Harrumph, say NZ First’s Shane Jones and Hobson’s Pledge. They call it “co-governance”. But that wasn’t how most people in the room saw it.
And the room was packed, with dozens of people filling the public gallery and spilling into a second room. Members of the iwi were there, many carrying photographs of those who had gone before. Students from Kelston Girls’ College turned up and made a strong contribution to the singing. Members of other iwi, the local boards and many others.
The deed formalises a partnership between the iwi and the council that has been a long time coming. Even the final formal presentation and debate took much of the day.
The council also voted to establish a forum to give effect to the partnership. That didn’t find favour with everyone: the vote was 15-7.
These decisions were made by the council’s policy and planning committee, which comprises the mayor, all the councillors and two members of Houkura, the Independent Māori Statutory Board. As reported last week, the Waitākere Ranges and Whau local boards had already endorsed the proposals.
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The original Act of Parliament allowing for the deed was passed into law in 2008, which prompted a “confession” from one of the Houkura members seated at the council table. Tau Henare, a National Party MP back then, said he remembered “someone had stood up and said we don’t need this bill, it can be looked after in the Annual Plan”.
Henare looked ruefully at the crowd. “Silly man,” he said. “That man was me.”
Tau Henare: “That silly man was me.” Photo / RNZ
Greg Presland, chairman of the Waitākere Ranges Local Board, reminded the councillors that much of the land on the western edge of the city had been “taken without agreement”.
“It’s impossible to read the history without understanding the enormity of the loss.”
His local board colleague Sandra Coney explained that the heritage area, which includes the regional park, was the largest indigenous forest in the city, by far. At 17,000 hectares, it’s the same size as the Hunua Ranges, but that forest has a lot of pines.
She also gave the council a short history lesson: when Auckland was looking for a 1940 centennial project, options were put to a public vote. A harbour bridge? A new children’s hospital? The people chose what became Auckland Centennial Memorial Park, in the heart of the ranges. Always been special, always will be, that was her message. And now the tangata whenua were being recognised.
Councillor Alf Filipaina told her, “Sandra, it’s always good to see you as one of the OGs.” Original gangstas, he explained for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with the term.
Filipaina and Coney are both inaugural members of the SuperCity’s governing body in 2010. Coney stood down in 2016 and is retiring from the local board this year. Filipaina is seeking another term.
(The governing body has four other OGs: Sharon Stewart, who is retiring, and Christine Fletcher, Mike Lee and Wayne Walker, who are standing again.)
Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson wanted to make sure everyone understood a few things properly. “Is this a co-governance arrangement?” she asked.
No, explained senior council official Michelle Chen. The new body will be an “advisory forum”. It will not have decision-making powers, which stay where they are currently. The council owns most of the land and will remain in charge of it.
“Will this affect public access?” Simpson asked.
No, said Chen, who also explained that the heritage area would include public land managed by the council and Crown land managed by the Department of Conservation (DoC). It won’t include other public land, such as Watercare areas and schools.
And it won’t include private land.
The deed provides the iwi with various ways to engage with the area: helping to create a vision, a strategic plan and specific workplans, and helping to monitor progress. The Heritage Area Forum will provide a mechanism for all this, and will consult widely and hold its meetings in public.
It will have three members from the local boards, two from the governing body of the council, five from the iwi and one from DoC. That’s a slight change from the original proposition, designed to pacify opponents of iwi getting too much of a say in things. The iwi is in a minority on the forum.
Despite this, councillor Ken Turner, who represents the area and said he had lived there all his life, was not convinced. He described the deed as “not all bad, now”, so he would vote for it, but he could not support the plan to set up the forum.
Julie Fairey suggested that supporting the deed was like buying a car, while setting up the forum was like taking the car for a drive.
“Why would you buy a car and not want to drive it?”
She was perhaps remembering that Turner is a mechanic by trade.
Mike Lee asked, “Is the balance of the committee right, given the council owns most of the land?”
Wayne Walker elaborated on that. “Why not have more council AC members? Is the council providing all the funding?”
Richard Hills, chairing the committee, said, “We pay for it now. We own it, we’re going to keep owning it, so of course we’ll keep paying for it.”
He added, “Why are certain people so upset about what is essentially just working together? Kanohi ki te kanohi.”
Richard Hills: “Why are certain people so upset about what is essentially just working together?”
Jo Bartley said, “My eye keeps twitching whenever I hear certain people speak around this table. What are you scared of? Recognising tangata whenua’s connection to the land?”
Shane Henderson said he also didn’t understand the opposition to the forum. “It strengthens the Treaty partnership and it gives more democracy to all Aucklanders.”
Presland noted that, back in 2008, public opinion in Auckland was 80% in favour of iwi involvement in preserving the ranges. “Latterly, there have been two camps,” he said, “but that seems largely to be based on the perception it will affect property rights.” Which it doesn’t.
Tau Henare took up this theme when he talked about a string of dog whistling. “It doesn’t affect private property, that was always a dog whistle. It doesn’t mean co-governance, that’s another dog-whistle from people who have no understanding of what this is about.”
Mostly, the debate was respectful. There was a big audience in the room, after all, who had turned up in good faith and expected to be treated respectfully. But in the end, it was leading Te Kawerau ā Maki member Edward Ashby who nearly lost it.
Ashby sits on Houkura, but had recused himself on this issue, and has been deeply engaged in the struggle to get the Deed of Acknowledgment signed since 2008.
“I’m looking forward to the day my forehead will heal, from where I’ve been banging it against the wall,” he muttered, before declaring, for the benefit of anyone who wanted to stop the whole process, that the deed was promised in the act.
“People who say different can take those views and stick them where the sun don’t shine.”
