Simon Wilson: 50 days of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and his focus is on the port

Simon Wilson

29 Nov, 2022

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has the port in his sights. Photo / Jay Farnworth, Michael Craig

OPINION:

Wayne Brown has been mayor of Auckland for 50 days and he’s made his first big power move. His target: The Auckland port.

On October 18, he wrote to Jan Dawson, chairwoman of the board of Ports of Auckland Ltd (POAL). In that letter he instructed the board to work with Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei to create a plan for public use of the port land from Queens Wharf to Bledisloe Wharf. That means shifting the vehicle-import operation.

Dawson wrote back on November 1. She said, “As the POAL is an integral part of the NZ freight network, we suggest it would be appropriate to wait for the MOT [Ministry of Transport] strategy to be completed prior to making any decisions on the Port’s future.”

She also said, “As requested, we will set up a working group with stakeholders to develop a plan and timeline to develop the area between Ferry Building and Bledisloe Wharf and explore the cessation of port operations on Bledisloe and Captain Cook Wharves.”

Translation (polite version): Nope.

The port doesn’t want to push ahead with moving the port or any of its operations.

And it, seemingly, doesn’t want to work exclusively with Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei.

Brown responded to Dawson’s letter by calling her in for a chat. She turned up alone; he had his advisers with him. Afterwards, he said, “Things are better now.”

He also revealed, in a written Q&A with Herald subscribers, that he was “currently working on replacing the board, in which I have lost confidence”.

When I asked him about this last Thursday, he confirmed he’d said he did not have confidence in the board but denied he was necessarily going to replace them.

Wayne Brown has a thing about the port and “fixing it” is at the top of his to-do list.

To recap: Brown chaired the Government-appointed Upper North Island Supply Chair Strategy (UNISCS) working group in 2018-19. He had some talented people on that group and they produced some insightful, future-focused ideas.

They included building the capacity of the rail network to carry most freight, which has significant potential for reducing congestion and emissions.

Brown’s report also proposed a major new “inland port” or distribution hub for Auckland’s northwest, and steadily relocating existing port operations to the Port of Tauranga and to Northport, at Marsden Point near Whangārei.

Tauranga is better placed for this right now but Northport will have far greater capacity once rail links and other improvements are in place.

Brown’s proposals enraged a lot of powerful people. Then-mayor Phil Goff and his council, with Labour, National and the Auckland Business Chamber, all lined up on attack.

Closing the port on the Waitematā Harbour would increase the cost of doing business in Auckland, they said, and therefore the costs faced by consumers.

It was a New Zealand First power play, they said. Northland is home to NZ First’s Winston Peters and Shane Jones. It was nothing but pork-barrel politics, the critics said, for the betterment of the owners of land and businesses in Northland.https://omny.fm/shows/on-the-tiles/episode-35-the-challenges-facing-auckland-mayor-wa/embed

And, they added, it ignored one important reality: The Government can’t move the port because it doesn’t own it. The land and the port company are both owned by Auckland Council.

The Labour-led Cabinet commissioned another report to assess the merits of Brown’s study. This was done by the consultancy Sapere and proposed the Manukau Harbour as a better bet than Northport.

Brown was angry. Shipping companies and insurers had already told his working group Manukau was a ludicrous idea.

He also rejected the “extra costs” argument: 40 per cent of imports to Auckland come through Tauranga now, he said, and they don’t cost us any more than imports that arrive here.

As for all the cars arriving in Auckland, POAL itself says only 61 per cent of them are destined for the Auckland and Waikato markets combined. That’s not a strong argument for having them land in the Waitematā.

The fact is, local transport costs play only a small role in the pricing of imports.

And what about the question of ownership? Brown had been asked to produce a regional strategy and he’d done exactly that, only to be criticised for ignoring the council’s property rights.

So now he’s got himself elected the owner of that property.

But the Government has instructed the Ministry of Transport to produce a new freight strategy, or “resilience plan”. It’s due in the middle of next year.

According to a spokesperson for the mayor, the ministry has not consulted with the new council. Even though the property issue is as real as it ever was.

A postscript to that whole episode: The Sapere report was co-authored by Gary Blick, who in March this year took up the role of chief economist at Auckland Council. One imagines he and Brown have had many fruitful late-night conversations.

While the Government is waiting for that new resilience plan, Brown wants to get on with it.

He’s got people around him who don’t like centralised planning anyway. Some of them even call it “Stalinist”, which is absurd: You can plan the future of infrastructure and supply chains without invoking gulags and famine.

At the same time, though, we’ve already had more than 20 studies on the future of the Auckland port and almost all of them say it will have to move one day. But mostly those reports have been used, not to prepare for change, but to delay it.

“Planning” has meant procrastination.

Quick progress at the port doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive.

All those containers stacked more than three high are empty. They could be removed right now, by rail, to almost anywhere, and the vehicle-import operation could then be moved eastwards. (Until it’s shifted off the wharves altogether, of course.)

There are some “practical difficulties” with this, but do they outweigh the reality that right now they’re using the most valuable land in the country to store surplus containers?

With the cars moved, the way will be clear to invite some clever architects and urban designers to dream up something great. With terraces into the water, perhaps, and an amphitheatre for shows, and a cultural centre?

Make it cheap, designed to last 10 years while they create a masterplan for the whole area. Put mana whenua in charge and watch how fast and how fabulously it gets done.

The port aside, in his first 50 days Brown has been busy reorganising council committees, threatening some council-controlled organisations (CCOs) while expressing himself “pleasantly surprised” at others, and making many declarations on the “coming storm”. By which he means, inflation.

About half the councillors are Brown enthusiasts and the remainder might be better classed as sceptics, with one or two neutrals, but almost all have committed to working with him.

He has responded in kind, with a reasonably even-handed allocation of councillors’ roles and committee memberships.

Brown is what you might call “incident prone”. Example: He marked the end of a presentation by three council officials by saying, “Thank you, gentlemen.” He probably thought he was being polite.

One of the officials was a woman and she rose from the table looking decidedly discombobulated.

And he’s produced a surprisingly cumbersome structure for oversight of the CCOs.

He’s made the whole council responsible for “monitoring the financial performance of the Auckland Council group, including Council-Controlled Organisations (CCOs) and the port”. But he also has a CCO direction and oversight committee, an expenditure control and procurement committee and a performance and appointments committee, which will “review current CCO and port directors”.

Then there are three “lead councillor CCO roles”, along with two councillors on the board of Auckland Transport. With the mayor and his deputy also actively involved in CCO oversight, there may be too many cooks in the kitchen.

Or perhaps there is a more generous explanation: Brown has invited a lot of councillors into the tent and has not given any of them too much power. Talent, he may be hoping, will rise.