March Newsletter : I AM Auckland’s Traffic
In 2003 I wrote a piece about Auckland, reacting to some startling news about the economic under-performance of the city.
It’s not that much better now really and Auckland, more than other large NZ cities is really feeling the brunt of the downturn. Layoffs have become commonplace. Everyone knows someone who’s been made redundant. It's getting depressing.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Auckland. I’m so pleased to be doing business there and since my main work is all about how to turn the downturn from crisis to opportunity, there’s a lot of demand for my services.
But, but. I have come face to face with the Auckland malaise in recent weeks and it does niggle at me. It’s just such a waste.
I went to an event at the Auckland Museum in early March called LATE. A fairly Grey Lynn crowd. . Don McGlashan performed and former Listener editor Finlay McDonald convened a panel of four to discuss the concept of an Auckland Super City – the amalgamation of all the disparate city units into a functioning whole.
My 8 Tribes co-author Chris Brown was one of the panel and I have to say he was the best one [though Gordon McLoughlin was cuter ]. The difference between Chris and the rest – I think that he was the only one who came to the topic believing change and progress was possible.
From the others there was [to my outsider ears] a largely insipid, whiny proactive excuse for why nothing would change and a Super City wasn’t going to work.
Wellington loomed large among their excuses. Those darn politicians were out to hold Auckland back. Someone suggested that Wellington didn’t want Auckland to be big and unified because then it’d have more power than them.
The thought of determining your own destiny was strangely absent.
The ghost of Sir Dove Myer Robinson haunted proceedings. If only we’d been allowed to follow his visionary traffic plan, Auckland would already be a super city. But the wicked Wellingtonians thwarted him with their dastardly road network.
Ironically, Sir Dove Myer reappeared as evidence of past vision lost in two focus groups I conducted in Auckland last week. In both cases he was produced in relation to a discussion about the traffic system and again he served as a kind of wistful doomed celtic warrior of lost hope and leadership.
To someone who lives at the bottom of the South Island when I’m not in Auckland, this perception of the city’s powerlessness seemed rather ludicrous. Places like Dunedin, Christchurch and Invercargill begin any discussion of investment in change with the view that nobody and certainly not Wellington is going to hand us anything on a plate.
Not unless we’re desperately deserving or very, very sneaky.
So what’s with these Aucklanders and their sense of passive entitlement? Don’t they know that doing it yourself means having it the way you want it?
While Auckland seems to have mastered in learned helplessness and cutting off your nose to spite your face, in the south and no doubt in the provincial cities of the North Island as well, we have become masters of blackmail, bargaining and bs.
In Auckland there seems such an absence of leadership and of collective spirit it’s difficult for them to coalesce around any cause. There’s so little awareness of themselves as part of a whole, they divide and conquer themselves.
In 8 tribe presentations I laugh about the North Shore tribe rationally self-maximising its way across the bridge each morning to work, totally fed up with all the other people doing the same thing.
But judging from my recent experience, this denial of involvement in traffic is an Auckland disease, not just one tribe.
I just want to shout at them: you ARE the traffic – with your one car per household member, driving the kids to school, all that living in one area and working way across town, the constant pressure on councils to cut rates, the fact you’d rather moan about a cycleway than use it and that at the same time you tolerate one of the most haphazard systems of public transport outside the third world.
But that’s no good. They just think I’m talking about someone else.
So let’s try for vision. At the time Auckland got the Harbour Bridge it was one sixth the population of New Zealand. Now it’s over a third. It’s predicted to keep right on growing and eventually to join up with Hamilton.
I don’t know who I feel sorriest for.
But let’s think forward 30 or 40 years into our probably climate changed future –beachfront Takapuna is now around Glenfield but don’t think about that.
Think Singapore meets Paris! A grown up city with stylish trains disgorging hordes of smart commuters at Britomart, Newmarket, Albany and Manukau. Ferries on the harbour. . . trams and trolley buses plus cute little electric cars and streamlined trucks on the roads. . . Petrol at $15 a litre because it’s running out.
Apartments with great views, green areas all around where all the ugly buildings got pulled down. [OK that bit’s fantasy] Finally a tunnel across the harbour because they realised that with rising sea levels you could build it on the harbour floor and just wait.
And people in focus groups moaning that their ferry comes every eleven minutes instead of every ten.
Ah, paradise.
Cheers
Jill
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006]
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". . . Auckland seems to have mastered in learned helplessness and cutting off your nose to spite your face. . .”
