For those wanting to post their votes on the Super City election, yesterday was the last day to do so. However, if you haven’t yet voted you can still do so – by dropping your forms off to a library or council office any time before midday on Saturday.
Over the past few days I have been following the only results we know yet – the record of how many people have voted in each of the voting areas. The information has been usefully updated each day – and makes for quite interesting reading and analysis. Late last week, and early this week, the NZ Herald ran a number of stories based on this information – one saying that Otara had been the keenest to vote, and another about John Banks scaremongering North Shore City voters into voting to stop “South Auckland taking over”. At that time it was the wards in Manukau City where voter turnout was highest. Coupled with this story on ‘exit polls’ of people who had voted, it seemed as though Len Brown was the hot favourite to take the super-mayoralty.
But looking at the most recent voting return information, I’m not quite so sure. Things might actually turn out to be a lot closer than we previously thought. The table below sorts the different voting areas according to the percentage of voters who have cast their ballot. I’ve also included the number of voters in that area, as we can put a little less emphasis on particularly small wards:
The most promising thing here is the sheer number of people who have voted. The 45.6% figure compares with 31% of people who had voted in the elections at this point of collecting votes back in 2007. With the final figure in 2007 being 37% (averaged across Auckland), it seems reasonably likely that over 50% of people will end up voting in these elections. That still seems very low in many respects – but it’s certainly much higher than what typically happens in local government elections.
The other statistic that is noteworthy here is when you look at the wards towards the top of the table, they do seem like the kinds of areas where John Banks might do reasonably well – parts of the city that are generally very safe National seats in general elections. By contrast, and also quite different to how things were a few days back, the bottom half of the table is dominated by wards in the south and west of Auckland: areas that might be friendlier towards Len Brown as they tend to be safer seats for Labour in general elections.
The table below shows the huge number of votes that have been received in the past few days:
Perhaps John Banks’s plea for North Shore voters to come on ‘en masse’ has actually had results in the past few days?
Looking at this information, it would make one feel as though John Banks has the edge. However, I think the result of this election will come down to one key thing – the extent that Len Brown can capture votes in right-leaning “blue” areas versus the extent to which John Banks captures votes in left-leaning “red” areas. Here’s where Brown probably has the edge. Whether or not that edge can offset the statistics above remains to be seen. I don’t think it will be a landslide result either way though – I think it will be surprisingly close.
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I wonder what the impact of the recent arrests, the name suppression, the enrollment rigging, the park naming, and the delaying tactics surrounding the Volare Ombudsman’s inquiry has been. It is possible that the rest of Auckland has woken up to the impact of being run like a larger version of South Auckland.
You’d be a Banks voter, then?
Banks is a bit of a nut and his Olympics idea was so out-of-left-field that it qualifies as possibly the zaniest political policy of the year. But the South Auckland Labour Party Machine has turned both Manukau CC governance and the super city election in to a joke. I think it is important that the new council get a clean and ethical culture established and embedded because it is hard to correct things once they go wrong. The secret Volare dinner guests, the secret payout to the retiring CEO, the naming of the park after the CEO, the CEO running interference on the Ombudsman’s inquiry, the electoral roll manipulation, the threats to quit the Manukau mayoralty if Brown is forced to name the people he met at Volare, the free-labour for visas bribery scandal, the fact that we’re voting for a potential councilor who has been charged with electoral offences but we can’t know who it is because he has name suppression, the allegations of further immigration fraud linked with Labour Party candidates, the anti-Maori comments to excuse the head slapping incident, and Brown’s shadowy campaign financing convince me that the South Auckland Labour Party culture isn’t the right one for the super city.
On the other hand a vote for Banks is a vote for cabinet control over Auckland. Not to mention the outright flip-flopping over issues depending on the audience of the day. I think the one thing we can all agree on is that both candidates are not very good and the best we can do is vote against the lesser of two evils.
Flip flopping is never a good look. But in terms of the “cabinet control over Auckland”, there are only a few ways to pay for large transport projects:
1. Pay for them out of an increase in rates or charges.
2. Pay for them using money saved from other lower priority council expenditure.
3. Pay for them out of asset sales.
4. Ask someone in Wellington to pay for them.
I would love for Auckland to take charge of this, but none of the candidates have stepped up to the plate. All transport projects “promises” by all the candidates amount to nothing more than promising to ask Cabinet to finance something. It wouldn’t be hard to take control of this… I’ve mentioned previously the Auckland council’s holdings in Mackay, Cairns, and Queenstown airports that could be liquidated to pay for a large part of either the CBD rail tunnel or rail to the airport. But it seems investing in Mackay, Cairns, and Queenstown are higher priorities than Auckland public transport for both Banks and Brown.
