September Auckland Mayoral Debate at OGGB
Auckland Mayoral Debate 2016
HOST: The University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning MEDIATOR: Mr Raymond Miller DATE: Wednesday 7th September, 6.30 pm LOCATION: University of Auckland Fisher & Paykel Appliances Auditorium
This is NOT a word for word transcription of the event, NOR is it an analysis from PPC. These are the overall points discussed, in the words of mostly the candidates and partly of our PPC content contributors to fill in the gaps of transcription. Our contributors have tried their best to give each candidate equal and unbiased coverage. The colours allocated to each candidate are not indicative of any political stance – they are random. Also note that the 6 panelists are 6 of the 19 total Mayoral candidates for Auckland. To find out more information about each candidate check out our other posts on the Mayoral candidates this year.
1. Deliver more of an Auckland that works. 2. Makes more progress on the things that are holding us back. 3. Make more progress on the things that have made Auckland less liveable. 4. Re-writing council budget. 5. Critically engage with the public about the Auckland plan. 6. Be more innovative with funding – we cannot fund ourselves. Mark says we need to have a conversation about priorities, and explore private-public partnerships to help us make progress.
1. Address critical issues facing Auckland 2. Housing affordability – some of those things within power of council implementing unitary plan, decent building consent process that works, infrastructure. This involves dealing with both supply and demand on housing. 3. Transport congestion …we have to have a working public transport system involving cycle ways and bus ways. We can’t simply believe in solving the problem through motorways. 4. Making the council more efficient. 5. Focus on improving the environment with his 1 million trees programme, focus on waterways, carbon emissions, and stopping the port from encroaching any further.
1. Provide a ‘cool’ Auckland. 2. Focus on achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2016 by promoting a carbon plan. 4. Take what we’ve already done in the last 6 years and move that forward. 5. Focus on his three main priorities:
A) Better government relationships. This involves working closely with the central government over funding for transport & housing B) Getting a rapid transit network built – everywhere in Auckland over 30 and 40 years C) Restoring better quality of democracy. This involves more local area planning where communities look at the facilities, infrastructure and parks to see how Auckland will work for them.
1. Make sure the rule of law is upheld because this is currently a Supercity for the 1% that is forced upon us. 2. Penny says she is the Bernie Sanders of this election.
1. Encourage more transparency. 2. Change the way we are growing Auckland. We need to intensify areas like Manukau, CBD, Albany and Henderson. 3. Wants to build a satellite city.
1. Lift the aspirations of Auckland – we deserve to be a world class, smart city (using technology), inclusive city. This means every ethnicity feels welcome and part of Auckland. This means a compassionate city that cares about the issues. This means a competitive city where the council enables businesses to be competitive. 2. Improve the way we fund the city. This involves better governance on how we spend money. This also involves finding better funding – we need to include other sources of funding and take pressure of rate payers. 3. Bring in the concept of eco-systems where you bring together groups of people to solve common problems and get better results. 4 . Utilise and take advantage of the cultural diversity we have in our city.
It comes down to local area planning. This involves restructuring local boards. The trick here in the next phase of development is to bring the boards together. Funding aspect: There’s no good answer for that. There’s a real burden on rate payers. We need a more sensible conversation on how fast can we grow given the resources we’ve got.
The Unitary plan has got it right to the extent that we need to move up and out. When we intensify there has to be arterial transport routes. The issue is we do it the wrong way round. We need to talk the German approach and build railway, and then get them on the railway to build the buildings at the end of rail. Development is linked to infrastructure and urban design. Funding aspect: If the government wants us to grow at the current rate, they need to provide money. There is an imbalance between the government taking money and the council having to spend infrastructure money. We are also going to have to pay for some of road infrastructure through road pricing. We have to look at PPPs (public private partnerships) if we can’t get infrastructure funding from the government.
Planning tools are going to be confounded if we don’t have organisation within the council to make that progress. We need to work council organisations to make it more effective. Funding aspect: We need to rewrite the budget and reverse the transport cut from Len Brown. We need to invest more of $3.5 million rate payers pay for transport – this will make us more attractive for government so that they will work with us.
Firstly, cities are the new growth engines of the world. Auckland isn’t suffering nearly as much as the rest of world. We haven’t been doing long-term planning for our city so you won’t see the link between the Unitary plan, Watercare, and the transport network. We’ve got to intensify around where we have public transport. Funding aspect: If we are going to burden rate payers with debt then we need to spend the money wisely. We will get money from the central government through an infrastructure fund. If we use the money wisely then we will get even more. We will source money from PPPs. We have only 2 in New Zealand so there is a lot more room there. We also need to engage with social entrepreneurs.
