Mayor

Len Brown hasn’t even finished two months in the job and he is breaking election promises left right and centre.

This was his election promise on rates;

I am committed to keeping rates low. My background is to keep rate increases close to the rate of council inflation and I have delivered no increase in water rates.

This is what he has just announced;

Aucklanders face a rates rise of 4.9%.

Mayor Len Brown made the recommendation for the increase in rates in a speech to the council’s Strategy and Finance Committee this afternoon.

With inflation running at around 1.5% Len Brown has delivered a rates increase three times what he promised. I just bet all those people who voted for nice Mr Brown are having face-slap moment about now.

The only thing Len Brown can be relied upon now is to lie, cheat, hide things, appoint his mates to jobs and flip flop.

Any doubt that Bernard Orsman is an ex-officio member of Len Brown’s staff have been removed to today.

Auckland Mayor Len Brown is winning the battle for greater openness of council business and more public access to the workings of council controlled organisations.

That would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. The headline alone is extremely offensive. “Mayor’s push for openness brings results“.

That’d be the openness that he used in deciding to reward his campaign team with plum CCo appointments in secret?

That’d be the openness he displayed when organising a witch-hunt for the person who did want openness?

Len Brown is a fraud and Bernard Orsman is a lickspittle masquerading as a churnalist.

Openess, yeah right!

Who was at Volare?

Why hasn’t Len Brown provided answers to the Ombudsmen?

Who else was nominated but thrown aside in len’s secret meetings?

Auckland Council will help restore a derelict downtown building that is described as an eyesore.

The century-old five-storey heritage building on Albert Street has been empty for more than 15 years, is covered in graffitti and has broken windows.

Mayor Len Brown says the building is disgusting but the council can’t legally force the owner to maintain it so has come to an agreement whereby both parties will pay for it to be cleaned up.

Mr Brown won’t say how much that will cost the ratepayer but says it’s well worth the money.

However, Councillor Cameron Brewer says the cost should be made public.

What is it with Len Brown and his secrets?

Why are there limits on Len Brown’s honesty?

Why does Len Brown support corporate welfare?

All good questions Len Brown is too dishonest to answer.

I have been thinking overnight about Len Browns ill advised witch-hunt to try to find an honest citizen more interested in transparency than he is.

It must be number three on his list of 100 things to do in his first 100 days.

The first was of course to instruct some council planners to prepare some paperwork. The second great initiative was to clean the townhall windows. After 30 days in office I would have thought we would have seen a list of 30 items but I cant find one anywhere, not on the Council website or anywhere else.

So I hae come to the conclusion that despite after 30 days and nothing since day two that the witch-hunt to find an honest citizen is the third intiative.

I cant wait for the other 97 things, and because Len Brown seems to have a problem with dates, there are just 70 days left counting today.

Of course I could be dead wrong and Len Brown actually just mouthed the pithy comment about doing 100 things in 100 days to feed that to the media. A bit like his Mayor in the Chair malarky.

Len Brown is just a bunch of slogans with the g cut off the end.

From the Mayor’s press release;

Auckland Mayor Len Brown wants to hear Aucklanders’ hopes, dreams and concerns about their community in the first of a series of regular events allowing people to get face to face with their mayor.

The mayor is inviting Aucklanders to drop by Aotea Square any time between 12.30pm and 1.30pm on Thursday 11 November for his first Mayor in the Chair session.

In these sessions, Aucklanders are welcome to pull up a chair and ask the mayor a question or share their thoughts with him.

“I’m going to get out into the villages of Auckland, and touch base with the locals. I want to get a good, first-hand feel for the people and the issues of different communities, in their own words.”

The mayor initiated the Mayor in the Chair sessions in Manukau City, and is keen to extend the concept throughout the region.

I thought I might go and pull up a chair and share this poem with him.

The Mayor is in the Chair,

It needs to be made clear,

So all the the facts can be laid bare.

All the lies are too much to hear

We need to know, because it was dear.

Lest you forget, Mayor in the Chair

We all do still care about Volare.

She might be quite mad, but at least she isn’t a hypocrite and practices what she preaches.

Cyclist and Snapper card-holder Celia Wade-Brown is in no hurry to exchange two wheels for a $70,000 Audi.

The capital’s new mayor – who jumped on her bike to ride to the Wellington City Council building when the election results were announced this week – will have the option of a more comfortable ride for the next three years.