“It’s an honour to be in the room with all the iwi here today,” said Angela Dalton. She talked about “Ed’s relentlessness and resilience” and said, “It is an historic day.”
“It’s for the park,” said Ashby. “It’s not for the iwi, it’s for the outcomes for the regional park.”
Councillors Sharon Stewart and John Watson joined Lee, Turner and Walker in voting against the forum. The mayor and all others voted in favour, while Maurice Williamson was absent.
But it’s not over. DoC and the iwi must now formally declare their support, which both are expected to do. Then it will come back to the governing body of the council, which does not have Houkura members, for a final decision on the forum.
Growing for everyone
Auckland Council helps to organise 104 community gardens around the city.
How many public community gardens do you think there are in Auckland? That’s public land where locals can grow food? The answer is 104. A massive number.
The programme is run by the council’s community innovation team, in part as a response to growing poverty in the city. As Te Tāpui Atawhai Auckland City Mission has recently reported, one in four children in Auckland is food-insecure: on a daily basis, they don’t receive enough nutrients to thrive.
It’s one in three for Māori children and one in two for Pasifika children.
The City Mission distributes 2000 food parcels a month, and many marae, church and other agencies and community groups run food banks too. But while it’s necessary, no one thinks that’s a good way to address poverty.
The council is involved in a more sustainable solution, “where communities are inspired and enabled to share kai grown in their own backyards, on church land, on approved council sites, and even in the ocean, where rangatahi are being taught how to dive and fish for kaimoana to feed their whanau”.
Sunita Kashyap, the manager of community innovation at the council, says: “We face a significant inequity challenge that we need to tackle together as a community. Growing and sharing kai is a mechanism for people to lead climate and wellbeing action from the ground up, creating a future where communities thrive together – now and for generations to come.”
The council’s climate plan, Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri, backs him up. One way to look at the climate crisis is as a “force accelerator”: it makes every bad thing worse. Poverty is an obvious example. The climate plan argues for “the importance of supporting locals to plant food forests and grow vegetables, protecting soil and reducing food-related emissions while creating a resilient, low-carbon food system”.
The Tumoana Dive Programme, teaching kids to harvest kaimoana, has been running since 2012. Led by Donovan Busby, it starts with safety training.
“The rangatahi are taught how to be lifeguards first in a 5m-deep pool in Henderson,” says Busby. “They develop confidence before they go near the ocean. We mitigate the risks first, and it becomes a lot easier.
“At a practical level, we’re giving them tools so they can provide kai for their whānau. Rangatahi are gifted a rod and tackle, and the Henderson and Massey local boards supply them with wetsuits. They treat their wetsuits like taonga.”
It’s not just about fishing. Through the programme, the kids “deepen their connections to whakapapa, build their indigenous knowledge and life skills, embrace their potential, and rise as leaders in their communities”.
There’s a Gardens for Health video. You can find out more at OurAuckland.
More Barnes dancing
People walking every which way: a Barnes dance on Queen St. Photo / Jason Oxenham
A Barnes dance is what happens at a lights-controlled intersection when all the pedestrians cross at once. The name doesn’t come from social dances in a barn, although the allusion to that phenomenon is intentional. Barnes dances are named after New York traffic superintendent Henry Barnes, who introduced them to the city in 1962.
He called them pedestrian scrambles. New York’s freeway overlord Robert Moses didn’t approve because they held up traffic, but New Yorkers loved them. “Barnes has made people so happy they’re dancing in the streets,” wrote one reporter.
Thus, “Barnes dances” was born. And so, according to Barnes himself, was the phrase “dancing in the streets”. He believed it was the first recorded use of the term; Marvin Gaye and others wrote the song in 1964.
Anyway, Auckland has some, and it’s getting another one. Auckland Transport is about to trial the phase on the intersection of Victoria St and Nelson St, to match the existing Victoria St Barnes dances on Queen St and Federal St.
The move is linked to a larger innovation, to allow cyclists to use the pedestrian phase legally on all three Victoria St intersections, without having to dismount. This has been trialled successfully in Dunedin and Christchurch, and will be trialled for a year in Auckland.
It comes at the same time as the long-awaited opening of the last section of the Victoria St cycleway. This runs from Albert Park to Federal St, where it joins the rest of the cycleway to College Hill, and is part of the larger makeover of Victoria St, also nearing completion, called Te Hā Noa.
All good news, but I can’t help thinking AT planners must be stuck in a well somewhere. Have they been into the city? On the existing Barnes dance intersections, most cyclists and scooterists already use the pedestrian phase, because it’s safer for them. Why “trial” the new approach only on some Barnes dance intersections, when it’s already the norm on all of them?
Ah, but is it dangerous for pedestrians? It doesn’t have to be. The rule of the road is, or should be, that the most vulnerable get the most protection. Cyclists should always give way to people walking and not ride fast or too close when going past.
And now the full Te Hā Noa cycleway is open, everyone on Victoria St will be safer.
Stitching for Palestine
Stitch for Palestine, this Saturday at the Ellen Melville Centre.
Feeling helpless in the face of the horrors of Gaza? Stitch for Palestine is a group of Auckland women, including Palestinians, who stitch together as a way to share their solidarity.
They’re having a session this Saturday, 10am-2pm, at the Ellen Melville Centre in the central city.
Dorita Hannah from Stitch Palestine says it will be “a communal art project that brings people together to create a Palestinian flag made from 20 keffiyehs with hand-embroidered patterns”.
“Through the timeless art of tatreez, we will celebrate the richness of Palestinian culture, share stories and uncover the meanings woven into every symbol.”
Hannah adds that they’re not experts. “But the collective act of this living artwork in-process is stitched not only with thread but with conversation, connection and care.” Everyone’s welcome.
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