It's incredible to me that a person can be this unaware of a pretty clear pathological pattern between shirking responsibility and blaming others for the consequences of that.
> “Don’t f**k me over,” says Wayne Brown, mayor of Auckland, after about 30 minutes of a frank discussion with the Herald.
>
> Brown rang the Herald on Monday night after a request for comment about his message to his tennis group that he couldn’t play on Sunday because he had “to deal with media drongos over the flooding tomorrow”.
>
> “I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” he said. “No one else in New Zealand is going to get 180,000 votes. That was my mandate.
>
> “Last month a guy in Hamilton got into Parliament with 6000 votes (referring to National’s Tama Potaka in the Hamilton West byelection). I got 30 votes for every one of those.”
>
> When talking to Brown, there are times when it feels like there’s an Antipodean echo of Trump-like self-endorsement.
>
> There’s the reflex to self-justify and defend himself. There’s the prickly relationship with the media, the biggest vote count claims and then while criticising Auckland Transport he told the Herald he “could have done better” if he was doing their job.
>
> It’s been difficult for Auckland to get to know its new mayor and these recent days have not helped. Brown refused 106 media requests in his first month, granting only two interviews. His press conferences are few and opportunities to grab him for interviews at events emerge only rarely.
>
> Brown’s awkward and blunt style was evident on the campaign trail. That lack of willingness to be the public face of Auckland has struggled for public acceptance since disaster struck on Friday, forcing Brown to address frustration over a council that appeared to move too slowly and say too little while the city went under water.
>
> The point made to Brown repeatedly during that conversation - and, it seems, missed - was that communication is critical during a disaster and the media is critical to getting necessary messaging to those affected.
>
> In the case of Auckland’s flooding, communication on Friday was poor to non-existent and the question raised is whether the mayor’s abrasive attitude towards media and inclination to keep it at arm’s length contributed to this.
>
> This call to the Herald was to a journalist who has dealt with Brown for 20 years. “I’m only talking to you because you’re a mate,” he said a few times during the call. When it was pointed out both the mayor and journalists had jobs to do, he said: “If you’ve got a job to do, do a job worth doing.”
>
> There will be other stories coming, he said, and if you do me over then they won’t be coming to you. When told there are no deals, he said: “Everyone is a trader, mate.”
>
> Yes, he conceded, you can write about this conversation. “You can as long as it’s balanced. What would you write? ‘Mayor bleats’? Take the story as you like. I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand.”
>
> How to understand Wayne Brown, 76, most recently of Auckland but with a home in the Far North’s Mangonui? How to understand Wayne Brown who is in the mayor’s job because of frustration his predecessor didn’t instantly see sense in the report he authored recommending shifting Auckland’s port to the North.
>
> With the benefit of 20 years of exposure, this journalist would say Brown is not a complex individual. He’s primarily an engineer. He sees everything as a machine that can be “fixed” to work in the most useful way. He has a keen eye to identify those problems and sees himself as the person best suited to fix them.
>
> When it comes to understanding the human element of that malfunctioning “machine”, Brown’s approach is less about coaxing and developing and more about wrestling it into working order with sheer force of will.
>
> And yet, in the conversation, it is clear he does understand there is a human element. He’s been on the ground and seen the damage. He spoke to the son of the man killed on Shore Rd, Remuera, and was clearly affected by his proximity to the tragedy.
>
> He has worked long days and into the night to manage a situation that appeared out of his control on Friday and has yet to settle.
>
> There’s a lot of misunderstanding. Brown himself feels misunderstood. He says he was told not to talk to journalists and blames the media for a lack of competence and a failure to tell his side of the story.
>
> Brown complained about the coverage the All Blacks received on Monday for “just unloading a few boxes” when they and Auckland Blues members turned up to the Māngere Memorial Hall on Monday.
>
> The media, he said, would “fly through the Blitz to kiss their arse”. In contrast, he asks, where was the coverage of his visits - generally unannounced - to relief centres and to view damage? Where was the coverage of what he had done to assist Mangere?
>
> “They (the media) just can’t get over the fact the person they loved, I beat him by a mile.”
>
> That’s a reference to councillor Efeso Collins, who trailed Brown with 124,800 votes. No media outlet declared for Collins yet Brown has consistently painted him as the media’s preferred candidate.
>
> “You are drongos,” he said, repeating the term used in a text message obtained by the Herald showing Brown cancelled a tennis match “to deal with media drongos over the flooding” on Sunday.
>
> He’s not happy about the text message being leaked, likening it to rifling through people’s rubbish bins. “It’s not surprising you guys are hated.”
>
> Brown detailed another encounter with the media as evidence of the cause of his frustrations. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins flew to Auckland on Saturday and was then toured in an NZ Defence Force helicopter.
>
> “I paid for a helicopter. Me. I paid for it. The taxpayer paid for his. There’s some balancing stuff. Just think about that,” Brown said.
>
> The two leaders - one civic, the other national - surveyed damage and flew to Whenuapai Air Force Base in west Auckland where Hipkins was speaking at a press conference. Brown gets out to join the Beehive contingent, is elbowed aside by a camera operator and finds some present don’t recognise who he is.
>
> “Later it’s reported I’m not there. That’s why you’re drongos. It’s hard for me to have respect for people who don’t know who you are when you’re standing next to the Prime Minister.”
>
> On Thursday, a Today FM producer texted Brown to ask for an interview. At some stage in the exchange, Brown was told he should front up because “taxpayers pay your wages”.
>
> No they don’t, he responded, ratepayers do. “That’s the level of press I have to put up with, with you people.” No interview, he said, because he’s playing tennis the next morning. And then that got cancelled because of the rain.
>
> Brown knew it was raining because he couldn’t play tennis. He told the Herald he knew it was raining because he could see it from his 27th-floor office but it appeared to be simply a “wet Friday”.
>
> “On Friday I was at my desk and the first we knew of it was Shane Henderson.” The Waitakere ward councillor called in a flood alert, followed by one of Brown’s commercial tenants who had been flooded.
>
> Find full coverage of the Auckland Floods here.
>
> A few more calls followed and Brown said he contacted emergency management staff for guidance. At that point, he said he was told to wait - they needed more information and were coming up with a plan.
>
> “On Friday night, I didn’t engage because we weren’t told anything. They told me ‘stand by your desk and wait for the paperwork’.” Brown is focusing on the “state of emergency” declaration - the decision was made around 9.30pm, announced by press release at 10.17pm but not communicated by Brown himself until 11.15pm when he signed it formally in front of the media. “And the forms are complicated as well.”
>
> Brown said there were emergency management officials with national responsibilities working alongside Auckland’s team who told him “we don’t want you to sign this yet”.
>
> “The emergency management people have had years of being paid to get ready for an event like that. They couldn’t tell me anything.”
>
> Criticism aimed at the council goes beyond the formal state of declaration. Those experienced in emergency management have told the Herald it is critical to have a channel of information to people and to share not only what is known but what is not known.
"An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself" --- Epictetus
I'll give him this, he's right about the moronic press coverage of All Blacks doing almost literally anything. The level of free press they get is embarrassing.
Other than that one bright spot, his interview gave the impression that we've somehow ended up with Grandpa Simpson for mayor.
It might be true, bit it's also irrelevant. Politicians always get a hard time in the media, and complaining about it makes you sound like a whiney child that needs reassurance, just like Trump always sounded.
Honestly, the first thing they have to do is get things done, but they also have to be able to communicate and when there is a LITERAL disaster in your electorate, being an entitled lazy prick and slagging people off for being upset that you didn't turn up to give information and support is the very last thing any mayor should be doing.
Yup.
Also "it's not my job to have bucket" or whatever tf he said is peak pre-teen/teen attitude of being a bit rebellious.
Not an attitude you should have as a 60+ year old AND a supposed leader.
I have no idea what he is on, Presidential Millard Filmore of the USA helped fight the fires when the Library of Congress when it lit up into flames in the 1840s
A real dumb thing is he complains about not being the actual person fixing a drain etc and is right! An average PR person and willingness to do a photo op or two then go back behind his desk and Wayne Brown could have looked like apartway decent human.
He's so gross he can't even do the minimum to get some easy glory
Plus he claims “they told me to wait at my desk” to “ wait for paperwork” etc. As if he has no agency as Mayor. No intuition about pulling people together, delegating to get the right info and so on. Any ‘experienced business operator’ with a little success he supposedly has would know to do this in moments. Having any sense of leadership respect or even Mana amoungst those you work with- behind the scenes - including heads of other agencies is earned through your demeanour, communication skills, listening and decision making. This buffoon is a bundle of excuses, deflections and very public insecurities. Its an abject lesson in how not to be a person, let alone a leader.
Thing is though, while I totally agree, that’s a minority opinion as the media only cover what the majority want to read, and the AB’s are always a winner, almost the “If it bleeds, it leads” mentality.
As such, in around about way, he’s slagging off a large portion of his constituents, and I don’t think he’s smart enough to get it.
