Fletcher blasts mayor as weak, ineffective
Christine Fletcher has unleashed an extraordinary attack on Phil Goff, accusing the mayor of weak leadership and failing to make Wellington sit up and listen by holding their feet to the fire.
Fletcher, who has gone from voting for Goff in 2016 to seeking to bring him down at this year’s local body elections, said a year into his three-year term “I was ready to sign a petition to ‘Bring back Len’.”
“JT [John Tamihere] has bravado. Phil Goff is not sufficiently charismatic. He hasn’t built a team and he hasn’t created a cross-party Auckland caucus.
“He simply has been incapable of bringing the right political experience to the council table to take advantage of the opportunities amalgamation allows.
“He failed, in fact he has not even tried, to bring councillors together as a team on the key issues. His approach is based on divide and rule,” Fletcher said.
The Albert-Eden-Roskill councillor has had a strained relationship with Goff since he effectively dumped her and Waitemata¯ and Gulf councillor Mike Lee from the board of Auckland Transport in 2016.
Fletcher was one of nine councillors to write to Goff last year saying he ran a “non-inclusive style of leadership” and council trust and transparency was getting worse.
As deputy designate on a mayoral ticket with Tamihere, Fletcher said Goff worked alone behind closed doors with bureaucrats, commissioning expensive reports from consultants that only come to light for councillors under the Official Information Act.
As a member of the “B” team on council — Goff and his handpicked chairs and deputy chairs of committees make up the “A” team — Fletcher said Goff had yet to learn it was not enough to scrape through on a simple, manipulated majority.
His weak leadership had allowed bureaucrats to fill the void.
“Goff has clearly failed and another term of his mismanagement would be a disaster for our city.”
Goff dismissed Fletcher’s comments as election-year politics, saying he was proud of his record of making the tough decisions on housing, transport and the environment.
“We got a diverse group of councillors together from right across the political spectrum and got their endorsement for the 10-year budget that sets out the major changes that we will make to address Auckland’s problems,” Goff said. “I regard that as a real achievement.”