Aucklanders live in a great city, but things are far from sweet - Simon Wilson
THREE KEY FACTS
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
We live in a great city. Yes we do.
The State of the City report released today recognises there has been progress in some areas and it’s especially pleasing, in the wake of Covid-19 and the 2023 storms, to learn that our resilience is stronger.
But things are far from sweet.
It will come as news to nobody that high property prices and transport dysfunction both undermine us badly.
It may surprise some, though, to learn that our tech innovation sector also performs relatively poorly. This is because neither the business sector nor central and local government take it seriously enough.
Emigration provides the context for this report. Of the record 52,500 New Zealanders who left in the year to March, many came from Auckland and 39% were aged 18-30.
That’s not sustainable. As the report makes clear, there are too many cities elsewhere that offer more enticing versions of what we do.
What are we going to do to get a brain gain?
The report has some difficulty coming up with answers. For starters, it doesn’t acknowledge we’ve been talking about better transport, better tech, better education and all the rest for years. This isn’t new, but it feels like we’re stuck.
Then there’s the jargon. The report is stuffed full of language like “harnessing the value of place” and “the collaboration that drives successful spin-out and scale-ups is not as habituated”.
Why do they do that? Perhaps because it disguises the lack of a sharper analysis.
The report says we lack long-term planning, but we already knew that. It declines to say why. It calls for leaders with “fit-for-purpose urban vision”, but doesn’t say what this might mean.
Overseas, a non-partisan approach to strategic planning has emerged. Not here.
Our politicians have chosen not to agree what transport infrastructure to build, what education should look like, how central and local government should co-operate or how mana whenua can partner with everyone else to the greater good.
Too many of them prefer not to think long-term, because there are few votes in it. And instead of removing these issues from the political arena so we can progress, they use them as cudgels to batter each other with.
The new State of the City report, like its predecessors, does not confront this.
Politicians will line up to endorse this report, although it should make them feel uncomfortable because it’s their short-termism and bickering that have done the damage.
In a revealing passage, the report correctly identifies the need for good leadership, but buries it in jargon: “If Auckland’s to continuously succeed it needs to do what many of its peer cities are already doing and other larger cities have been doing for some time, and that’s shifting to third cycle approaches, change by orchestration rather than change by edict, you might say”.
In government and at council, we need our politicians to be Auckland heroes: leaders who make change happen and not just insist grumpily that it must.
Because right now we’re a bit short of them.
Read more about The State of the City here.