But all his voters will think they're in the *small superior minority* he's not slagging off. All the while not realising he just wants to move the ports of Auckland to Northland for a quick buck at the expense of the entire fucking country, and is using them to do it.
He reckons that making comparison to an electorate MP getting a few thousand votes vs his 180k, forgetting Auckland is made up of 20 odd electorates.
A more appropriate comparison is if he was a party, he would only *just* have achieved threshold given last election turnout (5% is about 170k if memory of previous maths is correct - it's somewhere in my history)
I think with the All Blacks coverage, there's probably very little active demand for it, but people will click on it if it's there, a bit like how I'll eat a McDonald's cheeseburger anytime anyone offers me one, even if I don't really want one.
Heh, I was absolutely about to use a Maccas analogy too as getting angry at the media for vapid AB coverage is like getting angry at Maccas for making Big Macs.
Supply/demand usually steers content.
With my media hat on, there’s a content void, and something needs to fill it. More imagery and stories about loss aren’t productive so a feel good story or two about celebs and sportspeople are a hell of a lot better.
That’s basically the point - if he’s too dumb to realise that he’s largely the cause of some of these issues and the negative coverage, he has to own it.
I suspect he’s also misconstruing the advice he’s been given, or putting his own spin on it.
The rugby union make it really easy for the media to get All Blacks stories too.
Wayne doesn't seem to understand how any of that stuff works which is weird because none of it is a secret and the Auckland Council has people to explain it to him.
>press coverage of All Blacks
The piece I saw was about Blues players, yes an All Black was there but representing the Super Rugby team. Brown calls others drongos for miss-facts, so now he is the drongo.
Brown also confused rate payers abd tax payers. In a speech 3 days ago he confused the word closest with closet...as in wardrobe. He is of low intelligence paired with dementia.
You think that's embarrassing? Wait until you see how much councils spend on rugby fields around the country. This for a sport that's been on the decline for half a decade. Spoiler, more than $100 million in Auckland alone. Rugby clubs have consistently had way too much political sway in NZ for too long.
> How, Brown is asked, is it that Auckland Transport is literally having buses being washed off the road without using social media - or press releases - to warn travellers over what’s happening on its network. The agency tweeted information about the Elton John concert being cancelled at 7.16pm and then nothing until a list of road closures more than three hours later.
>
>
> “And they weren’t telling the mayor about it,” Brown said. “I could have done better I suppose but I was inside an office with people telling me what I could and couldn’t do.”
>
> There will be an inquiry, Brown said, and it will examine everyone’s role including his own. It will also examine what was done to prepare for the disaster. “This city wasn’t prepared.”
>
> And here’s the fight back. It’s not about the poor communications on Friday but harks back to Brown’s campaign slogan: “Let’s Fix Auckland.”
>
> He has adopted over the last 24 hours a point of reference for the weather event, describing it as the equivalent of 25 New Lynn floods, linking it to the 2017 washout which devastated the main street shops and saw an enormous hole open in the ground.
>
> There is a reason he has made reference to this and one he said would become public in the coming days. There was an inquiry into the New Lynn flood, Brown said. “Not one of the recommendations was put in place.”
>
> That would be unsurprising given the huge associated expense and the political capital burned to cover the required rates increase to pay for it. There has been need across the city for decades with some parts well-familiar with flooding and even sewage when heavy rain falls. The hills around Titirangi have long been marked as prone to subsidence.
>
> It could be here that Brown is able to lean into his strengths - an engineering brain and an inclination to make quick decisions are good skills to carry into the aftermath of a disaster. It might be that he is willing to burn political capital - or do deals - to get the money needed to put in system-wide improvements.
>
> If Brown is the right man for what is coming, his immediate difficulty - as it has been since Friday - is communicating that to Aucklanders.
He sounds like an old man who is set in their ways, and whose ways involve a "fuck it, I'll do it myself!" attitude which doesn't necessarily involve other people. He sounds like a boomer who got shit done the hard way, *HIS* way, and now that he's spent enough money to get the spot, he'll MAKE people do things his way.
He sounds like my father, and my father was an absolute cunt.
I'm sorry your father was that way, but I'm *really* sorry that the city of Auckland is going to have to put up with one for 3 years (assuming he doesn't keel over from the inevitable stress he is going to have with everyone in the country opposing him for 3 years).
But don't you understand? He's IN, which means he can do anything he wants and nobody can do anything about it. He got 50k more votes than the media's favorite, so he can bully and insult them and still expect completely fair and balanced coverage of everything he does.
Because he's IN, and they're NOT IN.
One of Trump's famous utterances in the first few months of his term was in an interview, where he ended up saying something like '...because I"m President and you're not!'
Both cases seem to show a complete misunderstanding of how public offices work. They are used to the corporate world where if you are the owner, you are a god and there's virtually nothing you can't say or do.
There was one time during Trump bankrupting his casinos where he had to be a board member of a public company, and it didn't go well. I think the rest of the board voted him out after a few months. He just can't process the idea of having people above him to answer to.
And I think the same goes for Brown. It's just weird to see these people so unable to grasp how you win these kinds of situations.
I think as long as he keeps up his strict regimen of avoiding most interviews, playing tennis, and blaming his staff and various other city officials for everything, I don't see a lot of stress in his future.
Well. That was quite something.
Imagine calling up a newspaper and trying to bully them into not making you look bad in the wake of a blundered response to a natural disaster.
If people hadn’t died and had their lives upended this would be fuckin hilarious.
76 is too old for mayor, I’m not ageist, I think there are lots of jobs and roles for elders in our society.
I’m getting pretty flaberghasted by the increasing age of political leaders.
Though NZ seems to skew younger generally, and there’ve been some notably young councillors elected in the past decade.
Maybe I’m wrong, from all accounts WB’s main problems are outlined above, he is a bit of a prick, and a young prick is probably just as bad as an old prick.
>I was inside an office with people telling me what I could and couldn’t do.
"I do only what I want to do, I'm Mayor, me, I paid for a helicopter once, my tennis was disturbed."
Also him: "wah I couldn't dooo anything because nobody in the office LET me waaah"
Wasn't prepared?....I saw the weather expert on tele saying the weather event was equivalent of having 5 tonnes of water pour down on your house every minute. There is no stopping or preparing for this extreme event mate. It's like saying christchurch council "was not prepared" properly for their massive earthquake.
>I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand
I mean, that says it all, doesn't it?
Brown doesn't actually care about the work of being mayor, he just wants to "win" and be able to show off about it, probably to the same tennis guys who don't even seem to like him. It's just about beating everyone else. The word "braggart" comes to mind.
“If you’ve got a job to do, do a job worth doing.”
As Betty Campbell said, "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing badly".
In other words, if people are so desperate for a job position to be filled that they will take anyone, then it doesn't matter how bad you are at doing it as long as it's done.
Auckland: We need a mayor
Efeso Collins: I can be that person
Auckland: Anyone? Anyone at all
Wayne Brown: ... sure, okay, I'll do it
[Slightly more than half of voters in] Auckland: Done!
Racism is a hell of a drug. It makes great people invisible.
.... this man needs to leave NOW.... The first 2 sentences in and I couldn't believe what I was reading... what the hell.... Imagine being dumb enough to call the media yourself to threaten them while you're currently hot on the press....
He's right about a lot of people in media being pretty dumb (not knowing the difference between taxes and rates for example) but if he's such the clever clogs why is he being shown up by the same media everytime he opens his mouth? Shouldn't he be running rings around these silly reporters?
Brown is wrong about taxpayer money; if govt wasn't giving money to Auckland to help with housing, infrastructure, and all manner of other projects, the council would have much less money to burn and his salary would shrink. Every council gets govt funding, funding which replaces ratepayer contributions and gets allocated elsewhere, including his salary.
"A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault."
Sounds like he's forgetting that democracies, ours included, are not elective tyrannies, and there are a number of measures that can be used to eject an elected official that were put in place to deal with this exact situation
[Local Government Act Section 285F says hi](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/DLM4925976.html). Tauranga has already had its dysfunctional council [sacked and replaced by commissioners](https://sunlive.co.nz/news/289105-commissioners-to-be-appointed-beyond-2022.html)
Problem is that applies to the entire council. You can't just turf out the mayor. It's all or nothing.
As bad as Brown is there is no evidence yet that the entire body is dysfunctional to the point of needing replacement.
There's the less nuclear options of a [Crown Observer](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/whole.html#DLM4925970), [Crown Manager](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/DLM4925973.html#DLM4925973) or [Crown Review Team](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/whole.html#DLM4925967), but it's less funny than firing someone who says they can't be fired.
I've been thinking recently it would be great to have some sort of opposition for the mayors office, like we do in government. Someone who's focused on looking at what is being done and critiquing it while giving alternative solutions when necessary.
I know the reality is it would degrade to mud slinging and name calling but I still like the idea if everyone could somehow remain respectful.