There seems to be an idea floating around that the Mayor will be able to tell cabinet to scrap the Wellsford motorway and use the money on some Auckland transport project. That seems to be a fantasy to me since the motorway is primarily designed to benefit Northland. It’s like saying the Mayor will be able to get the government to scrap a new hospital in Invercargill or a bridge in Tauranga and spend the money in Auckland. It just isn’t going to happen.
I had more in mind Auckland Council scrapping the billion and a half they have planned for the AMETI road widenings and spending that on more effective transport options.
With one third of the country’s rating base (probably more I guess if they are based on land value) Auckland will be able to fund many of it’s own big projects, especially if they can convince wellington to allow regional levies, fuel taxes etc.
Nick… AMETI is council funded so that would fit in to my “lower priority” category of ways to finance transport projects. Have any of the candidates proposed scrapping it? If not, I don’t think it would be a good look to shut down the project after an election. That would be far from transparent.
I’m not sure how I feel about regional taxes. The US has a bizarre system of sales taxes that vary from state to state and generally I think it is to be avoided. And with fuel you risk ending up with giant petrol stations just over the Northland and Waikato “borders”, as exist on the Swiss side of the Switzerland-Italy borders and which necessitate all sorts of regulations to stop Italians importing too much petrol. The council has an existing tax on residents in the form of rates, so why not use it?
They should shut down AMETI regardless, it’s a colossal expense for very little gain. I am really hoping that Auckland Transport revisit the needs of eastern Auckland properly rather than just struggling along with a wartered down rehash of the “Eastern Transport Corridor”. At the least they’ll have to change the name to ATIETI! I’m not surprised that no one campaigned on the issue, its better to keep quite about it from any angle.
My main issue with increasing rates much more is that it is regressive, i.e. a ‘flat’ tax based on property land value. That hurts some people very hard (i.e. home owners living off a pension) while the value of land under your property bares little relevance to how much value you gain from being a user of the transport system.
I like the concept of a petrol tax because it is the beneficiaries of transport projects who pay the most for them, whether a road or a rail line the people that drive the most (and pay the most petrol tax) are the ones that benefit the most for reduced congestion. Furthermore it helps reduce demand to drive and therefore assists in mode shift.
As for the border issue, I imagine people coming up from the Waikato might fill up at Pokeno rather than Bombay to save themselves three or four bucks on a tank of gas, but you’re not going to have people making the trip out there from metropolitan Auckland just to buy gas (or up to Mangawhai or Kaiwaka for that matter). The only place I could see that happening regularly would be Pukekoheans popping down the road to Tuakau to fill up. Anywhere else you are looking at at least a 30km round trip.
I’ve seen plenty of European border tax differentials in action. The most obvious being British folk popping over to France for the day and returning with a van full of cheap booze and tobacco. But also stumbling across a minor Netherlands-Germany crossing with a petrol station and a shop on opposite sides of the border with one doing a brisk trade in tobacco, IIRC, while the other sold cheaper petrol to their neighbours.
I stumbled across the Swiss thing when I pulled in to the very last Swiss motorway services on my way home to Rome, and only because I had some Francs to get rid of. The place was vast… maybe the size of a medium sized suburban mall and all the customers had Italian plates. The Italians had laws banning petrol containers, supposedly for safety reasons but in actual fact to stop people returning from Switzerland with a couple of hundred liters of cheap fuel in the boot or in their van. You wouldn’t make a special trip unless you were living within spitting distance of the border. But you’d certainly fill up if you were there for the day or for a holiday, and it might make sense for trucks to make a special trip anyway.
But can I assume the difference in price, exchange rate etc amounted to a lot more than 10c litre? Just how many Aucklanders are going to be motivated to drive to Northland or the Waikato to save $5 on a tank of gas?
I always thought that “what will happen at the borders” issue was overplayed. What was probably a bigger issue was the question of how you might enforce the system – and whether petrol stations would average out the cost over the whole country rather than apply the tax fully to the Auckland region. After all, nothing would really stop them from doing so.
Admin – I’m pretty sure some consumer groups based outside the city would keep an eye on that and jump up and down pretty quickly if there was even a sniff of petrol companies trying that on, hell they would probably jump up and down anyway.
I think a petrol tax is a hard thing to pass as price seems to be one of things that really affects people emotions, perhaps it is because it is a forced purchase and in our car dominated society most people would be cut off from the world without buying it.
The strange thing was that Aucklanders generally seemed to accept the need for the regional petrol tax. Of course it was controversial, but time and again consultation showed a lot of support – and this was in 2008 when petrol prices were higher than thy are now!
Admin: “What was probably a bigger issue was the question of how you might enforce the system – and whether petrol stations would average out the cost over the whole country rather than apply the tax fully to the Auckland region.”
