No mistakes or regrets

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown is ready to talk about his flawless life and career.

It’s 10am on the fourth Thursday of November – time for the Governing Body. This is the big kahuna of Auckland Council’s monthly calendar: the mayor plus the city’s 20 ward councillors arrayed around a giant doughnut of desks wedged into a weird-shaped room at the pointy end of the triangular Town Hall complex on Queen St.

The mood today is tetchy: councillors on the doughnut’s northern edge are unhappy about the imminent sale of the council’s Downtown Carpark and are calling out “point of order!” and “transparency!”, and a councillor from the doughnut’s south side is suggesting “Can we chill?” – which is precisely as aggravating as it sounds.

It’s like a not-very-fond extended-family dinner gathering where everyone knows the long-running enmities and dormant scandals, the triggers and the undercurrents, so it only requires an eyebrow raise or deceptively phrased compliment to keep a grudge simmering.

Between the factions, on the doughnut’s western edge, sits mayor Wayne Brown: mostly silent but constantly fidgeting. Opposite him are seats that are filled by a revolving cast of officials and visitors presenting to the council.

Brown’s expressions range from bored to exasperated and back to bored. In the two hours I’m there I don’t exactly catch him rolling his eyes, but the way he slumps and unslumps his shoulders, yawns, rubs his mouth, twiddles his pen, attacks a hangnail and occasionally juts his lower jaw so that his upper lip rests on his bottom teeth are, in essence, a fullbody eyeroll.

When he does talk, it’s generally brief, often a reminder that everyone should get the hell on with it. Most comments are lightly sardonic, or dismissive, or belittling, or complaining, or all of the above.

Some of it is, arguably, funny – in the same way that the misanthropy of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm is funny.

Just occasionally though, something stirs and Brown has something more. Like when Eden Park’s management are presenting an update on the stadium’s triumphs, including a forthcoming Coldplay concert.

Brown concedes the management have done “pretty well”, then adds:

“I’ve actually played at Eden Park, but it wasn’t cricket or soccer, it was rugby.

“As for Coldplay – my band [he plays banjo and sometimes sings with a fivepiece covers band called The Hangi Stones] plays Coldplay. We play Fix You. My wife – she came out of hospital and the whole gig were in tears. It’s a great song to play. Quite challenging and ah ... yeah!”

It’s a tiny instance of something you notice about Brown when you look back through his public comments and his newspaper columns – a sense that it is only when he has personally seen or touched a thing that it becomes fully real to him.

Wayne Brown has been mayor for just over a year. His relationship with media has been frequently brittle, but of late his hostility toward media has softened – with one notable exception: the case of Stuff’s Todd Niall.

Niall, who retired three days ago, has managed to get right up Brown’s nose with more than a year of cool, measured analysis of the mayor’s words and deeds, past and present.

Brown’s hostility is on display during this Governing Body meeting – which happens to be the last one Niall will ever cover.

When the chief executive acknowledges Niall’s near half-century of service to the public of Auckland, it sparks a Mexican wave of praise and Todd-related reminiscences from councillors. Niall, a row ahead of me at the media desk, remains humbly silent during this brief, touching and utterly fitting tribute to a stalwart of local government reporting.

When the councillors are done, Brown notably declines to join in the lovefest, instead giving a small, pained, sigh.

“Ah … if there’s a chance we might get back to what we were discussing here… ?”

Wayne Kelvin Forrest Brown was born in Symonds St in central Auckland, in a hospital that isn’t there any more. His mother was a homemaker and former Karitane nurse. His father Kelly came back from World War II with two Distinguished Service Orders and a lump of German bomb in his innards that wasn’t found until years later when surgeons mistook it for a cancer.

Kelly ran a small aluminium sales business, which was successful enough that the family had “everything we needed and a bit of what we wanted”. They lived in plutocratic Remuera, but Brown says the house was opposite a smouldering rubbish dump that gave him a reference point for his own financial aspirations.

“I didn’t want my kids to grow up on a rubbish tip.”

He went to Auckland Grammar, where he resented the discipline. He was good at maths and physics and liked making things, so did an engineering degree.

There was an engineering consultancy, then diversification into property development, into kiwifruit-growing “and other bits and pieces”. He’s chaired health boards and been a director of organisations including TVNZ, Māori TV, Vector and Transpower, including appointments by both left and right-wing governments. He says he’s not especially political in the sense of supporting a party or a tribe.

He married Toni in 1974 and they have two children. For much of the past half-century he and Toni have lived in Northland and from 2007 to 2013 Brown was mayor of the Far North district, though he’s always had a home in Auck

land. He says at 50 he felt sufficiently well off to retire for the first time, but that didn’t last.

By his own account, his engineer’s eye has made him unbelievably good at identifying what’s wrong with an organisation or a situation and fixing it. His greatest hits include overseeing Vector’s recovery from Auckland’s catastrophic power cuts of 1998, something similar at Transpower in 2014, and the on-time on-budget building of Auckland City Hospital in 2001 when he was chairing the Auckland District Health Board (ADHB). (He also famously tried to prevent the children’s hospital being call “Starship”, but lost.)