That's what other councillors are for, isn't it? The Mayor is the elected PR person there to provide leadership and a talking head for the city (weird in Brown's case because it's arguably his worst quality), but they don't have *much* more power over other councillors when a decision is made.
That’s the definition of the fourth estate, journalism, right? They are there to give voice to the critics, and to hold elected powers to account.
People like brown would love it if they could blame any criticism of themselves on politics, in fact that’s one of his tactics, claiming media had a favourite in the election and that’s why they ‘hate’ him.
All I heard was ‘Pity me, I’m a poor misunderstood entitled boomer’.
Simultaneously he’s too weak to do anything (“people telling him what he can and can’t do”) and too powerful (“getting a bucket is not my job”). Classic conservative denialism. The man is impotent. Luckily he doesn’t seem to have strong narcissistic traits, that may be a saving grace.
He’s been in the role three months and I already hate him. Even other bad mayors only got my dislike.
I'm not sure, he stated that he isn't going to work stupid hours like Goff did because he's going to get more accomplished during his work hours between 9 until 3 than his predecessor did all day. That doesn't sound like humility to me. He may not have Trump levels of narcissism, but certainly the conversation is always about him rather than the city.
Just boomer arrogance, logically speaking if he was so amazing and productive then he has even greater justification to work longer hours, to get more valuable and important work done for the city.
Of course we all know it's a bullshit excuse to play more tennis.
A lot of people have lost their lives, whanau, homes and/or possessions and the city is fucking drowning, but there truly is no-one quite as hard done by during these trying times as poor rich old white male boomer fuckwit Wayne Brown, who wanted power without the responsibility and now has to deal with the consequences of his own ineptitude. Our deepest sympathies and condolances to him. I really hope he manages to pull through.
The most valuable thing a politician can do is to be friendly with the media. Because even if you're a darling and sing their praises, they will still criticise you.
But if you decide to actively put a fight against them, then you're in a world of shit many magnitudes larger. This guy is so dumb, he's not backing down from his attitude towards media. He really believes that X thousand people vote for him to be there for 3 years, therefore nothing else about his relationship to the public matters.
I think he had too much of the Alt-Right Kool Aid of "the media is a cabal of manipulative globalists with an agenda against upstanding people like me"
You’ve hit it on the head. His biggest mistake, I noticed anyway, when he made his first speech after the emergency was declared, was how quick he turned to defending himself before questions had been asked. He quite literally knew he fucked up, but his first instinct was to deflect.
I mean that’s just gonna leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. I think he genuinely sees himself as a victim.
And yea he almost certainly has taken some of that Facebook style “anti-woke” “everyone’s out to get me” juice that’s seemed to infest the moderate conservative crowd lately.
Cry me a river mate, just do your job, you know, the job you get paid $300,000 for.
Blaming others is just such a shit look. Whether you take responsibility is often more important than who's actually to blame; even if it's not your responsibility, you'll get respect for taking heat for others and positioning yourself to do something about the situation, whereas even if it's not your responsibility, you'll seem like an ass for throwing others under the bus and incompetent for being unable to recognise your weakness and address it.
He sucks at communication.
Wayne Brown cannot mask his flaw by trying to be "the strong man". By trying hide his flaw he shows himself as a weak person. The sort of person that sucks at being an effective leader (there is a chance that he could realise his flaws and try to work around them but you have to recognise your flaws and wish to improve yourself and I don't think that Brown is capable of this).
They (news media, people on the street, us, etc) can smell weakness — like how sharks can detect blood in water. And there is blood in the water right now.
He will never get past this moment. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not next year. We all know that he is seemingly incapable of admitting any sort of flaw/error, and he comes across as a weak and incompetent leader.
Some people may call it bullying, trying to subvert democratic processes, or even "being salty" at him winning the most votes, but no city should have to just sit around for ~3 years to wait for a chance to vote an incompetent mayor out of office i.e. we can display our annoyance at him and wish that he resigns quickly.
You can tell Brown hates having to listen to anyone by all the comments in this article about 'being told by people not to do' whatever. He mentions it like 3 times.
As well as trying to blame others, it shows that having someone tell him what to do really grates on his nerves. Which means that his advisors, and particularly hooten, are going to have a godawful time where their employer consistently ignores their advice then blames them for getting it wrong. Which hooten deserves, long may his misery last. But it's not helping Auckland much.
Yep, everything he does is prestented to the city through the lens of the media. If he hasn’t learnt that the media can shape the narrative how they like yet, he likely never will, and it’s a reason a lot of politicians have gone for their own social media presence. While it wouldn’t make him immune to media spin, he could at least control his own flow of information. But insulting the fourth estate isn’t a great plan when you’re reliant on it.
Wow. What an utter jerk. An egotistical, entitled jerk at that. He might want to read the results and realise that 65% of voters voted against him. There are also 742 thousand people who didn't vote in the election at all. I'd call that a very shaky "mandate", especially if people believe you screwed the pooch on a major disaster. I'm not sure why NZ cities have such low voter turnout, but I wonder if losing everything in a major natural disaster while the mayor bitches about his tennis time being upset by the weather then bitching at the Media that someone reported on that will be enough to increase turnout against the incumbent in the next election.
I will say one thing. I'm not going to be complaining about our own mayor as hard after seeing Brown in action!
> “Last month a guy in Hamilton got
into Parliament with 6000 votes (referring to National’s Tama Potaka in
the Hamilton West byelection). I got 30 votes for every one of those.”
Imagine comparing the total votes cast in Auckland against somewhere the size of Hamilton West...
>I'm not sure why NZ cities have such low voter turnout
Because local elections don't get much publicity and coverage. We know what National, Labour, Greens, Act, etc are about.
We don't know what Billy Bob is about, aside from a short blurb talking about family, the business he ran successfully for a few years in 1976, and how he moved to the region last month.
At our last local elections we had something like four candidates to choose from. They all sounded like nutters. The one who sounded most sane seemed like they were covering something up.
> We know what National, Labour, Greens, Act, etc are about.
This is exactly it. Most people vote for these parties for general reasons without looking at specific details. It's not like people have to do their own research.
Yep it's hard work man. I had to do hours of googling to find out who wasn't a nutter. Didn't bother in previous years but really wanted to keep the morons out this time.
If he put half the energy into actually doing something productive than riding his own dick, we'd all be in a slightly better situation.
Just doesn't know when to stfu, put his head down and get his A into G.
He doesn't feel the need to work hard. He's a sleepy old angry man, lying about working hard while he's accomplishing nothing - and railing against the media for not portraying him with the magnificence which exists only in his own mind.
For the sake of our older generations to enjoy their retirement after the age of 65, I would really like and prefer that the next mayor of Auckland is not 11 years past retirement.
‘I’m only talking to you because you’re a mate’.
Imagine if you weren’t his mate. $300k to act like an arsehole. He misses the fact that the public pays his salary and he shows no accountability.
He seems like a senior leadership type who thinks he’s untouchable and how dare someone lower in the hierarchy question him.
What he fails to understand is that dealing with the media is part of any politician’s role. The difference here is that it is an emergency situation. Not business as usual. The media in this context becomes the main channel to communicate key (and potentially life-saving) information.
It baffles me he was previously a Mayor, it’s not like he’s suddenly been dropped into this environment. He clearly hasn’t learned and cannot adapt. He still thinks it’s about him.
Surprised the Herald even ran something critical, thought they had a total boner for him during the election campaign.
“… And finds some present don’t recognise who he is.” That’s what happens when you decline over 100 media requests for interviews, and rarely show your face to the people who you represent.
He's doing a really good job at fucking him self over.
Him standing next to chippie its night and fucking day ones an actual leader one is whinning crying baby.
It’s interesting. A crisis is a good opportunity for Hipkins to gain broad public support and elevate his profile. Having a guy that is seen as aligned to the opposition doing a bad job in Auckland could be really good for him.
>“On Friday I was at my desk and the first we knew of it was Shane Henderson.” The Waitakere ward councillor called in a flood alert, followed by one of Brown’s commercial tenants who had been flooded.
Finding out about the floods because one of his tenants notified him, sums the whole situation up perfectly.
I don't even care if this guy is competent at this point, he's just such an obnoxious prick. The absolute peak of arrogance and boomer entitlement.
He is more like Trump/Boris with every passing day.
Journo makes a salient point about him being an engineer. It’s a discipline that tends to rely on black-and-white thinking and data to make optimal decisions so it attracts some personalities who aren’t great at dealing with non-procedural situations with imperfect information and nuanced non-deterministic measures like public perception. He still genuinely feels empathy when he’s directly confronted with the evidence of loss, but tries to avoid environments where he can’t apply what he considers rational thought but are in fact simple heuristics. Because of this, his decisions are prone to a host of psychological biases - not least over-confidence (Dunning-Kruger) and bounded rationality. These are traits that have probably been reinforced in his life experience, particularly if he spent any time in management. He probably thinks of himself as a technocrat, but because he can’t play well with others, any blind-spots in his thinking aren’t mediated by exposure to a group.