Work closer with transport and Watercare. We should build growth where infrastructure is already in place because the intensification of suburbs makes us go broke. Funding aspect: When we build a satellite city it will bring us lots of household income, lots of GST, and the council will recover lots of money from rates. Manukau makes money from growth by acquiring land before you rezone it. We have opportunity to do that. By acquiring that we can introduce $4-5 billion back into the council bank.
Why does all the growth have to come to Auckland? Why isn’t there a regional employment strategy? Who is benefiting? The law is not being followed – The Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009 (s 79) spatial planning for Auckland was supposed to be evidentiary based and coherent. Who is benefiting apart from foreign investors, bankers etc.?The Auckland Council is a member of a commercial construction group. This is bad because they are ‘networking’… (Penny alludes to corruption).
We’ve made a lot of mistakes in destroying heritage. The urban design panels now operating are good because it’s an advisory body that provides good feedback regarding the changes that can be made.
But we have to do better than that.
David was a senior policy analyst and the Manukau plan was done in collaboration with the police, WINZ, DHBs. They decided what they wanted for the future for their city. The design is a process is about engaging with the customer to see what they want from that space. David advocates for a more grassroots process where workshops are held with different parts of the community to talk about sustainability and climate change and other issues. Engage people in that process of design is important and is part of the reason why David talked about devolving more power to local boards. This involves asking: How are we going to design the future you want for your children and your grandchildren?
We have to be much smarter at planning our city across Auckland. We need to understand the aspects of our community. What we have is an incredibly expensive cost to build, and the more aspirations we have regarding aesthetic design, the more costly it is – some areas able to afford aesthetics but some areas are not. There are things specific to the market like the cost of building, and lack of scale, which will hold us back from designing an aesthetic Auckland. The market will solve these aesthetic problems much more than the council can. There is a balance and we need to look at that.
John used to build things from the ground up when he worked as a builder and he designed his own restaurant. Urban design currently is causing developers to be less productive and it is causing the cost of buildings to be greater. It would be better if we had better guidelines. We shouldn’t be telling people how to build but urban design is important to implement guidelines about what is and is not feasible. Is housing a property right or a human right? You have lovely designed buildings but what about the community in which those buildings are being designed? Who is looking after heritage buildings? This lunatic plan has taken a lot of say away from Aucklanders in terms of what is happening. Who wants a tall apartment building next to them? Auckland needs to come back to Aucklanders- locals and local communities.
Rule reduction was about how we can make the council work more easily. We need to find a way we can work more collaboratively. Critically we do have a design manual that Mark has been part of putting together. It’s an essential element hoping to guide designers and architects. Mark was one of the urban design ‘champions’ – who could connect people. Mark will continue to support the work of urban design panel and he will use his design champion expertise to ensure we have much more collaboration so we get a much better design.
We need to build a satellite city to make new homes cheaper. It’s not council’s responsibility to build affordable housing but it’s their responsibility to open up the land that builders can use.
The cost to consent new subdivisions or to make changes to your home are high. The council needs to take actions to resolve that. They need to get rid of the mull, to make more land available and put sunset clauses in. The whole consenting process has to go online for efficiency. The costs need to be reviewed as well. The council can play a role in bringing together a range of people like the government, councils, and social housing providers. The council can then match them to social capital in NZ and globally to bring forward mix of affordable homes. The government can help with this.
Mark regrets not having inclusionary zoning in the Auckland Unitary plan. He regrets the lost ability to ring fence affordable housing. However, Mark will make much quicker progress than the 5 by 2030 plan. He has 3 broad objectives: 1. Affordability 2. Transportation 3. Sorted growth We can do that by supply. The government has the tools and the Reserve Bank has more. But let’s do better with the resources we can control.
This week in Auckland the average house price hit $1 million. Council provides some affordable housing directly but it’s tiny. We can work collaboratively with groups like the Housing Foundation, where you’ve got rent to buy and shared equity. Council can move to make housing more affordable by ensuring the supply of land – stopping land banking. However, the real instrument of power in providing affordable housing is with central government. The central government has to drive the process of getting housing done. They could be pushing that social housing. We have a lowered proportion of social housing in Auckland than at any time. Central government is where the resources are.
