
Molloy says the super city model is made for a person like him.
“As far as the councillors go, I traverse the entire political spectrum. I traverse the whole spectrum of Auckland. I funnily enough get accused of having too many bro, brown mates, but I’ve always been what I am, I’m an Irish Catholic and I gravitate towards certain people.
“But down there [at Headquarters bar], we judge on behaviour and behaviour only. We treat everybody equally and that’s exactly what I’ll do politically, it’s exactly what I’ll do for this city,” he says.
And if you want to hear more about the candidates’ ideas for Auckland, listen to the full episode of The Detail.
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