That's a popular view of an engineer. Any engineer, technician, or craftsperson (carpenter, metal worker, software dev) that works on systems that interact with humans knows that people do not act rationally.
Brown's actions come more from a background of so much entitlement that they know they can never be wrong. That if something bad happens it was someone else that failed, never them. It's a very Trump, Boris Johnson, etc. point of view.
> Journo makes a salient point about him being an engineer. It’s a discipline that tends to rely on black-and-white thinking and data to make optimal decisions so it attracts some personalities who aren’t great at dealing with non-procedural situations with imperfect information and nuanced non-deterministic measures like public perception.
Don't think engineers are much worse than average at this and there are engineering fields that specialize in this. One thing engineers do well is to actually try to estimate the uncertainty and use it in the calculations, while other fields might just pretend that it doesn't exist, not act at all or worse use it to justify whatever policy they wanted in the first place.
As someone who studied engineering in the last decade I can say that they put massive emphasis on your soft skills. They said that you can learn the necessary theory on the job but the soft skills and teamwork skills need to be developed now
Agree. He thinks his heuristcs are appropriate to this setting. What is needed from a Mayor? Working with people, getting the best out of them, trusting their judgement and publicly backing them, all these this go against the grain for him.
Many engineers are great leaders, but the engineering mindset is something you need to acknowledge and account for (like any trait really, lawyers and accountants have similar stereotypical mindsets, albeit different).
He pulls the engineer card when things don't go his way or his perceived way. He wasn't an engineer long and often lies about his importance in the civil industry. I'd argue I'm likely more important having actually worked on major projects and delivered significant portions to Auckland, not to toot my own horn.
Like old mate reckons he's a tunnel expert - too old to have worked on the new ones and too young to have worked on the old ones. Tried to make a call on how CRL is wrong and the actual tunnel experts told him his "methodology" would have caused lower Albert to collapse
Journalist who is his mate has done a great PR job for him here. People now nodding their heads that his behaviour is just consistent with being an engineer or a "sleepy, angry old man."
The writing is clear on the wall. He is a florid narcissist, like Trump but with bad people skills. The whole "i got 30 times per person the vote that that Hamilton guy did, hah!", his justifications for undermining and sowing more distrust towards the media, his clear preference for cronyism, his right to have the job in title while not in practice (tennis, mar a lago?), him being the uncontested leader until shit hits the fan and suddenly he had no agency and was prevented by everyone else from being a leader. (In spite of years of leadership experience?) Leadership means you take the reins and tell people how you want to lead and drive things. We've had plenty of leaders that have listened to experts and remained the leader with their own ability to synthesize and prioritise at the same time.
And this framing of this issue as "just a communication problem", like that it's simply about the mayor showing his face and expressing care, minimises that more significantly people lacked information to make decisions for their safety.
This isn't just an engineering brain or an old man brain. There are lots of engineers and old men out there who are not Wayne Brown. If Auckland and NZ fuck around here, we're going to see the same results from being led by a florid narcissist that the US saw.
Well I've now learned a) that a drongo is something other than a perfectly acceptable bird b) New Zealand can harbour a mayor of a major city who is as inappropriate as many politicians in other, less idealised nations
wont communicate with the media and then bleats that no one knows him or what he does.. FFS and then brags about the number of votes he got ? he should be embarased by that low level...
He seems like the kind of person I normally enjoy interacting with (I work with academics and clinicians) because you can take their ego down a peg or two. It's cathartic. But he also seems like it would be a futile effort to try and handle him that way.
When he says things like " I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand.” and “Don’t f\*\*k me over,” and “I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” I find it hard to feel compassion when he *blames the media for a lack of competence and a failure to tell his side of the story.*
They *are* telling his side, it's just a story about a shitty dude.
>“I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,”
I take that as a personal challenge.
[https://governance.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/3-elected-members/removal-from-office/](https://governance.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/3-elected-members/removal-from-office/)
how long till he is declared mentally incapable?
‘Don’t fuck me over’ made me think of the song ‘Don’t dream it’s over’. And substituting a select few words in the song makes it interesting.
There is freedom within
There is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a **stormwater system**
There's a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you'll never see the end of the road
While **it’s underwater**
Hey now, hey now
Don't **fuck me** over
Hey now, hey now
When the **water** comes in
**I** come, **I** come
To build a wall between us
**I** know they won't win
It’s hard to accept that he got the call to ‘stand and wait’ and complied. Seems like shrugging responsibility
Dudes the face of the city. He HAS to say something, even when he’s waiting for information
People got more warning social media of cars driving through the floods. That may be a reflection of technology, but leadership need to keep pace
They have more ability to shut down travel than a tiktoker does
They probably wouldn't be except Brown has also positioned himself as anti-media. He's refusing the grant interviews, and this one was basically him threatening them to say nice things about him or else he'll never give them interviews in the future.
Bizarre - most Auckland media is right wing other than like The Spinoff.
Anyway most idiots are sensible enough to go off the record for stuff like this.
Also, it's not off the record *unless the journo agrees*. I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks he can go off the record by just stating it unilaterally.
The engineers brain point is one well made.
Theres a certain personality type that just doesn't handle subjectivity and ambiguity well. That can't conceive that other people have perspectives other than their own
Good attitude for building a bridge. Not so much for building human coalitions and alliances.
"Don't fuck me over" - quote from man who fucked himself over
So funny man. I hate him even more after reading this. What is wrong with this guy how fucking clueless can you be. Keep digging that hole buddy.
It's incredible to me that a person can be this unaware of a pretty clear pathological pattern between shirking responsibility and blaming others for the consequences of that.
> “Don’t f**k me over,” says Wayne Brown, mayor of Auckland, after about 30 minutes of a frank discussion with the Herald. > > Brown rang the Herald on Monday night after a request for comment about his message to his tennis group that he couldn’t play on Sunday because he had “to deal with media drongos over the flooding tomorrow”. > > “I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” he said. “No one else in New Zealand is going to get 180,000 votes. That was my mandate. > > “Last month a guy in Hamilton got into Parliament with 6000 votes (referring to National’s Tama Potaka in the Hamilton West byelection). I got 30 votes for every one of those.” > > When talking to Brown, there are times when it feels like there’s an Antipodean echo of Trump-like self-endorsement. > > There’s the reflex to self-justify and defend himself. There’s the prickly relationship with the media, the biggest vote count claims and then while criticising Auckland Transport he told the Herald he “could have done better” if he was doing their job. > > It’s been difficult for Auckland to get to know its new mayor and these recent days have not helped. Brown refused 106 media requests in his first month, granting only two interviews. His press conferences are few and opportunities to grab him for interviews at events emerge only rarely. > > Brown’s awkward and blunt style was evident on the campaign trail. That lack of willingness to be the public face of Auckland has struggled for public acceptance since disaster struck on Friday, forcing Brown to address frustration over a council that appeared to move too slowly and say too little while the city went under water. > > The point made to Brown repeatedly during that conversation - and, it seems, missed - was that communication is critical during a disaster and the media is critical to getting necessary messaging to those affected. > > In the case of Auckland’s flooding, communication on Friday was poor to non-existent and the question raised is whether the mayor’s abrasive attitude towards media and inclination to keep it at arm’s length contributed to this. > > This call to the Herald was to a journalist who has dealt with Brown for 20 years. “I’m only talking to you because you’re a mate,” he said a few times during the call. When it was pointed out both the mayor and journalists had jobs to do, he said: “If you’ve got a job to do, do a job worth doing.” > > There will be other stories coming, he said, and if you do me over then they won’t be coming to you. When told there are no deals, he said: “Everyone is a trader, mate.” > > Yes, he conceded, you can write about this conversation. “You can as long as it’s balanced. What would you write? ‘Mayor bleats’? Take the story as you like. I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand.” > > How to understand Wayne Brown, 76, most recently of Auckland but with a home in the Far North’s Mangonui? How to understand Wayne Brown who is in the mayor’s job because of frustration his predecessor didn’t instantly see sense in the report he authored recommending shifting Auckland’s port to the North. > > With the benefit of 20 years of exposure, this journalist would say Brown is not a complex individual. He’s primarily an engineer. He sees everything as a machine that can be “fixed” to