Fighting to keep the village alive
Leafy suburbs of Albert-Eden struggling to save spirit of their community and manage inevitable change
The fish shop in Mt Eden Village has closed. The shop that helped to reinvent fish and chips in Auckland. A shop acclaimed for its service and its fish, exactly the kind of shop suburban villages need to survive. But it didn’t.
It’s a tough world, now, even in the leafy suburbs of Albert-EdenPuketa¯ papa. Mark Graham, first-time City Vision candidate, says the biggest issue is change. How to manage it, he means. Christine Fletcher, standing for re-election on the C&R (Communities and Residents) ticket, says the biggest issue is process. It amounts to the same thing.
“There’s so much change coming,” says Graham, “and we’re not good at dealing with it. People are experiencing loss of a way of life that isn’t coming back. And I think some of the local issues pale, given the scale of what’s coming.”
Climate change? “Yes, but not just that. Population growth, new technologies, especially in transport. The future of jobs.” Graham’s a bigpicture guy, but if he wins a seat, he’ll learn very quickly that the big picture — let’s have more public transport! — has a way of turning into local issues.
Where should the bus stops go? Why is that cycle lane there? What’s the future of this park?
Climate change and population pressure, wherever you look. The ward is full of it.
Fletcher and City Vision’s Cathy Casey have been the ward’s two councillors since the start of the Super City, nine years ago.
Casey speaks often in council on poverty and precarious lives, but she’s also the councillor who got dogs allowed on public transport and she’s led the opposition to public firework sales. What she’s most keen about, though, is a process.
Take the proposed recycling centre at Western Springs. Years in the planning, a joint initiative of three local boards, it will use a site near the motorway which has been home to the Horticultural Society. “It’s an ideal site. It’s been upgraded for the horticultural people too: They’re getting a better facility. This will create jobs and awareness. And it’s a recycling centre: It’s the right thing to do. Who doesn’t think that?”
The Horticultural Society is who. They’re talking about court action.
“I think of it like this,” says Casey. “You get something and you give something up, for the greater good. Don’t we all have to learn to think like that? You look for the win-win but everybody has to be ready to share. This whole business, you know, it’s about relationships and compromise.”
The same process has been evident at Monte Cecilia Park in Hillsborough, she says, in the fight over an old decision to demolish nearby pensioner housing.
The new plan is to build more social housing for the elderly, taking 800sq m from the park, which has been substantially added to in recent years and is now 15 hectares. Casey says everyone will win. C&R opposes the plan.
Why’s she standing again?
“I love what we do. I want a more connected city. I know we’re in crisis, in many ways, but I think the council is really good at building resilient communities.
“There’s so much negativity about that on social media.”
Casey points to the “wonderful shared paths” alongside State Highway 20, at Oakley Creek and on Meola Reef. “You know people were opposed to that one but they’re not now. We can do these things. I absolutely love it.”
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HRISTINE FLETCHER has been an MP, minister of the Crown, mayor of Auckland City and councillor. She’s especially proud of her record on public transport, urban planning, and environmental issues.
“When my Government abolished the Planning Commission in 1991 I crossed the floor. I think I still hold the National Party record, over Marilyn Waring, for crossing the floor the most times. I decided right then that I was going to make my own mind up. I’ve kept to that.”
She lobbied for school zoning. She was instrumental in stopping the proposed eastern motorway and in getting Britomart railway station built. “We could never have had the CRL [city rail link] without that.”
She pushed for rail to Pukekohe, despite “people in Pukekohe saying they will never, never, never want rail”. She says she established the first cycleway. Now, she looks at the Government’s inaction on light rail and worries it won’t ever happen. She’s keen on it, provided they learn the biggest lesson in politics: “You’ve got to take people with you.”
Despite Fletcher being C&R, she is also John Tamihere’s deputy mayoral candidate. But he’s a good ol’ boy, the kind of politician she’s tended to steer clear of. She doesn’t support some of his policies and he doesn’t share her commitment to public transport, light rail or cycleways. Why did she join him?
“I actually think he will do those things. John will take himself out of his comfort zone. But can he be managed? That’s the question. And we need legislative change and funding change and it will take a pitbull to achieve it.”
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LETCHER’S C&R running mate for the ward is Mark Thomas, who declared in his nomination he was living in his campaign office in Mt Eden. It’s a shop with no bathroom or kitchen, but it allowed him to say, in the voting instructions booklet, that his “official place of residence” is in the ward.
It wasn’t true, so why did he make that declaration? “It’s complicated,” he says. He hopes people won’t think it’s a big issue.
Thomas is a former Orakei local board member and more recently a “smart cities” business operator in Singapore. He’s been extremely busy on social media criticising Casey — an approach Fletcher is not part of. Indeed, Fletcher and Casey rarely speak critically of each other.
Like Casey, he’s keen on process and he knows how the council works. But unlike her, he thinks they’re getting it all wrong. “In nine years, what has this council achieved?”
Did he mean that? “No, definitely, they’ve achieved a great deal. But they don’t understand how to treat people like customers. Cathy Casey doesn’t know how to serve customers. I do.”
It’s a ward full of issues and many of them boil down to what Auckland Transport did. At the Mt Albert shops, it spent millions of dollars to remake the intersection, without solving the traffic problems, and to build a short cycle lane that goes nowhere. A rethink is scheduled for 2022.
Thomas blames Casey. She says it’s easy to criticise but now everyone has to work together on a new plan. She hopes her “compromise for the greater good” approach will flourish.
Mt Albert businesses, meanwhile, want a village centre that works. They look with envy at the popular restaurants of Sandringham and Balmoral and wonder how they can get themselves some of that.
Over at Mt Roskill, with homes for 10,000 new residents on the way, they want the same things.
“We’ve got to turn this into something or it will die,” says Julie Fairey, deputy chairwoman of the Puketa¯ papa local board.
It’s happening now. The Mt Roskill Kiwibank and Post Shop, like that Mt Eden fish shop, has just closed.
The hottest topic in the ward is the future of Chamberlain Park, a public golf course across the motorway from the Museum of Transport and Technology (Motat). The Albert-Eden local board wants to spend $30 million cutting the course from 18 holes down to nine and turning the rest of the park into sports fields, walking and cycling tracks and more, for the use of non-golfing locals.
The ward is bracing for rapid population growth and the board believes, with very good reason, that it has a duty to create more park facilities. But the people of the future aren’t voting in this election.
The golfers, on the other hand, have very good reason to defend the course as it is. It’s popular and they love it: Why should they have to give that up? Most of the golfers, though, won’t be voting on this either, because they don’t live in the ward.
The golfers say 1000 trees will be cut down. The board disputes that but, oddly, doesn’t know how many trees will go. It says thousands more will be planted, but how many saplings equate to each mature tree lost? Both sides claim to have a better environmental plan.
They’ve sniped angrily at each other and both have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority.
Cathy Casey’s “compromise for the greater good” doesn’t seem to have a dog’s show.