Wayne Brown became mayor promising to reduce Auckland Council's debt to prevent rates from rising. The plan was to sell money-making publicly owned assets and close community services and amenities to save money. Not long before the election he was inundated with a torrent of money donated by fabulously wealthy property owners who would benefit most from his austerity plan. One was so grateful that he gave Wayne a helicopter tour of his new domain.
Another torrent flooded numerous houses at the end of January of this year, leaving many of them uninhabitable. Nine months later, Wayne again supports the estate interests. He has volunteered nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money to pay homeowners affected by the storm. The central government will provide the remaining $1.1 billion.
It's very kind of you, you might say. And it's certainly a welcome relief for those affected, particularly those who were underinsured. But as he himself points out, the $900,000,000 is unique. Future disasters caused by climate change will receive nothing, regardless of their insurance status.
It's nice of him, but also, well, strange. Wayne is a legendary curmudgeon who is not known for his generosity. Then why? His short-term solution. Remember he's Mr. Fixit, right? – is political gold. In the upcoming mayoral election, he will be touted as “The Man Who Saved You From Sinking…”
Cynical? Think about it this way. For the past 70 years, Aucklanders have been imploring politicians to fix the region's wastewater and stormwater systems. Every decade or two, we have a tropical storm that blows manhole covers off sewage systems, and millions of gallons of septic water are dumped into homes, onto our streets, into our parks, and onto every beach in the world. region.
After each event, politicians promise to accelerate improvements to our clandestine networks, but with each local election cycle, “fiscal responsibility” once again pulls the purse strings at the behest of complaining taxpayers.
You get what you pay for, as the saying goes. If we had paid for a proper sewage system, we wouldn't be ankle-deep in shit when we go to the beach. We wouldn't have creeks and bays that reeked of sulfur. We wouldn't have toilet paper scattered throughout the parks. We wouldn't have hundreds of houses playing submarines, or people in the streets, or a thousand tons of sewage-soaked carpets destined for landfills. We wouldn't let our insurance premiums go through the roof.
Unlike the earthquakes or volcanic eruptions that New Zealand misses, what happened in Auckland had been predicted for decades and was entirely preventable… if we had paid to prevent it.
Wayne could take the long view, see the inevitability of increasingly frequent future flooding, and put that nearly billion dollars toward fixing the cause, not the symptoms. But that's not as sexy as handing out money and being...
"The man who saved you from sinking."
Finnish Flynn is a former journalist who returned to New Zealand after more than a decade living in the United States. He has witnessed the rapid decline of the so-called greatest country on Earth, from the dynamism of Obama's “audacity of hope” to the paralyzing cynicism of Trump's sulfur politics. New Zealanders shake their heads in disbelief at America's decline, not realizing that they too are on the same slippery slope to failure.