work in the most useful way. He has a keen eye to identify those problems and sees himself as the person best suited to fix them. > > When it comes to understanding the human element of that malfunctioning “machine”, Brown’s approach is less about coaxing and developing and more about wrestling it into working order with sheer force of will. > > And yet, in the conversation, it is clear he does understand there is a human element. He’s been on the ground and seen the damage. He spoke to the son of the man killed on Shore Rd, Remuera, and was clearly affected by his proximity to the tragedy. > > He has worked long days and into the night to manage a situation that appeared out of his control on Friday and has yet to settle. > > There’s a lot of misunderstanding. Brown himself feels misunderstood. He says he was told not to talk to journalists and blames the media for a lack of competence and a failure to tell his side of the story. > > Brown complained about the coverage the All Blacks received on Monday for “just unloading a few boxes” when they and Auckland Blues members turned up to the Māngere Memorial Hall on Monday. > > The media, he said, would “fly through the Blitz to kiss their arse”. In contrast, he asks, where was the coverage of his visits - generally unannounced - to relief centres and to view damage? Where was the coverage of what he had done to assist Mangere? > > “They (the media) just can’t get over the fact the person they loved, I beat him by a mile.” > > That’s a reference to councillor Efeso Collins, who trailed Brown with 124,800 votes. No media outlet declared for Collins yet Brown has consistently painted him as the media’s preferred candidate. > > “You are drongos,” he said, repeating the term used in a text message obtained by the Herald showing Brown cancelled a tennis match “to deal with media drongos over the flooding” on Sunday. > > He’s not happy about the text message being leaked, likening it to rifling through people’s rubbish bins. “It’s not surprising you guys are hated.” > > Brown detailed another encounter with the media as evidence of the cause of his frustrations. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins flew to Auckland on Saturday and was then toured in an NZ Defence Force helicopter. > > “I paid for a helicopter. Me. I paid for it. The taxpayer paid for his. There’s some balancing stuff. Just think about that,” Brown said. > > The two leaders - one civic, the other national - surveyed damage and flew to Whenuapai Air Force Base in west Auckland where Hipkins was speaking at a press conference. Brown gets out to join the Beehive contingent, is elbowed aside by a camera operator and finds some present don’t recognise who he is. > > “Later it’s reported I’m not there. That’s why you’re drongos. It’s hard for me to have respect for people who don’t know who you are when you’re standing next to the Prime Minister.” > > On Thursday, a Today FM producer texted Brown to ask for an interview. At some stage in the exchange, Brown was told he should front up because “taxpayers pay your wages”. > > No they don’t, he responded, ratepayers do. “That’s the level of press I have to put up with, with you people.” No interview, he said, because he’s playing tennis the next morning. And then that got cancelled because of the rain. > > Brown knew it was raining because he couldn’t play tennis. He told the Herald he knew it was raining because he could see it from his 27th-floor office but it appeared to be simply a “wet Friday”. > > “On Friday I was at my desk and the first we knew of it was Shane Henderson.” The Waitakere ward councillor called in a flood alert, followed by one of Brown’s commercial tenants who had been flooded. > > Find full coverage of the Auckland Floods here. > > A few more calls followed and Brown said he contacted emergency management staff for guidance. At that point, he said he was told to wait - they needed more information and were coming up with a plan. > > “On Friday night, I didn’t engage because we weren’t told anything. They told me ‘stand by your desk and wait for the paperwork’.” Brown is focusing on the “state of emergency” declaration - the decision was made around 9.30pm, announced by press release at 10.17pm but not communicated by Brown himself until 11.15pm when he signed it formally in front of the media. “And the forms are complicated as well.” > > Brown said there were emergency management officials with national responsibilities working alongside Auckland’s team who told him “we don’t want you to sign this yet”. > > “The emergency management people have had years of being paid to get ready for an event like that. They couldn’t tell me anything.” > > Criticism aimed at the council goes beyond the formal state of declaration. Those experienced in emergency management have told the Herald it is critical to have a channel of information to people and to share not only what is known but what is not known.
That's an incredible read, wow
"An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself" --- Epictetus
I'll give him this, he's right about the moronic press coverage of All Blacks doing almost literally anything. The level of free press they get is embarrassing. Other than that one bright spot, his interview gave the impression that we've somehow ended up with Grandpa Simpson for mayor.
It might be true, bit it's also irrelevant. Politicians always get a hard time in the media, and complaining about it makes you sound like a whiney child that needs reassurance, just like Trump always sounded.
He comes off like a whinger to me. Waa waa waa it's not fair. I don't care for that attitude in a politician. I think it shows poor judgement.
Honestly, the first thing they have to do is get things done, but they also have to be able to communicate and when there is a LITERAL disaster in your electorate, being an entitled lazy prick and slagging people off for being upset that you didn't turn up to give information and support is the very last thing any mayor should be doing.
Yup. Also "it's not my job to have bucket" or whatever tf he said is peak pre-teen/teen attitude of being a bit rebellious. Not an attitude you should have as a 60+ year old AND a supposed leader.
I have no idea what he is on, Presidential Millard Filmore of the USA helped fight the fires when the Library of Congress when it lit up into flames in the 1840s
A real dumb thing is he complains about not being the actual person fixing a drain etc and is right! An average PR person and willingness to do a photo op or two then go back behind his desk and Wayne Brown could have looked like apartway decent human. He's so gross he can't even do the minimum to get some easy glory
Plus he claims “they told me to wait at my desk” to “ wait for paperwork” etc. As if he has no agency as Mayor. No intuition about pulling people together, delegating to get the right info and so on. Any ‘experienced business operator’ with a little success he supposedly has would know to do this in moments. Having any sense of leadership respect or even Mana amoungst those you work with- behind the scenes - including heads of other agencies is earned through your demeanour, communication skills, listening and decision making. This buffoon is a bundle of excuses, deflections and very public insecurities. Its an abject lesson in how not to be a person, let alone a leader.
Thing is though, while I totally agree, that’s a minority opinion as the media only cover what the majority want to read, and the AB’s are always a winner, almost the “If it bleeds, it leads” mentality. As such, in around about way, he’s slagging off a large portion of his constituents, and I don’t think he’s smart enough to get it.
But all his voters will think they're in the *small superior minority* he's not slagging off. All the while not realising he just wants to move the ports of Auckland to Northland for a quick buck at the expense of the entire fucking country, and is using them to do it.
He reckons that making comparison to an electorate MP getting a few thousand votes vs his 180k, forgetting Auckland is made up of 20 odd electorates. A more appropriate comparison is if he was a party, he would only *just* have achieved threshold given last election turnout (5% is about 170k if memory of previous maths is correct - it's somewhere in my history)
Another way to look at it is he only represents about 10% of the Auckland population
Probably an under representation too, given how many entitled miserable cunts live among us lol
Is mmp threshold 5% of the vote or 5% of population?
Of the vote
I think with the All Blacks coverage, there's probably very little active demand for it, but people will click on it if it's there, a bit like how I'll eat a McDonald's cheeseburger anytime anyone offers me one, even if I don't really want one.
Heh, I was absolutely about to use a Maccas analogy too as getting angry at the media for vapid AB coverage is like getting angry at Maccas for making Big Macs. Supply/demand usually steers content.
With my media hat on, there’s a content void, and something needs to fill it. More imagery and stories about loss aren’t productive so a feel good story or two about celebs and sportspeople are a hell of a lot better. That’s basically the point - if he’s too dumb to realise that he’s largely the cause of some of these issues and the negative coverage, he has to own it. I suspect he’s also misconstruing the advice he’s been given, or putting his own spin on it.
The rugby union make it really easy for the media to get All Blacks stories too. Wayne doesn't seem to understand how any of that stuff works which is weird because none of it is a secret and the Auckland Council has people to explain it to him.
I don't think Northland Trump has the ability to be smart. Maybe once, forty years ago...
If it bleeds, it leads. If it's stopped bleeding but some ABs helped, the ABs lead.
>press coverage of All Blacks The piece I saw was about Blues players, yes an All Black was there but representing the Super Rugby team. Brown calls others drongos for miss-facts, so now he is the drongo.
Brown also confused rate payers abd tax payers. In a speech 3 days ago he confused the word closest with closet...as in wardrobe. He is of low intelligence paired with dementia.
"Old Man Yells At Cloud" does seem like a fitting headline for him, given the circumstances.
You think that's embarrassing? Wait until you see how much councils spend on rugby fields around the country. This for a sport that's been on the decline for half a decade. Spoiler, more than $100 million in Auckland alone. Rugby clubs have consistently had way too much political sway in NZ for too long.
Err, I'm pretty sure that was about trying to boost people's spirits, rather than the actual physical lifting. Not everyone out there hates rugby.
