Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has defended a refusal to attend several local election candidates’ debates, while his most prominent challenger, councillor Kerrin Leoni, was questioned on the funding of her rates cap pledge.
Both appeared on Q+A this week in separate interviews as voting’s underway in this year’s local elections.
The two are the only candidates in a field of 12 running for mayor who are already voices around the council table and have emerged as frontrunners in the race.
Brown, the incumbent, was first elected in 2022 and said he liked being mayor only “at times”. He defended his apparent choice to skip mayoral candidates’ debates and was pressed on Q+A about whether he was being accountable enough to Aucklanders.
“Do I want to sit in a whole lot of cold, half-filled church halls listening to 11 people who’ve never done anything in their lives, who want my job? No, I don’t,” he said.
The mayor then held up a copy of his council’s yearly budget while gesticulating with it.
The progressive councillor says she wants a different style of leadership for Auckland, speaking to Q+A’s Jack Tame. (Source: Q and A)
“Accountability? We have people saying we want people to be more accountable and more open. This is our annual plan. I can hardly pick it up,” he said.
“Everything we do is in there. I just want some of the people to read it. They’re public documents … This is the most accountable organisation I’ve been involved in, so everybody’s saying, we’re going to be open and accountable. Nonsense. We already are.”
Leoni has repeatedly criticised Brown for missing debates in the past several weeks, though the mayor has attended a few candidates’ events since earlier in September.
His campaign had previously contended he couldn’t fit all debates into a “very busy schedule” as mayor and that he “gets many requests from various groups” to speak.
Brown was also pressed about reporting showing his close advisor, Chris Matthews, was contracted for more than $300,000 to provide “specialist strategic advice” to the mayor.
Asked if it was a good use of ratepayers’ money, he suggested it was “probably not the best thing we’ve done” but that to find savings, people should be looking at “the big numbers are what you need to change,” and “not this piddling stuff”.
He said: “The chief of my staff organised some specific projects and paid him and it’s a contractor’s rate. Probably not the best thing we’ve done.
“But that’s not how you save money in an $8 billion thing (referring to the council’s annual revenue). Get some big numbers out there.”
Brown added: “I don’t set people’s salaries. I mean, I would set people’s salary a hell of a lot less … I didn’t know what they arranged to pay. You don’t know that — I’m the mayor. Everybody works for the chief executive.”
On transport, Brown argued his reforms to dismantle Auckland Transport would improve outcomes, describing the independent but council-controlled agency as “annoying”.
“Auckland Transport is really unpopular. That’s because it has two sectors. The public transport sector is actually quite well used. I use it myself from Ponsonby. We’re going to leave that behind. They can concentrate on that and do a really good job of that.
The change, which has previously been hinted at, was labelled by Mayor Wayne Brown as a “major victory”. (Source: 1News)
“But everything else they do is annoying. Just the way the traffic lights don’t mesh one on the other. We’ve got no AI or brains in our traffic-light system.
“I’ve been moaning and wanting that for three years, and nothing’s happened.”
Clash over intensification as zoning plan debated
Brown was eager to defend a new plan to allow more apartments in suburbs closer to Auckland’s city centre, which passed through the council in an 18-5 vote last week, and which would absolve the city of introducing blanket three-by-three townhouse zoning.
Responding to the suggestion of more greenfield development as an alternative to more intensification, the mayor retorted: “Well, do you want to pay more rates, do you?”
Brown added: “We’re going to have multi-storey buildings down where we’ve spent the money on putting the [City Rail Link] through, and we’re going to intensify the city.
“People waffle on about infrastructure, and … we should be putting people where we’ve got infrastructure, not on farms, where there’s no infrastructure, but we’ve got a lot of underutilised infrastructure in the city and along these routes.”
Crowds have packed out public meetings in suburbs such as Mt Eden to protest the new plan, which they say will affect special character homes and amenity in low-rise suburbs.
The Government has mandated 10-15 storeys around several rail stations, expected to gain big travel time improvements to the CBD when the City Rail Link opens next year. There was also other upzoning plans around other train stations and major bus lines.
Leoni pledges more accessible mayoralty
Brown’s most prominent opponent was first-term councillor Kerrin Leoni, who previously stood on a Labour ticket when running three years ago but was now running for mayor as an independent. She promised a more accessible mayoralty than Brown.
“We’ve had a lot of concerns over the last three years that a lot of Aucklanders haven’t seen our current mayor,” she told Q+A. “With the debates that have been happening recently, I’ve been making myself accessible right across Auckland”.
She added Aucklanders wanted “to have a leader who’s actually going to get out there, get on the ground and actually come up with solutions for our city, because right now we don’t have that vision, and we don’t have that leadership to keep Aucklanders here.”
Speaking on Q+A. Leoni was questioned about her “rates relief guarantee” policy to cap rates at or below inflation in year two of the next council term, without cutting services.
Asked about the feasibility, she said: “The policy, is to work towards that, because we know that there’s so many moving parts in local government.
“I mean, there could be another flood. There could be a number of things. But my goal is clear to Aucklanders that I want to bring those rates down to the rate of inflation.”
The candidate was also asked about a recently deleted social media post on the council’s new zoning plans, which was critical of “rapid intensification” and said infrastructure needed to come before a push to build upwards.
“That post was put up by someone that is in my media team. It was actually put up while I was asleep, at 11 o’clock at night, so I had no idea that that post had gone up,” she said.
“We do have team members that have not had experience on political campaigns.”
The post, which referred to a public meeting on the issue hosted by Epsom MP David Seymour, came before Leoni “clarified” her position and voted for the council’s new plan.
But, she continued to raise concerns about infrastructure, saying school rolls should have been a priority and point of conversation with the Government.
On her campaign, the councillor said she wasn’t standing on a ticket because there were “a number of reasons why it is beneficial to stand as an independent”.
“Wayne’s standing as an independent. He’s not endorsed by the National Party or by C&R. So both of us are standing as independents for this election,” she said.
Leoni added when pressed about if she had discussions about tickets: “I have talked about endorsement with a number of parties, and I’m standing as an independent.”
Brown and Leoni’s separate interviews in Auckland follow Q+A’s candidate mayoral debates in Wellington and Christchurch, which went to air earlier this month.
For the full interviews, watch the videos above
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air
