The ‘A’ Wellington won’t hear - and it’s not Auckland
The capital can learn from the supercity but the biggest lesson is amalgamation, writes Todd Niall.
There was a time when Aucklanders envied Wellington with its peoplefriendly downtown waterfront, and the funky, walkable city centre with precincts like Cuba Street, and later, Courtenay Place.
It was the 1980s and 90s. Brave things happened in Wellington. The then-absurd idea of turning prime downtown real estate into green space, created the now muchloved Midland Park.
As developers demolished Auckland heritage icons like His Majesty’s Theatre and arcade, Wellington City Council saved Courtenay Place from a massive Chase Corporation plan, and buildings like the Missions to Seafarers Hall from demolition.
The touring car street races around the downtown waterfront, for a few days each year, made Wellington’s downtown waterfront resemble Monaco.
Auckland’s critical turning points
The hosting of the America’s Cup in 2000 and the 2010 enforcedamalgamation of Auckland’s eight local bodies were pivotal to the northern city leap-frogging the capital.
Team New Zealand’s 1995 winning of the America’s Cup sparked the redevelopment of part of the city’s industrial waterfront into a precinct with apartments, bars and hotels.
Lobbying by the Helen Clark-led government persuaded it that Auckland’s potential would not be achieved by the bickering seven councils and a regional council above them.
A Royal Commission of Inquiry’s recommendation to amalgamate was implemented in a stripped-down way in 2009 by John Key’s National-led coalition.
Today, a single region-wide council sits above local boards, with arms-length council-owned companies to run water, transport, economic development, culture and major facilities.
Last year, Wellington regional councillor Roger Blakeley organised a trip to Auckland with four colleagues to see what they could learn. Blakeley already knew. The engineer-turned-career public service manager had spent a decade as chief executive officer of Porirua City before he became the Chief Planning Officer of Auckland Council in 2010.
He oversaw the visionary Auckland Plan – a legislative requirement – which was a ‘‘world best practice’’ blueprint for the development of the region for the next 30 years.
‘‘I think we did a remarkable plan – from land use, to transport and other infrastructure, water, wastewater, and also the economic and cultural and social objectives,’’ Blakeley said.
It led to the nuts-and bolts Unitary Plan, which locked in the concept of a ‘‘quality compact city’’ creating higher density housing zones, a forerunner to the government’s current nationwide reforms.
Lesson: Plan it and they will build
Lesson number one for Wellington is that such plans do work, according to Matt Lowrie, a director of the transport and urban development-focussed website greaterauckland.org.nz.
‘‘We are seeing significant development occurring,’’ he said.
Auckland’s collection of big, unified plans caught the eye of Isabella Cawthorn, a community facilitator who runs the blog Talk Wellington.
‘‘It’s necessary, but not sufficient to have a good city vision, a city centre master plan, and a big regional set of scientifically prioritised (transport) projects like ATAP (the Auckland Transport Alignment Project),’’ she said. ‘‘We have a weird mish-mash of half-vision and wish-lists of projects, with no line of sight through to implementation, and I think that has been a problem.’’
ATAP was a victory for united Auckland’s inaugural mayor Len Brown, getting government agreement to a 30-year list of transport projects it would co-fund, rather than haggling project by project.
Lesson: The ‘a’ word that isn’t Auckland
Blakeley made it clear that amalgamation was not a topic for discussion in Wellington: ‘‘There’s just not the appetite for it at the moment.’’
Auckland’s amalgamation was government-mandated, and a Wellington plan promoted five years later by then-Wellington Regional Council chair Dame Fran Wilde, crashed after the inevitable public pushback.
One of the commissioners who recommended Auckland’s amalgamation, former Wellington City councillor and governance consultant David Shand, was not surprised that Wellingtonians, when asked, said no.
‘‘If our recommendations, or what (local government minister) Rodney Hide came up with, had been put to a vote, (in Auckland), it would have been lost overwhelmingly,’’ he said.
But much of what is admired by
Blakeley, Cawthorn, Shand and Lowrie are either direct consequences of amalgamation, or ideas that were accelerated by it.
Blakeley’s tour was impressed with the urban transformation work led by Auckland Council’s regionwide property and development arm Eke Panuku, which helps masterplan projects involving council-owned land, on the city’s waterfront, and increasingly in it’s sub-regional centres.
‘‘They’ve done a brilliant job
developing the (downtown) Wynyard Quarter into what it is today, that’s a great success story,’’ said Blakeley.
They were also impressed with a big transit-oriented development in suburban New Lynn, where the commuter rail line was lowered into a trench, a bus station built above, and apartments adjacent.
‘‘We are keen to explore examples in Wellington, which could be around Waterloo Station in Hutt City,’’ he said. ‘‘Another is Porirua, where the station is close to the city centre – Johnsonville is another possibility.
’’A Panuku could be an excellent thing,’’ quipped Cawthorn who has just finished facilitating a community-driven street upgrade in Porirua East. ‘‘You get some really sad decisions being made. For example, whoever sold off Porirua’s waterfront – it’s got a big box supermarket on it.’’
Lesson: Never say never to amalgamation
Cawthorn doesn’t share Blakeley’s view that amalgamation is off the Wellington menu.
‘‘The writing’s on the wall,’’ she said, pointing to the government’s Three Waters reform as a step.
‘‘One of the things Auckland does have that I envy is the scale to have some of the best people in the country (in local government).
‘‘If you’re an engineer for example, you are going have to take such a pay cut to go and work in a (smaller) local council – yet that’s where we need the best of breed.’’
Wins from having scale and a single powerful voice include the $4.4 billion City Rail Link project which went from 2010 election promise, to a construction start in 2016.
Government reforms such as, the National Policy Statement on Urban Development, the requirement to have spatial plans, and Three Waters, will deliver elements of the progress enabled in Auckland, but without the simplicity of a single regionwide body to implement them.
Lesson: It’s not about plans but about doing
‘‘They have to find a way to speed up the process for urban development, to accelerate the number of dwellings to get the advantages in a reasonable time,’’ Blakeley said.
Speed of change was also cited by Lowrie, looking at the tripartite Let’s Get Wellington Moving entity which is planning the transit future for Wellington City.
‘‘What they can learn (from Auckland) is to try not to take 8 years to do something – how to speed-up getting quick wins,’’ said Lowrie, suggesting creating bus lanes soon where Light Rail might run, to accelerate behaviour change.
Shand, who now lives on the Ka¯ piti Coast, said Wellingtonians had misconceptions about Auckland’s amalgamation.
‘‘People said, look at the awful mess the Supercity was – they said staff numbers ballooned – rates went through the roof, completely untrue.’’
Lesson: It’s not all about the big city
An important lesson from Auckland for the Wellington region – is one that has taken Ta¯ maki Makaurau itself, much of the past decade since amalgamation to learn.
It is that the quality of the region is not defined just by the funkiness of its metropolitan centre, but also by the quality of living in outer areas – read Hutt Valley and Porirua.
Auckland Council’s 2012 commitment to transform the lives of its poorest urban communities in the south and west, has only now delivered an idea of scale – a potential billion dollar evolution of Ma¯ ori and Pasifika-owned businesses working in the recycling economy.
Auckland offers lessons on how smart ideas can be made to happen, and happen soon using the strength of scale and unity.