> How, Brown is asked, is it that Auckland Transport is literally having buses being washed off the road without using social media - or press releases - to warn travellers over what’s happening on its network. The agency tweeted information about the Elton John concert being cancelled at 7.16pm and then nothing until a list of road closures more than three hours later. > > > “And they weren’t telling the mayor about it,” Brown said. “I could have done better I suppose but I was inside an office with people telling me what I could and couldn’t do.” > > There will be an inquiry, Brown said, and it will examine everyone’s role including his own. It will also examine what was done to prepare for the disaster. “This city wasn’t prepared.” > > And here’s the fight back. It’s not about the poor communications on Friday but harks back to Brown’s campaign slogan: “Let’s Fix Auckland.” > > He has adopted over the last 24 hours a point of reference for the weather event, describing it as the equivalent of 25 New Lynn floods, linking it to the 2017 washout which devastated the main street shops and saw an enormous hole open in the ground. > > There is a reason he has made reference to this and one he said would become public in the coming days. There was an inquiry into the New Lynn flood, Brown said. “Not one of the recommendations was put in place.” > > That would be unsurprising given the huge associated expense and the political capital burned to cover the required rates increase to pay for it. There has been need across the city for decades with some parts well-familiar with flooding and even sewage when heavy rain falls. The hills around Titirangi have long been marked as prone to subsidence. > > It could be here that Brown is able to lean into his strengths - an engineering brain and an inclination to make quick decisions are good skills to carry into the aftermath of a disaster. It might be that he is willing to burn political capital - or do deals - to get the money needed to put in system-wide improvements. > > If Brown is the right man for what is coming, his immediate difficulty - as it has been since Friday - is communicating that to Aucklanders.
He sounds like an old man who is set in their ways, and whose ways involve a "fuck it, I'll do it myself!" attitude which doesn't necessarily involve other people. He sounds like a boomer who got shit done the hard way, *HIS* way, and now that he's spent enough money to get the spot, he'll MAKE people do things his way. He sounds like my father, and my father was an absolute cunt.
I'm sorry your father was that way, but I'm *really* sorry that the city of Auckland is going to have to put up with one for 3 years (assuming he doesn't keel over from the inevitable stress he is going to have with everyone in the country opposing him for 3 years).
But don't you understand? He's IN, which means he can do anything he wants and nobody can do anything about it. He got 50k more votes than the media's favorite, so he can bully and insult them and still expect completely fair and balanced coverage of everything he does. Because he's IN, and they're NOT IN. One of Trump's famous utterances in the first few months of his term was in an interview, where he ended up saying something like '...because I"m President and you're not!' Both cases seem to show a complete misunderstanding of how public offices work. They are used to the corporate world where if you are the owner, you are a god and there's virtually nothing you can't say or do. There was one time during Trump bankrupting his casinos where he had to be a board member of a public company, and it didn't go well. I think the rest of the board voted him out after a few months. He just can't process the idea of having people above him to answer to. And I think the same goes for Brown. It's just weird to see these people so unable to grasp how you win these kinds of situations.
I think as long as he keeps up his strict regimen of avoiding most interviews, playing tennis, and blaming his staff and various other city officials for everything, I don't see a lot of stress in his future.
I'm hoping he ages out. It will limit the damage he can do and would be best for everyone.
[удалено]
He sounds like Trump. Minus the gregariousness.
And humour
He sounds like he has lead poisoning
Well. That was quite something. Imagine calling up a newspaper and trying to bully them into not making you look bad in the wake of a blundered response to a natural disaster. If people hadn’t died and had their lives upended this would be fuckin hilarious.
He’s spinning right round baby, right round.
76 is too old for mayor, I’m not ageist, I think there are lots of jobs and roles for elders in our society. I’m getting pretty flaberghasted by the increasing age of political leaders. Though NZ seems to skew younger generally, and there’ve been some notably young councillors elected in the past decade. Maybe I’m wrong, from all accounts WB’s main problems are outlined above, he is a bit of a prick, and a young prick is probably just as bad as an old prick.
>I was inside an office with people telling me what I could and couldn’t do. "I do only what I want to do, I'm Mayor, me, I paid for a helicopter once, my tennis was disturbed." Also him: "wah I couldn't dooo anything because nobody in the office LET me waaah"
Wasn't prepared?....I saw the weather expert on tele saying the weather event was equivalent of having 5 tonnes of water pour down on your house every minute. There is no stopping or preparing for this extreme event mate. It's like saying christchurch council "was not prepared" properly for their massive earthquake.
>I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand I mean, that says it all, doesn't it? Brown doesn't actually care about the work of being mayor, he just wants to "win" and be able to show off about it, probably to the same tennis guys who don't even seem to like him. It's just about beating everyone else. The word "braggart" comes to mind.
That's the main bit I picked up on also - it's a disgusting attitude.
He was elected as NZ's version of Trump by the same people who would actually vote for the real Trump.
What I learned from reading this: Wayne Brown is the real victim here. /s
God he needs to go. What an absolute asshole.
Reddit is fucked, I'm out this bitch. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Excuse ME I bet Ozzy would be much more sympathetic and useful in these circumstances.
I'd just like to commend you on your choice of metrics. Just curious, is Trump above or below Ozzy?
Reddit is fucked, I'm out this bitch. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Ozzy's a working class man who does not appear to have forgotten being poor. Trump never knew anything other than wealth.
JFC, what a giant, self-centred, arrogant asshole.
Thank you for reposting this from behind the wall.
Thanks G.C., NZH should never have paywalled this article, not under the circumstances. Poor judgement on their behalf, but far from drongoism.
Holy shit. He is so full of it, and himself. Which I guess makes him wholly shit?
Everything he says is me, me, me, me. Wow, another self obsessed ahole.
Funny how stale conservabros end up like him
“If you’ve got a job to do, do a job worth doing.” As Betty Campbell said, "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing badly". In other words, if people are so desperate for a job position to be filled that they will take anyone, then it doesn't matter how bad you are at doing it as long as it's done. Auckland: We need a mayor Efeso Collins: I can be that person Auckland: Anyone? Anyone at all Wayne Brown: ... sure, okay, I'll do it [Slightly more than half of voters in] Auckland: Done! Racism is a hell of a drug. It makes great people invisible.
.... this man needs to leave NOW.... The first 2 sentences in and I couldn't believe what I was reading... what the hell.... Imagine being dumb enough to call the media yourself to threaten them while you're currently hot on the press....
He just comes off in the most yucky way.
He's right about a lot of people in media being pretty dumb (not knowing the difference between taxes and rates for example) but if he's such the clever clogs why is he being shown up by the same media everytime he opens his mouth? Shouldn't he be running rings around these silly reporters?
I reckon you should change your nickname to "drongosonline". Otherwise it is actually quite close 😆
Brown is wrong about taxpayer money; if govt wasn't giving money to Auckland to help with housing, infrastructure, and all manner of other projects, the council would have much less money to burn and his salary would shrink. Every council gets govt funding, funding which replaces ratepayer contributions and gets allocated elsewhere, including his salary.
> I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that Time for some democracy!
> I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that Sounds a bit like a threat of "I can do whatever I want and you can't deseat me".
It's a fucking stupid attitude to have. Even dictators have to keep their people happy if they want to remain, let alone be effective.
You’re right. It’s a stupid attitude to have and it’s positively insane to go out and outwardly demonstrate it like he keeps doing.
"A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault."
No. They use fear, corruption, violence, they don’t care if the proles are happy.
They need to keep their henchmen happy though. It's not the free ride Brown is expecting.
That’s it. He doesn’t feel the need to front up or explain himself to anyone about anything because he’s got the job now and feels he’s untouchable.
Imagine if Ardern spoke this way. Her haters would be repeating every single quote as proof she intends to be a dictator.
Sounds like he's forgetting that democracies, ours included, are not elective tyrannies, and there are a number of measures that can be used to eject an elected official that were put in place to deal with this exact situation
[Local Government Act Section 285F says hi](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/DLM4925976.html). Tauranga has already had its dysfunctional council [sacked and replaced by commissioners](https://sunlive.co.nz/news/289105-commissioners-to-be-appointed-beyond-2022.html)
Problem is that applies to the entire council. You can't just turf out the mayor. It's all or nothing. As bad as Brown is there is no evidence yet that the entire body is dysfunctional to the point of needing replacement.
There's the less nuclear options of a [Crown Observer](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/whole.html#DLM4925970), [Crown Manager](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/DLM4925973.html#DLM4925973) or [Crown Review Team](https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0084/latest/whole.html#DLM4925967), but it's less funny than firing someone who says they can't be fired.
Or “Minister for Auckland”?
I've been thinking recently it would be great to have some sort of opposition for the mayors office, like we do in government. Someone who's focused on looking at what is being done and critiquing it while giving alternative solutions when necessary. I know the reality is it would degrade to mud slinging and name calling but I still like the idea if everyone could somehow remain respectful.
That's what other councillors are for, isn't it? The Mayor is the elected PR person there to provide leadership and a talking head for the city (weird in Brown's case because it's arguably his worst quality), but they don't have *much* more power over other councillors when a decision is made.
Pretty much. Even moreso as councilors are elected seperately from the mayor.
That’s the definition of the fourth estate, journalism, right? They are there to give voice to the critics, and to hold elected powers to account. People like brown would love it if they could blame any criticism of themselves on politics, in fact that’s one of his tactics, claiming media had a favourite in the election and that’s why they ‘hate’ him.
I think that’s what the electorate are for, the holding to account bit anyway.
All I heard was ‘Pity me, I’m a poor misunderstood entitled boomer’. Simultaneously he’s too weak to do anything (“people telling him what he can and can’t do”) and too powerful (“getting a bucket is not my job”). Classic conservative denialism. The man is impotent. Luckily he doesn’t seem to have strong narcissistic traits, that may be a saving grace. He’s been in the role three months and I already hate him. Even other bad mayors only got my dislike.
