As rivals trade barbs and controversies re-emerge, the abrasive mayor appears to be strolling to victory, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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Brown breaks cover, on his terms

After weeks of “Where’s Wayne?” as The Post’s Jonathan Killick put it (paywalled), the Auckland mayor finally fronted for an official debate on Sunday. Brown shared the stage with four mayoral challengers, but largely treated them as background, focusing his fire instead on central government and rules he says hobble the city. He told organisers he’d skipped earlier forums because they were too poorly attended, and joked the big issue of the day would be “staying awake”.

Despite his low-key campaign, Brown is positioned to win comfortably in October, buoyed by a hard push to “fix Auckland” – not least the recent overhaul of transport governance and the political credit he’s claiming for it. Announcing a blueprint to strip Auckland Transport of almost all of its powers last week, he said the changes would restore democratic control of transport, calling it “a major victory for the people of Auckland.”

A Teflon mayor?

According to new reporting by Newsroom’s Tim Murphy, on the evening of the devastating Auckland Anniversary floods, a staff member visited the mayor’s office, at 4.15pm and again around 7.45pm, finding “Friday night drinks” on both occasions. “The delay in declaring a state of emergency and poor communication with the public were widely criticised at the time,” notes Murphy. Brown’s response: a small group socialised before the scale of the emergency was clear, and once it was, the alcohol stopped.

It’s far from the only bad headline for Brown: Last month, the NZ Herald’s David Fisher (paywalled) reported that multiple councillors alleged a “boys’ club” atmosphere at council, exemplified by Brown’s lewd crack about a colleague “climaxing” in a meeting. Councillor Julie Fairey says Brown later apologised, and her colleagues have noted he isn’t the only council member at fault. None of it has obviously shifted the race; Brown’s standing appears resilient even as the stories pile up.

A mayor and his hit list

Meanwhile in the (paywalled) Herald, Simon Wilson recently wrote about Brown’s Fix Auckland ticket, which aims to unseat four out of the five councillors who most vex him: Wayne Walker and John Watson in Albany, Alf Filipaina and Lotu Fuli in Manukau, and Mike Lee in Waitematā and Gulf. The mayor’s case is more personal than political, Wilson writes. “It’s because he finds these five exasperating beyond measure. They rage and fulminate, they lecture him and the other councillors, and they quite often attack the integrity of council staff.”

The irony is that Brown hasn’t needed them to pass the big stuff – budgets, the airport-shares sale and CCO reforms have all passed with solid majorities. Still, he wants them gone. “For some councillors, being an angry outsider is the only thing they know,” writes Wilson. “So they sit on their high horses and keep shouting at the mayor and the rest of council. Brown is sick of it.”

The king of the cutting remark

If there’s a defining motif of Brown’s campaign, it’s contempt – sometimes even for his own voters. As Hayden Donnell noted in The Spinoff this week, the mayor has met hugely controversial Devonport densification plans with a shrug: it would upset people, “but they deserve to be upset”, he said. Then came Mount Eden, which Brown said “looks like Gaza” – an incredibly tone-deaf comparison to make, even for the famously abrasive mayor. “Brown would later claim his comment was a joke, though it didn’t possess a key attribute for a joke: being funny,” Hayden writes, before conceding Brown often has a point. He just has an exceedingly spiky way of making it, and, so far, Aucklanders don’t seem to mind.

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