Aucklanders don’t want instructions from Wellington

To become mayor of Auckland you have to spend weeks visiting every nook and cranny of our sprawling city. It is very rewarding, and you end up better informed than almost all citizens, having discovered gems like the lovely little yacht club way out at French Bay on the Manukau and having met wonderful audiences like the real rural Kiwis at Wellsford.

But you do uncover disturbing issues like the almost daily threats to our mostly Indian dairy owners, or the squabbles over use and administration of our volcanoes by the Maunga Authority. Many of these worrying issues are allowed to elevate to the point where there is either a disaster like the recent deadly stabbing of a dairy worker or the ludicrously expensive legal actions over selective tree removals from our much-loved volcanoes.

Simple, sensible solutions seem to escape us. Ramraids and shop attacks deserve real action, yet all we got from central government was a bungled attempt to fund protection works to the shops, rather than an effort to dissuade these mainly young criminals from this behaviour.

These young offenders are all aware that if you are under 18, all you get if caught is referral to Youth Aid rather than youth punishment. Calls for a younger voting age need to be met with a younger prison age. Tree destruction on our reserves needs to be met with wide-scale planting, using both supportive volunteers and young offenders under heavy control.

Government should be there to help, yet in some of our local squabbles it is the very opposite. There is another squabble over the odd decision to erect a huge concrete thing in Parnell Rose Gardens of all places, to remember the tragedy when an Air New Zealand plane flew into Mt Erebus. Surely this should be near the airport, perhaps reminding us that there is a risk in flying.

Instead of sorting this out with adult negotiation, we are now at the stage when a government ministry that most of us are not even aware we are paying for through our taxes, is threatening to sue the very council that owns the gardens. Is this real?

If there is a drive to remember our aviation history, better research from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage would have uncovered that there is actually a real aeronautical link to the Parnell Rose Gardens above Judges Bay, where a Grammar schoolboy built a plane back in the 1930s and went on to a notable aviation career, founding EastWest Airlines in Australia, where he is recognised by the naming of the town square in Tamworth.

A small plaque commemorating this man, who was my uncle, Basil Brown, would be a much more appropriate option for Parnell Rose Gardens where Basil would fit in with Dove-Myer Robinson, whom he knew.

If there is a need for more memorials, how about one to commemorate our worst road accident, the bus tragedy in February 1963 when 15 Ma¯ ori returning from Waitangi died on Brynderwyn (known as Piroa) when their bus crashed through a corner and landed on the farm my mother was born on.

Instead of a memorial at Piroa, this dangerous corner remains as it was while Waka Kotahi has wasted more than $50 million converting the northern side of Brynderwyn from a safe 100kph road to a dangerous 80kph road.

What about the dreadful marine tragedy at the Manukau Heads exactly 100 years before the Brynderwyn crash, when 189 lives were lost in the sinking of the Orpheus?

Instead of a memorial, the Government is wasting $2m on a report into whether Manukau Harbour should be a port, in spite of marine insurers saying they won’t insure large ships there and it also being on the wrong side of New Zealand for trade.

The one thing that resonated with all audiences through this year’s mayoral campaign was that Aucklanders want to make our own decisions about what is built in Auckland and we resent Wellington bureaucrats telling us what is coming.

We absolutely don’t want to be sued by the same Government that takes taxes off us. We want and deserve to be listened to and we all need to sort out our differences in a grown-up way without any reference to legal processes, which is the very last place to go to sort things out.

Calls for a younger voting age need to be met with a younger prison age.