Life
Dear Santa
by Bill Ralston
We’ve been good, so can we have a new Auckland?
A few years ago I attended a function in Christchurch, where, when the cheery Cantabrians had finished asking me what school I had gone to and whether I ski, the conversation dried up. A friend, a former Canterbury dweller, wandered over and was enthusiastically received by the group.
“Haven’t seen you for ages! What are you doing now, mate?” they asked. He explained that he was running the highly successful New Zealand wing of a large international banking company and living in a lovely seaside suburb in Auckland.
“Auckland! You poor bastard,” they cried in unison, and shouted him a beer.
I sighed and put it down to the kind of blind parochialism you only find in the South Island, but these days I’m beginning to wonder if they weren’t right in expressing their sympathy for anyone condemned to live in this city.
The Royal Commission set up to determine the future of Auckland and streamline its dysfunctional management system of seven territorial authorities and a regional council faces a huge task.
Auckland is a sprawling collection of villages that have grown together, and its local government structure reflects that historical fact. Because of its fractured governance, the greater City of Auckland has a piecemeal approach to its infrastructure. Its crucial public amenities are scattered, its arterial traffic is strangled, and when it comes to long-term development, there’s virtual paralysis.
It’s been obvious for more than two decades that the city needs another harbour crossing, but little has happened other than talk. Even when Transit is forced to admit that the clip-on lanes on the harbour bridge could suffer “catastrophic failure” during a traffic jam (when is there not a traffic jam on the bridge?), there is no sudden urgency to push through a tunnel from the North Shore. Currently the tunnel appears scheduled for completion somewhere around the turn of the next millennium.
The Rugby World Cup looms in 2011 and it doesn’t bode well. After the fiasco of the proposed waterfront stadium, the Eden Park redevelopment isn’t exactly roaring ahead. Where would we put everyone anyway? We’re expecting 70,000 visitors to a city that can only accommodate 35,000 of them.
Perhaps they all could sleep at the park – there’s no way they’ll get to Mt Eden because of the traffic. They could go by train, but as some moron failed to double-track the Britomart station, the congestion there will be worse than it is on the southern motorway.
Iknow I sound pessimistic, but Auckland’s planning and development is characterised by a dithering and short-sightedness that inevitably leads to gigantic screw-ups.
A super-city comprising North, South and West Auckland is the logical and probable outcome of the Royal Commission. That means that, finally, the region would have a common rating system, uniform planning codes and harmonised services. At the moment, God help any Auckland business that has to operate across several local authority areas and navigate its way through each council’s regulatory eccentricities.
Actually, this city is at its best when its citizens blithely ignore their local authorities and do their own thing. I live on Franklin Rd, not far from the inner city. Every year, virtually every home in the street is smothered in gaudy Christmas lights, and for the month of December we create a blazing carbon footprint the size of Manhattan.
Tens of thousands of people in happy family groups wander up and down gazing at the display; carol singers loiter on the corner; and my near neighbour, Hamish Keith, usually dresses up as Santa Claus and scares small children.
I have just dustily emerged from the attic with four boxes containing more than 1000 lights, 30 metres of green yuletide bunting and a dozen or so assorted gold cherubs that will soon festoon the house. These were generously left by the previous owners, who recognised the community importance of the sheer craziness of Franklin Rd’s month of lights.
Although the usually quiet neighbourhood becomes a zoo at night for four weeks, it’s worth it for the joy it brings to so many people. It’s a spontaneous act of community kindness. It needs no funding. It is voluntarily organised by one energetic local chap.
I suspect that if the council ran it, it would be delayed for four years, rescheduled for early August, encounter massive cost over-runs causing a huge rates hike and that each home would be restricted to a single long-life bulb. But they would have designed a nice logo for the event.