His 2022 campaign for the Auckland mayoralty hung on his “Mr Fixit” branding, but not everyone has enjoyed being party to a Wayne Brown fix.

Some Auckland doctors talked about how Brown had been “divisive” and had a “aggressive and toxic” leadership style when running the

ADHB. As Far

North mayor he had his knuckles rapped following a blurring between his private property interests and his position leading the council.

Since becoming mayor though, Brown has faced fresh criticisms. Some are relatively traditional: he was the candidate from the right who promised to cut spending, slash jobs and remove services, and the left of the council pushed back, successfully knocking the edges off some of those cuts.

More unusual for Auckland local body politics, though, has been the way the mayor has been called out for being, well, kinda obnoxious.

It started even before the election, when a broadcaster’s hot mic caught Brown “joking” about how he would glue little pictures of the Herald’s Simon Wilson on urinals “so we can pee on him”.

Since then there have been reports of Brown upsetting council staff in the lifts by making demeaning comments about their jobs. He’s referred to councillors as “idiots”, to journalists as “drongos”, and in the texts we exchanged setting up this interview he’s called another journalist a “wanker” who writes “shit”.

I’m busy laying out these facts as preamble to a question when he interrupts to say, “I’ve got texts from existing politicians using exactly those words!”

Plus, he says, there was a time he went to lunch with Helen Clark and a friend warned him not to swear like he normally does but after the lunch he had reported back to the friend that “I didn’t say f... but she said it five times!”

But anyway – it wasn’t the swearwords as such I was about to ask about. It was more the disrespect and disdain the words convey. Why does Brown keep signing up to chair a board, or lead a council, or run a city, when he seems to hold so many of the people he’s obliged to work with in such contempt?

“Because I’m trying to fix things for people.”

He recounts how his run for Far North mayor grew out of his clash with a building permit official which made the newspapers, and how the phones then ran hot with people saying “run for mayor, Wayne, and sort this out”. So he acquiesced to the will of the people and ran. And won.

Now in Auckland, “I’m driven by the ratepayers of Auckland. I want to make things easy for them. Not a lot of people can fight their way through things like I can.”

Hmm. This is sounding pious, and one thing that Wayne Brown does not project is piety. So I try again: Look, I’ve seen you slumping grumpily in your chair during those council Governing Body meetings, eye-rolling at all and sundry. It doesn’t look much fun. Why do it? I mean – are there any parts of this job that actually bring you joy?

He ponders this, then says he does enjoy it when he’s talking to an audience and he manages to convince them that Auckland’s a great place to live and he can make things better.

“I can lift a whole lot of people’s spirits. I really like that. So it could be a business group, it could be a sports group and at the end of that they’ll feel, man we’ve got a clear direction here. Those things are really rewarding.”

There’s another reason he’s so rude in those council meetings, though. It’s

“I’m driven by the ratepayers of Auckland. I want to make things easy for them. Not a lot of people can fight their way through things like I can.”

Wayne Brown

to keep everyone awake. “It’s just trying to liven up a really dull day. Like there were two guys who came up at the front there and said, ‘Oh, we've come in almost dressed in the same clothes.’ And I said, ‘Oh I saw there was a sale at Farmers this week!’

“It’s a light hearted thing. It wasn't picking on them. And the rest of the room laughed, and they all woke up.”

Fact is, says Brown, you journalists have drifted too far from the way the public sees things.

“The public really like the way I am.” Jesting about pissing on a journalist’s photo, calling councillors idiots and a journalist a wanker, it’s just rough and tumble!

“Have you ever worked on a building site? On the building site, the language there is very inclusive, but it’s very rough, you know. The language is appalling, But the behaviour is very equal.”

I ask if anyone in his personal life ever suggests that he tone things down.

“Oh I get that quite a bit. My son runs the biggest PR company in New Zealand – but on the other hand I get huge number of supporters saying, you tell it like it is. We love the way you're doing it. We’ve had too much bullshit from politicians.”

I’m curious to know if there’s ever been a time in his life when Wayne Brown has made a mistake or been wrong.

What about the night of Auckland floods in January, when the new mayor was hardly to be seen, and ex police commissioner Mike Bush’s report a few months later found that “senior leaders underestimated the importance of their visible leadership roles”?

When that report landed in March, Brown’s office re-released a written statement with an apology for “dropping the ball” in his public communications that night. Now though, in person, he’s not about to apologise again.

The leadership being chastised in the report “wasn’t necessarily me,” says Brown.

“They’re talking about the leadership of the people who are paid to do that – the fire brigade, the police. These are people who’ve been paid for years. I’d been here for three weeks.”

OK, what about a much smaller thing? Was it a mistake talking to his tennis mates on WhatsApp about having to face up to the media drongos – a comment that got leaked.

Not a mistake, and actually a great thing for the English language, says Brown.

“I brought that word back into the lexicon.”

What about your relationship with the media in general: an early refusal to talk to reporters and the exclusion of some outlets from a major budget announcement?

My management of the media, says Brown, has been “perfect”.

Really? How?

“What I did was we stopped talking to you. I didn’t have commentary to make on every single thing. I was busy doing the work.

“And then – just like tomatoes mate – absence of supply increases the value. If I want to speak now, they’ll jump at it!”