I can’t do much but marvel at how these things play out.
Everyone I know is utterly pissed off with Auckland Council. They don’t like the job it does and they don’t like the cost of their rates.
So Aucklanders have a number of limp wristed weak as piss candidates foisted upon them, probably none of which they like.
None of these candidates talks seriously about lowering rates and how they’re going to do it. No one talks about the need to sweep with a new broom. Not one of them gives detailed and calculated alternative budgets, or real and clearly explained plans.
No media ask any questions directed at these objectives.
The whole exercise is the most ludicrous case of meaningless froth and bubble you could wish for. And they call it democracy.
TrueblueNZ 
My guess is Auckland isn’t that much different from the rest of the country, with the exception that Auckland had amalgamation shoved down its throat. The concept of ‘local’ governance has gone out the window.
You’re right, everybody – and I mean everybody – grizzles about their rates bill specifically and Council in general. But nobody feels they can influence what happens at Council, and therefore nobody bothers. Even the leading candidate ‘on the right’ – Vic Crone – can’t figure out what the Mayor’s responsibilities are vs the CEO’s vs Council vs Local Boards, so it’s no wonder nobody else can.
I live almost as far north as it’s possible to get whilst still within the Auckland boundary. We have been indebted and indentured by a rapacious Mayor and his administration to pay for such extravagances as a train tunnel under the central city (which neither I nor any of my neighbours will ever use), a new Council building on which the pre-purchase inspection was so poor they missed the fact it’s a crumbling, condemnable wreck requiring – at current estimates – $30 million of remedial works (but of course, like all tax- and rate-payer funded initiatives, look for that estimate to double or treble before works are finished) and a multi-dozen
propagandacommunications unit to tell Aucklanders how wonderfully well their great-grandchildrens’ inheritance is being ‘invested’. The Mayor is a spendthrift, the Council is a toothless, feckless, inept agglomeration of misfits and morons and the bureaucracy is running rampant.Anyone tries to tell you ‘amalgamation’ and ‘super cities’ are a good idea, punch them right on the nose.
Now as to the election, Vic Crone is out there meeting people and making a difference. But … our friend Whale Oil is backing (failed candidate from last time around) John Palino, and there’s also Mark Thomas with some pretty good ideas about how the place should function. The result will be a splitting of the sensible vote and the election of Phil Goff as our next Mayor.
Heaven help us.
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Thanks Gantt, great comment.
It seems to me that the Auckland city council election is taking place on its own isolated plane, with the actual voters having very little choice except in the end, the lesser of any number of evils.
Why can’t a rreal evolutionary get any traction, when IMHO that is what people are looking for?
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It’s cultural Marxism, but of course you already knew that. After decades of spendthrift waste and fraud across Auckland, the Council is a massive, bloated, tyrannous leviathan. The issue is, after so many generations of constant growth, the Left owns local body politics and the ‘right’ (to the extent there even is a ‘right’) is too scared to propose even moderate trims in growth forecast for fear of being vilified in the media.
Of some interest, Thursday this week is Tax Freedom Day in New Zealand. I don’t know if this includes local body payments in their calculation of which day is Tax Freedom Day. That aside, government in New Zealand sucks up 40% (yes, four-zero) of the economy. The only word anyone could possibly use to describe such a massive footprint on the economy (a boot stomping on the face of the economy?) is ‘fascism’.
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