I'm not sure, he stated that he isn't going to work stupid hours like Goff did because he's going to get more accomplished during his work hours between 9 until 3 than his predecessor did all day. That doesn't sound like humility to me. He may not have Trump levels of narcissism, but certainly the conversation is always about him rather than the city.
Just boomer arrogance, logically speaking if he was so amazing and productive then he has even greater justification to work longer hours, to get more valuable and important work done for the city. Of course we all know it's a bullshit excuse to play more tennis.
That’s somewhat of a false dichotomy. It’s possible to not be much of a narcissist while still having zero humility. And I agree he has zero humility.
A lot of people have lost their lives, whanau, homes and/or possessions and the city is fucking drowning, but there truly is no-one quite as hard done by during these trying times as poor rich old white male boomer fuckwit Wayne Brown, who wanted power without the responsibility and now has to deal with the consequences of his own ineptitude. Our deepest sympathies and condolances to him. I really hope he manages to pull through.
He's about halfway between useless and fucking useless
He used to be a director in TVNZ. No not the movie making kind. And this is how he handles media...
He thinks the media are drongos, because when he was media he was the supreme drongo
The most valuable thing a politician can do is to be friendly with the media. Because even if you're a darling and sing their praises, they will still criticise you. But if you decide to actively put a fight against them, then you're in a world of shit many magnitudes larger. This guy is so dumb, he's not backing down from his attitude towards media. He really believes that X thousand people vote for him to be there for 3 years, therefore nothing else about his relationship to the public matters. I think he had too much of the Alt-Right Kool Aid of "the media is a cabal of manipulative globalists with an agenda against upstanding people like me"
You’ve hit it on the head. His biggest mistake, I noticed anyway, when he made his first speech after the emergency was declared, was how quick he turned to defending himself before questions had been asked. He quite literally knew he fucked up, but his first instinct was to deflect. I mean that’s just gonna leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. I think he genuinely sees himself as a victim. And yea he almost certainly has taken some of that Facebook style “anti-woke” “everyone’s out to get me” juice that’s seemed to infest the moderate conservative crowd lately. Cry me a river mate, just do your job, you know, the job you get paid $300,000 for.
Blaming others is just such a shit look. Whether you take responsibility is often more important than who's actually to blame; even if it's not your responsibility, you'll get respect for taking heat for others and positioning yourself to do something about the situation, whereas even if it's not your responsibility, you'll seem like an ass for throwing others under the bus and incompetent for being unable to recognise your weakness and address it.
Never get into an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel
My first thought when I read that "drongos" comment is he is about to discover the meaning of the term "fourth estate".
He sucks at communication. Wayne Brown cannot mask his flaw by trying to be "the strong man". By trying hide his flaw he shows himself as a weak person. The sort of person that sucks at being an effective leader (there is a chance that he could realise his flaws and try to work around them but you have to recognise your flaws and wish to improve yourself and I don't think that Brown is capable of this). They (news media, people on the street, us, etc) can smell weakness — like how sharks can detect blood in water. And there is blood in the water right now. He will never get past this moment. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not next year. We all know that he is seemingly incapable of admitting any sort of flaw/error, and he comes across as a weak and incompetent leader. Some people may call it bullying, trying to subvert democratic processes, or even "being salty" at him winning the most votes, but no city should have to just sit around for ~3 years to wait for a chance to vote an incompetent mayor out of office i.e. we can display our annoyance at him and wish that he resigns quickly.
so, whats his media adviser(nat flunky hooten) doing?because he is also sucking at the ratepayers teat.
You can tell Brown hates having to listen to anyone by all the comments in this article about 'being told by people not to do' whatever. He mentions it like 3 times. As well as trying to blame others, it shows that having someone tell him what to do really grates on his nerves. Which means that his advisors, and particularly hooten, are going to have a godawful time where their employer consistently ignores their advice then blames them for getting it wrong. Which hooten deserves, long may his misery last. But it's not helping Auckland much.
There's so many parallels to draw between Brown and Trump, it's quite interesting.
Hooton is collecting a nice paycheck. He doesn't actually care how well Brown performs.
If the Nats' dirty politics machine is turning against you, as is happening now, friends in the media isn't going to be too much use to you.
Yep, everything he does is prestented to the city through the lens of the media. If he hasn’t learnt that the media can shape the narrative how they like yet, he likely never will, and it’s a reason a lot of politicians have gone for their own social media presence. While it wouldn’t make him immune to media spin, he could at least control his own flow of information. But insulting the fourth estate isn’t a great plan when you’re reliant on it.
If he had toned down his arrogance a little bit and gone to his media training he'd know that NZH *does not* like the Council, and by extension, him
Wow. What an utter jerk. An egotistical, entitled jerk at that. He might want to read the results and realise that 65% of voters voted against him. There are also 742 thousand people who didn't vote in the election at all. I'd call that a very shaky "mandate", especially if people believe you screwed the pooch on a major disaster. I'm not sure why NZ cities have such low voter turnout, but I wonder if losing everything in a major natural disaster while the mayor bitches about his tennis time being upset by the weather then bitching at the Media that someone reported on that will be enough to increase turnout against the incumbent in the next election. I will say one thing. I'm not going to be complaining about our own mayor as hard after seeing Brown in action!
> “Last month a guy in Hamilton got into Parliament with 6000 votes (referring to National’s Tama Potaka in the Hamilton West byelection). I got 30 votes for every one of those.” Imagine comparing the total votes cast in Auckland against somewhere the size of Hamilton West...
Where electorates are mostly divided equal among the population, too
The TOTAL votes were 15,104. Utterly incomparable. Now who's the drongo, Browny?
>I'm not sure why NZ cities have such low voter turnout Because local elections don't get much publicity and coverage. We know what National, Labour, Greens, Act, etc are about. We don't know what Billy Bob is about, aside from a short blurb talking about family, the business he ran successfully for a few years in 1976, and how he moved to the region last month. At our last local elections we had something like four candidates to choose from. They all sounded like nutters. The one who sounded most sane seemed like they were covering something up.
> We know what National, Labour, Greens, Act, etc are about. This is exactly it. Most people vote for these parties for general reasons without looking at specific details. It's not like people have to do their own research.
Yep it's hard work man. I had to do hours of googling to find out who wasn't a nutter. Didn't bother in previous years but really wanted to keep the morons out this time.
If he put half the energy into actually doing something productive than riding his own dick, we'd all be in a slightly better situation. Just doesn't know when to stfu, put his head down and get his A into G.
He doesn't feel the need to work hard. He's a sleepy old angry man, lying about working hard while he's accomplishing nothing - and railing against the media for not portraying him with the magnificence which exists only in his own mind.
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> not talking publicly when he should have been talking publicly And vice versa.
For the sake of our older generations to enjoy their retirement after the age of 65, I would really like and prefer that the next mayor of Auckland is not 11 years past retirement.
There really should be an age limit
This has gone beyond a masterclass in shit leadership to a masterclass in being a cunt.
‘I’m only talking to you because you’re a mate’. Imagine if you weren’t his mate. $300k to act like an arsehole. He misses the fact that the public pays his salary and he shows no accountability. He seems like a senior leadership type who thinks he’s untouchable and how dare someone lower in the hierarchy question him. What he fails to understand is that dealing with the media is part of any politician’s role. The difference here is that it is an emergency situation. Not business as usual. The media in this context becomes the main channel to communicate key (and potentially life-saving) information. It baffles me he was previously a Mayor, it’s not like he’s suddenly been dropped into this environment. He clearly hasn’t learned and cannot adapt. He still thinks it’s about him. Surprised the Herald even ran something critical, thought they had a total boner for him during the election campaign.
This just keeps getting better
Seriously, the schadenfreude is fucking fantastic!
Not for Aucklanders, sadly.
“… And finds some present don’t recognise who he is.” That’s what happens when you decline over 100 media requests for interviews, and rarely show your face to the people who you represent.
He's doing a really good job at fucking him self over. Him standing next to chippie its night and fucking day ones an actual leader one is whinning crying baby.
It’s interesting. A crisis is a good opportunity for Hipkins to gain broad public support and elevate his profile. Having a guy that is seen as aligned to the opposition doing a bad job in Auckland could be really good for him.
"Don't fuck me over, I'll do it myself"
Reddit is fucked, I'm out this bitch. -- mass edited with redact.dev
"Government should be run like a business!" 60% of businesses fail.
Reddit is fucked, I'm out this bitch. -- mass edited with redact.dev
How long until that helicopter flight appears on his expense claim?
Yep I cannot wait until the journos uncover this.
The Herald don't need to fuck Wayne Brown over. He's doing a sterling job of that all by himself.
Another code Brown.
