History of Auckland City

Chapter 6: Progressing towards abolition (1971-1989)

Responses to development and congestion

Despite the completion of the first reviewed district planning scheme in 1970, the function demanded mounting attention. There were gladiatorial battles over major shopping centres in Remuera and Meadowbank, special studies of three older inner-city suburbs, preparation of a central business district traffic plan (1973), and, from 1974, the second review of the district scheme. Before this became operative in 1981, the 1977 revision of town and country planning legislation compelled the process to be relearnt. Innovations of the mid 1980s were the ordinance prohibiting the unauthorised felling or pruning of certain trees and appointment of a planning commissioner to expedite the handling of minor and uncontentious applications, this enabling completion of the third review, which attracted 2,600 objections and 36,000 counter-objections, just before the 1989 elections at an estimated cost of $4,000,000.

Though neither a funder, planner, nor provider of public transport, the Council had a key stake in ensuring mobility and combatting congestion. It controlled most roading and traffic, provided most car-parking, operated the Britomart bus terminal and had a vested interest in maintaining the health of the central business district. Furthermore, throughout the seventies the mayor, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, passionately believed that only a modern rapid rail system could reverse the alarming decline in public transport usage -- 22% of commuters in 1963 forecast to drop to 10% in 2000. To Robbie's dismay a financial commitment by the 1972-75 Labour government was disavowed by its National successor. Thereafter the Council was left to agonize over whether to encourage or discourage car commuting, build more carparking buildings, suspend the Western bus terminal plan while embarking on an ambitious scheme for Britomart which fell with the 1987 stockmarket crash, and belatedly give attention to suburban traffic congestion. The Auckland Regional Authority's 1989 adoption of light rail for the southern and western corridors received the Council's endorsement.

In the community's interest

With few exceptions, the Council's multiplicity of regulatory and service delivery functions became ever more demanding. The 1964 code of by-laws, which contained 3,124 items became steadily less possible to administer: its 243-page replacement came into effect in 1988. Areas high in controversy were restraint of excessive noise, fighting motor vehicle-induced air pollution, fencing of swimming pools, smoking in public places, and dangerous dogs. The exemplary Traffic Department reached new levels of efficiency only to be underhandedly nationalised by the Labour Government in 1989. As regards roading, noteworthy were the construction of Mayoral Drive (1985) and the Upper Queen St link (1987) and removal of the Quay St rail tracks (1989). Traffic calming measures in residential suburban streets became common. Refuse disposal was hard to get right. Multiwall paper bags replaced rubbish bins (1979), the collection service was privatised in 1979, and an overworked compost plant closed in 1986. The Council found the promotion of recycling to be a mixed bag. Notwithstanding the delicensing of domestic meat killing in 1979, the abattoir remained the largest such facility in New Zealand and in 1988 actually purchased a private meatworks in Pukekohe. A long link with history was severed when the Council vacated responsibility for care of the dead: the mortuary was transferred to the Hospital Board in 1979 and Waikumete Cemetery to the Waitakere City Council in 1989.

Living by more than bread alone

Cultural and recreational facilities stayed in an expanding mode. The library skilfully adapted to an electronic world, extended its services to six neighbouring local bodies and celebrated its centenary in 1980 with publication of a splendid history. The art gallery survived a tempestuous decade of administrative upheavals and still managed to mount superb special exhibitions. Its physical renaissance in the mid 1980s almost doubled the exhibition space. For too long the needs of the ageing Town Hall were lost in the forbidding shadow of the Aotea Centre, but eventually in 1988 the Council bit the bullet and resolved on its massive $40,000,000 restoration as a dazzling period showpiece. As to parks and reserves, there was always much occurring: indeed, there was even debate as to how many -- 200 to 300 -- parks the Council actually controlled. It added -- the coast-to-coast walkway; the Tahuna Torea nature reserve; the people in parks's programme; the reconstruction of Western Springs Stadium; the MOTAT tramline: it subtracted -- Motuihe and Brown's Island transferred to the Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park Board (1968 ) and 2,000 hectares of Waitakere Ranges reserves to the Auckland regional Authority (1983); it upgraded -- most notably Western Springs and the zoo; and once it just watched transfixed as the Bastion Point protest erupted in 1977.