I can’t imagine they’d do that. The rest of the country would beat them up about it, and what incentive would the oil companies have to subsidise Auckland customers by getting the rest of the country to pay Auckland taxes? In fact I guess having a million Aucklanders moaning about expensive petrol would be to their benefit.
A bigger issue is how you prove that Auckland’s fuel is actually taxed. Like, it all looks the same and is easily moved around the country. It’d be trivial to divert Waikato tankers to Auckland petrol stations. To stop this you’d need tamper proof meters and an enforcement branch. Again using an example from overseas, the UK has two types of diesel with the “red” variety dyed to indicate it has no (or low?) tax and is for marine use only. The dye allows law enforcement to check it isn’t being sold to motorists. To complicate things, it is illegal for boats in places like Germany to use the untaxed UK fuel, so you have the spectacle of German police levying multi-thousand-euro fines against UK yachts when they arrive in German harbours with red diesel onboard.
obi, the tax would be applied at the pump not at the source. There’d be no such thing as “Waikato” petrol or “Auckland” petrol. If you bought it at a station in Auckland the tax would be added at the register. If you bought it at a station in the Waikato, it wouldn’t. Any other way of doing it is begging for gaming of the system, and is also a total compliance enforcement nightmare.
If you look at the population distribution across Auckland, the vast, vast majority of people live so far away from the nearest regional border that travelling out of town to avoid the tax becomes a self-defeating exercise – the cost of the petrol you consume in the avoidance trip is higher than the savings you make from avoidance. That just contributes extra money back to the general roading fund, some of which will end up in Auckland in any case.
Sure those people who don’t leave there side of town may be scared Auckland will be “run” like SA. But alot of people living in SA know Central Auckland just as well as their part of town.
I’m picking Botany to support Brown because I feel alot of people there moved from SA.
It will be an interesting result, and only a couple of days left until we know the outcome!
If Banks gets in we may as well disolve the council and join with Wellington as essentially that’s where Auckland will be run from.
@ James B – They already run the trains from Wellington 🙂
word on the street is those in the more Banks orientated areas arent voting Banks, they’re voting brown. Every online poll (which normamally has a tendancy to have a skewed view towards the right) has Brown destroying Banks.
The only question is, how much is Brown going to kill Banks? I’m picking 20%
Slightly topic related but,
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are holding a rally this sunday in Auckland to get the then mayor to follow on his pre election promise and get the CBD tunnel going.
http://www.350.org/en/send-message-aucklands-new-mayor
No doubt Brown has been told about it, but it’d be awesome to get as many people there as possible!
The One that will rule Auckland has already been installed: Mark Ford.
But pleased to see the Gulf islands lead the democracy race, as usual.
as someone who lives in Papatoetoe, may i say i am totally P***ed off by what he has “allegedly” done.
I feel that the shadowy Act/National party culture also isn’t right for the new super city. First of all I’ll wear my stripes on my sleeve and say I’m a Len Brown supporter. Now most of the ‘issues’ which you have brought up have been addressed except the one ‘volare dinner’. I haven’t heard much about the reluctance of the Manukau City Council to release the severance pay on Leigh Auton’s of $171,000; however I do resent saying that there is something wrong with a park in Spinnaker Bay being named after him. He has been an employee at the Manukau City Council for the past 28 years working from a town planner to become the city CEO. My understanding he has been personally involved in this project; and it was on the recommendation of the local community board which decided that it should be.
In terms of the ‘voting scandal’ it was for a local board member on the Labour ticket not councillor; and my understanding on that he has only been a member since May to represent Labour in the Papatoetoe Ward. I personally think he has no place in local politics if it is proven that he did take part in election fraud and this is further stated by Len. In terms of saying Len had said ‘anti-maori’ comments with regard to his head slapping thing, I think that was his media guy who said that and was later denied and rubbished by Len Brown on numerous occasions. Furthermore, out of both Brown and Banks, if you want to look at an anti-maori candidate see Banks running his ‘anit-south Auckland’ campaign with a hint of racial undertones.
Now the Volare issue, I trust Len, yes I do. I feel that there must be a good reason why these people shouldn’t be named, but I shouldn’t speculate too much on that. It will be up to the privacy commissioner if they should be now and the ombudsman. I know him well, not personally, but in a professional sense and he is in my opinion a man of integrity and honesty and I do trust his judgement. When they do come out, they will probably be anti-climatic anyway. Brown: a $810 on a 10 person dinner vs. Banks: $10,000 on a new mayoral garage door.
The only issue I don’t know about is the “the free-labour for visas bribery scandal”.
On a transport note – I do agree with Nick that AMETI project should be scraped and Transport Auckland should relook at providing a RTN option instead of the ‘eastern corridor’ in disguise. Len seems the friendliest to public transport, mind you the council officials at Manukau City were not though. That is probably why most Manukau officials in planning have missed out on the top jobs – with many heading to the private sector including the entire Urban Design team.