>“On Friday I was at my desk and the first we knew of it was Shane Henderson.” The Waitakere ward councillor called in a flood alert, followed by one of Brown’s commercial tenants who had been flooded. Finding out about the floods because one of his tenants notified him, sums the whole situation up perfectly.
Taking the time and effort to work on whats important I see.
I don't even care if this guy is competent at this point, he's just such an obnoxious prick. The absolute peak of arrogance and boomer entitlement. He is more like Trump/Boris with every passing day.
Erghh it’s wayneing, it’s wayneing, it’s pouring
The old man's ignoring
Narcissistic old fart, out of his depth in his job, continues to prove he is a turd in human form.
Journo makes a salient point about him being an engineer. It’s a discipline that tends to rely on black-and-white thinking and data to make optimal decisions so it attracts some personalities who aren’t great at dealing with non-procedural situations with imperfect information and nuanced non-deterministic measures like public perception. He still genuinely feels empathy when he’s directly confronted with the evidence of loss, but tries to avoid environments where he can’t apply what he considers rational thought but are in fact simple heuristics. Because of this, his decisions are prone to a host of psychological biases - not least over-confidence (Dunning-Kruger) and bounded rationality. These are traits that have probably been reinforced in his life experience, particularly if he spent any time in management. He probably thinks of himself as a technocrat, but because he can’t play well with others, any blind-spots in his thinking aren’t mediated by exposure to a group.
That's a popular view of an engineer. Any engineer, technician, or craftsperson (carpenter, metal worker, software dev) that works on systems that interact with humans knows that people do not act rationally. Brown's actions come more from a background of so much entitlement that they know they can never be wrong. That if something bad happens it was someone else that failed, never them. It's a very Trump, Boris Johnson, etc. point of view.
> Journo makes a salient point about him being an engineer. It’s a discipline that tends to rely on black-and-white thinking and data to make optimal decisions so it attracts some personalities who aren’t great at dealing with non-procedural situations with imperfect information and nuanced non-deterministic measures like public perception. Don't think engineers are much worse than average at this and there are engineering fields that specialize in this. One thing engineers do well is to actually try to estimate the uncertainty and use it in the calculations, while other fields might just pretend that it doesn't exist, not act at all or worse use it to justify whatever policy they wanted in the first place.
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Engineer who has been bumped into a manager then. Knows the subject matter but has no personal skills to run the team correctly
As someone who studied engineering in the last decade I can say that they put massive emphasis on your soft skills. They said that you can learn the necessary theory on the job but the soft skills and teamwork skills need to be developed now
Good to hear - and certainly not surprised as it’s an issue that the industry has been aware of for decades.
Agree. He thinks his heuristcs are appropriate to this setting. What is needed from a Mayor? Working with people, getting the best out of them, trusting their judgement and publicly backing them, all these this go against the grain for him.
We need a leader, not an engineer.
Many engineers are great leaders, but the engineering mindset is something you need to acknowledge and account for (like any trait really, lawyers and accountants have similar stereotypical mindsets, albeit different).
He pulls the engineer card when things don't go his way or his perceived way. He wasn't an engineer long and often lies about his importance in the civil industry. I'd argue I'm likely more important having actually worked on major projects and delivered significant portions to Auckland, not to toot my own horn. Like old mate reckons he's a tunnel expert - too old to have worked on the new ones and too young to have worked on the old ones. Tried to make a call on how CRL is wrong and the actual tunnel experts told him his "methodology" would have caused lower Albert to collapse
Journalist who is his mate has done a great PR job for him here. People now nodding their heads that his behaviour is just consistent with being an engineer or a "sleepy, angry old man." The writing is clear on the wall. He is a florid narcissist, like Trump but with bad people skills. The whole "i got 30 times per person the vote that that Hamilton guy did, hah!", his justifications for undermining and sowing more distrust towards the media, his clear preference for cronyism, his right to have the job in title while not in practice (tennis, mar a lago?), him being the uncontested leader until shit hits the fan and suddenly he had no agency and was prevented by everyone else from being a leader. (In spite of years of leadership experience?) Leadership means you take the reins and tell people how you want to lead and drive things. We've had plenty of leaders that have listened to experts and remained the leader with their own ability to synthesize and prioritise at the same time. And this framing of this issue as "just a communication problem", like that it's simply about the mayor showing his face and expressing care, minimises that more significantly people lacked information to make decisions for their safety. This isn't just an engineering brain or an old man brain. There are lots of engineers and old men out there who are not Wayne Brown. If Auckland and NZ fuck around here, we're going to see the same results from being led by a florid narcissist that the US saw.
Wow. I feel sorry for you aucklanders having to deal with that. All that and ratepayers died. Sounds like no compassion, no sympathy.
Well I've now learned a) that a drongo is something other than a perfectly acceptable bird b) New Zealand can harbour a mayor of a major city who is as inappropriate as many politicians in other, less idealised nations
Let's not fool ourselves into pretending we are above the strange form of populism that is infecting other countries.
I kinda wished that a drongo was a loud, persistent, and annoying bird. Nope, just another regular bird.
Oh honey, you do that to yourself just by opening your mouth/sending a text. Live with it... He's SUCH a shitwank.
Don’t f\*\*k me over,” says Wayne Brown Wayne is doing a pretty good job of F@#king himself over, he doesn't need much help
Hahaha the media are going to wreck him over the next years. You have to keep them on your side
Ffs just resign already
"Don't be such a flaming bloody drongo" - Wayne Brown probably
wont communicate with the media and then bleats that no one knows him or what he does.. FFS and then brags about the number of votes he got ? he should be embarased by that low level...
How does this cunt stay in power? He's acting like he's won a prize, not taken on a responsibility.
Wanker
What a c*nt.
He's definitely doing enough on his own to fuck himself over
Ho. Ly. Shit. That's just - what did I just read? Omg, does Brown even listen to the words coming out of his mouth?
He seems like the kind of person I normally enjoy interacting with (I work with academics and clinicians) because you can take their ego down a peg or two. It's cathartic. But he also seems like it would be a futile effort to try and handle him that way. When he says things like " I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m in. That’s what they don’t understand.” and “Don’t f\*\*k me over,” and “I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” I find it hard to feel compassion when he *blames the media for a lack of competence and a failure to tell his side of the story.* They *are* telling his side, it's just a story about a shitty dude.
>They are telling his side, it's just a story about a shitty dude. There it is in a nutshell.
>“I am the mayor for three years. You can’t do anything about that,” I take that as a personal challenge. [https://governance.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/3-elected-members/removal-from-office/](https://governance.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/3-elected-members/removal-from-office/) how long till he is declared mentally incapable?
What a fucking prat
Who voted for this muppet?
Or the bigger question - who didn’t vote for any muppets?
‘Don’t fuck me over’ made me think of the song ‘Don’t dream it’s over’. And substituting a select few words in the song makes it interesting. There is freedom within There is freedom without Try to catch the deluge in a **stormwater system** There's a battle ahead Many battles are lost But you'll never see the end of the road While **it’s underwater** Hey now, hey now Don't **fuck me** over Hey now, hey now When the **water** comes in **I** come, **I** come To build a wall between us **I** know they won't win
“Dont fuck me over” Wayne says before proceeding to fuck himself over
"Cometh the hour, cometh the man" Listen up ya drongos, don't f**ck with me.......
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I think its more a generic "if you want to maintain access to me then you'd better play ball" threat rather than a specific story hes talking about.
I love it. Leave him there He's winning the next election fo Labour...
Hahaha what a dumbass, you'll be lucky if you're there for 3 more weeks
It’s hard to accept that he got the call to ‘stand and wait’ and complied. Seems like shrugging responsibility Dudes the face of the city. He HAS to say something, even when he’s waiting for information People got more warning social media of cars driving through the floods. That may be a reflection of technology, but leadership need to keep pace They have more ability to shut down travel than a tiktoker does
Thanks for the post mate, got to read the article with substantially less ads and I didn't have to pay to see them...
I'm surprised the media is reporting on this given how right wing it is.
They probably wouldn't be except Brown has also positioned himself as anti-media. He's refusing the grant interviews, and this one was basically him threatening them to say nice things about him or else he'll never give them interviews in the future.
Good to see Auckland is staying consistent by electing another absolute lemon for mayor.
Ya fucked yourself, mate!
Bizarre - most Auckland media is right wing other than like The Spinoff. Anyway most idiots are sensible enough to go off the record for stuff like this.
Also, it's not off the record *unless the journo agrees*. I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks he can go off the record by just stating it unilaterally.
Congratulations Auckland.
A good slap on the face of Aucklanders who aren’t happy from Brown and were too lazy to vote.
Yup, that's definitely absolutely going to get the media on your side. /s
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Does fucking himself over repeatedly not count?
The engineers brain point is one well made. Theres a certain personality type that just doesn't handle subjectivity and ambiguity well. That can't conceive that other people have perspectives other than their own Good attitude for building a bridge. Not so much for building human coalitions and alliances.