Top priority if David could achieve anything in first 60 days in office is to house the homeless. He’d do this by selling airport shares. We don’t need bright pink cycle path if there are people sleeping rough. He wants to take both supply and demand. The council has a responsibility on supply side regarding infrastructure, and land. There is also the idea of changing building technology – building houses faster. The current technology is just not going to get us there. As for the 10% of units going to be produced – David opposes that completely. He sees it as a lotto whereby a privileged few will get houses and rest will miss out.
Activists get things done. Social housing to Penny: state and council housing are public, social housing is private. Penny is absolutely opposed to privatization of state housing whether owned by the state or not. There is no mandate for the privatisation of state housing. Right now we have boarded up state housing with nobody in them while there are people sleeping on Queen Street. There will not be any empty state houses. In terms of the ratio between what it costs people to buy and even rent a house, Penny supports the living wage for council staff and contracted staff. How do you fight poverty? – how about giving people some more money.
Due to time constraints, Raymond asks two candidates at a time to answer the rest of the questions.
The UP (Unitary Plan) makes more intensification possible. However, rules don’t suddenly make more affordable housing possible. The plan doesn’t consider affordability or deal with infrastructure how he wants. Progress comes in areas mentioned like Hobsonville. We can take experience from these to apply to Onehunga and other areas. It’s a great opportunity for us to move forwards.
Phil supports the plan’s up and out approach. We need arterial routes, transport hubs and need for good infrastructure. He is in favour of the Three Kings Quarry. If you’re going to intensify at the scale that Fletcher wants, you need to make sure that there is infrastructure for people to move from where they live to where they play and work. However, Phil is not convinced Auckland has to grow at the rate that it is – he comes from most multicultural electorate but he says needs to ease the tap of immigration. He calls for a population policy to see how we moderate population. He emphasises that he is not anti-immigrant, he is pro-immigrant but also common sense.
Completely open the books. Introduce an independent budget office. Having somebody independent going through council forecast – make that information is available to councillors and to the public. Inquire into how to actually provide a more proactive report card on the progress that we are making. If you take that approach you will lift engagement in the council as well. We also need to modernize communications from the council. This involves 3D modelling to show us what the future of our city will look like. We need to get into space of virtual reality. We can show people what’s going on in interesting ways. The Mayor is voice of city. Having a mayor who is proactive will make a big big difference to Aucklanders and council over time.
How can people be involved when they don’t know what’s going on? Communication transparency is extremely important. Councillors are hiding behind closed doors – we need to know what they are in favour of. When we go to vote for them we need to know what they have been doing in the past few years. Council spends money in communicating through newspapers and media but they spend less than 1% in ethnic newspapers. We need to start letting people understand and know what’s going on. When researching with a financial firm, he could not find information on how we are going to reduce costs. It would take 100 days to really get into the books to see what’s happening. It’s about getting the council to be open and transparent.
David advocates for a single transferable vote. Council provides a canvas on which you paint your lives – it’s good that people take it for granted because it means we’re doing our jobs well. But it’s not good if there are big issues like climate change and people don’t understand what the issues are and how to address them. Leadership of the Mayor is not about leading people to the future but inviting people to a space of engagement and collaborate to create that future.
It’s really simple – open the books. Tick Penny Bright for Mayor and that’s all you have to do.
Democracy is failing when 2/3rds of city don’t turn out to vote. There’s a lack of understanding about what council can do, and a lack of recognition for candidates who are running. The difficulty is that we’ve got communities like youth and ethnic minorities where the turn out rate is 20% – it’s about the way in which the media covers these issues. You would think there would be a lot of coverage about what’s happening in these elections but it’s almost absent.
Council as a franchise is broken and damaged. Only 15% said they were satisfied in the July survey. The local power policy is about giving power back. This involves introducing referenda. Combine that with innovative polling to get representative democracy back. This includes polls for proposing and sanctioning issues.
Chlöe did law and arts at this University. Since she entered the race, everyone has spoken about her age. It’s not the most important thing about her. Her policy is the most detailed and most researched out of all the candidates. She decided to enter the race because in 2013, we had really low turnout – you can’t have representative democracy when 2/3rd of Auckland did not vote. Regrading the engagement question, it should not be done by way of dictating but by way of talking. The role of mayor is to be bridge the gap between politics and people. Chlöe has spent the last 2 months collecting submissions through social media. This has set the agenda on how she would talk about the issues. She has acknowledging diverse views. She sits on the ‘intensifying and growing Auckland’ side of the spectrum. To Chlöe, the role of leader and of a mayor is not to come in and be the auditor or the accountant. The role of the mayor is to represent you and that is exactly what she would do as Mayor.