Approaches to community development

On balance, the role of developing and sustaining the community took firmer root. The Council appointed New Zealand's first community advisor in 1970 and thereafter a welfare capability was energetically engineered but needed to tread a delicate political path. Urban renewal in Freeman's Bay struggled forward, a token housebuilding role was retained, emergency housing was vigorously promoted (as long as Government subsidies flowed), and by 1984 the pensioner housing stock totalled over 800 units. The community advisory bureaux multiplied and matured so that in 1981 one-sixth of citizens approached them for assistance. Community centres popped up everywhere, by 1986 sixteen providing vibrant focal points for community activity and dynamism. What really made a dramatic difference was entering into the providing of programmes for youth at the youth resource centre, expansion into daycare facilities and programmes for children, and for a decade from 1975, a practical fight to combat unemployment.

What is the CBD's real value?

What had long been happening to the central area gave the Council nightmares. It was very special financially, politically, economically and culturally, yet was steadily being drained of residents, workers, industry, commerce and shops by complex forces mostly beyond the Council's control. Its record in the two decades from 1970 was at best a well-meant but often unsure attempt to stem the adverse tide. At worst it actually dug channels which allowed that tide to advance. To be fair, some potent weapons for shaping the central area's destiny -- the public transport system, control of the harbourside, the snaking motorway network -- were in other hands. So while were was plenty of sophisticated planning and theoretically beneficial ideas, a relationship with practical outcomes was always tenuous. So the Council tried pedestrian malls, saving a few historic buildings but not others, granting development rate relief, expanding carparking space, prettifying Queen Street, and tinkering with the orphan-like Queen Elizabeth II Square. And above all, in 1990 it finally built the Aotea (Cultural) Centre. That, however, was small beer compared to what havoc the frenzied office building boom wrought to downtown Auckland between 1983 and 1987. The answer to the question of whether the City could have `saved' the central area, let alone creatively sculpted a superior version, depends on one's standpoint.

Cheering for itself and Auckland

The Council became more adept at promoting itself and the City it cradled and it generally reaped a good harvest from its investment in the maintenance of workable relationships with those crossing its path. A press officer's position created in 1977 was soon upgraded to Marketing and Public Affairs Manager. One of the products was a logo -- `Auckland City, Caring for You'. Annual reports to ratepayers became chatty and information leaflets abounded. Slow to gather momentum -- little happened for a decade after Los Angeles was embraced in 1972 -- the sister cities' programme leapt forward with the forging of links with Fukuoka (1986), Brisbane (1988) and Guangzhou (1989). In boosting the chosen `Auckland Alive' image, the Council sponsored an urbanisation conference (1975), the fiesta (1984-87), heavily supported the Auckland Public Relations Office, and finally became a nuclear-free zone (1983). And the City Council, especially the Mayor, Cath Tizard, was instrumental in securing the 1990 Commonwealth Games for Auckland. Another of the friendly faces of Council was as a benefactor: it gave grants and loans (though never funded from rates) to an astounding variety of local endeavours and causes. Its unfriendly face as a rates collector was a prime target during the `rates rebellion' of 1978-80. Relationships were normally cordial with the Government (although strained over blame for the 1984 Queen St riot), edgy with the Auckland Regional Authority and abrasive with the Auckland Harbour Board when land development was involved. Having established fourteen community committees in 1974, the Council intermittently had misgivings about its offspring causing more trouble then they were worth. Somewhat tied down in the 1980s, they survived.

Coping with the Aotea Centre and reorganisation

From the mid 1980s two topics exercised enormous sway over the Council's strategic agenda: they were the building of the Aotea Centre and the restructuring of the local government system. Understandably, both became preoccupations, but woven around them are such tangled political, financial and psychological webs as to make even a satisfactory summarising impossible. Originally conceived in 1910, resurrected in 1970 as a centennial project, and seemingly destined only to generate reports, the concept of a worthy civic centre crowned by a superb auditorium had repeatedly proven too big to handle. But it also flatly refused to lie down. A frightening obstacle course confronted it -- political opposition from many quarters; Government indifference; an unfavourable poll; dumping of the principal contractor midstream; a 100% cost overrun; and an Audit Office investigation. Rather touchingly, the Aotea Centre was declared finished and ready on the same day that a restructured City Council legally began its existence. And that -- the formal abolition of the City Council founded in 1871 and its merging with eight other isthmus local bodies as the final local act in the revolutionary restructuring of the national local government system in 1989 -- is a watershed history in itself.

G.W.A. Bush 5.8.98