However, when asked yesterday whether she would be using the mayoral car in future, she said it was not something she had considered yet.

The same can’t be said of Sue Kedgeley who didn’t even know what a Snapper Card was when DPF and I interviewed her in 2008.

I wonder though if Len Brown will practice what he has been preaching during the mayoral campaign. Will he be taking public transport into his new office from 1 November?

There will be a plethora of cars to choose from, his existing Commodore plus Driver/Paramedic, Andrew Williams black Nissan Maxima plus other assorted mayoral vehicles. The temptation for Len Brown will be to avoid taking the train, but we are watching Len.

My pick is that the only shots of Len Brown taking public transport will be the ones from his TV adverts (which have now conveniently been removed from Youtube). You know the ads where he said we could trust him to open the books and keep them open…..still waiting for that opening of the books regarding Volare Len….not so open on that are you?

I’ve been thinking about the strange change in Andrew Williams over the past several weeks.

I think that Andrew Williams is me, but for the mayoral elections, baiting for reactions.

His role would appear to be one of resignation for losing in the mayoral race but also as the baiter to get John Banks to react to his over-bearing antics all the while Len Brown sits serenely watching the carryon gaining the benefit of the mayhem.

Has Len Brown promised Andrew Williams the deputy mayoralty in return for playing the clown in the mayoral campaign? Or is it far more venal than that, promised him a board position on a CCO when Williams fails in his bid in Albany?

Remember this is a man who has very few demonstrable skills and the lightest CV of any 51 year man I’ve ever seen, with the exception of the latest list of Labour party selection candidates.

Len Brown and Andrew Williams were talking in hushed tones this morning, all chummy like at the Chamber of Commerce mayoral debate this morning.

Of course Len is having to really on someone who introduced him last night as “Mayor…Len…Bankssssh”.

Len Brown hasn’t had a stellar record in choosing proposed deputies, having once preferred Sue Bradford and even considered Judith Tizard. Time for ALL mayoral aspirants to declare their preferences for deputy mayor.

Len Brown needs to come clean on his apparent cosy deal with Andrew Williams. In the end it won’t matter because there simply aren’t enough brown people  committed enough to vote for Len Brown to out weigh the deluge of votes john Banks will receive from North, Central and East Auckland. At least john banks is well advised and won’t bite, making this tactic by Len Brown and Andrew Williams futile.

Of course the good folk of Albany can stop this all happening by voting Slater for Albany and tossing Andrew Williams on the electoral scrap heap.

Vote Slater - Vote for Whaleoil, not Well Oiled

If there was ever a reason needed why a triple dipper shouldn’t be the Mayor of Christchurch it is the earthquake. Imagine if this had happened when Jim Anderton was wearing his MP for Wigram hat on a tuesday in Wellington. With the airport closed and all access shut down his citizens would have been without a leader.

Cities need mayors to concentrate on being mayor not trying to fill their pockets with additional taxpayer or ratepayer loot.

Contrary to many a wag suggesting that the earthquake was caused by $1.7 billion of taxpayers cash landing in South Canterbury, it was in fact God, speaking to Jim Anderton to tell him to quit. He said it would take an earthquake for him to lose, and so god spoke and delivered as a clear a message as possible for a 70 year old dodderer to understand.

Time to quit Jim, God has spoken.

This week has probably been a real tough week for John Banks after TVNZ and Mark Crysell spent three weeks of muck raking work at the behest of Len Brown’s Labour flunkies. Bernard Orsman’s article isn’t much better and does himself a dis-service shopping tawdry tales Labour has been trying to get in the media for 3 weeks. He should ask himself why he is studiously ignoring both Brown and Williams using council resources and the spamming of council staff on the beg for money. John Banks had to face something that no parent wants to face and he dealt with it admirably.

Non-political people have commented to me how well Banksie handled himself in the face of an obvious hit. They say that you just know that Alex Banks got a boot in the arse, one he deserved. Now political people are weighing in and that is why I say that Len Brown’s campaign is over.

John Banks is a polarising individual, admired by some, hated – not too strong a word – by others. For my part, I have not changed my view of the man I attacked on The Ralston Group, the talk-back host I deplored on Radio Pacific or the Mayor of Auckland in his previous incarnation. But either he has changed or I have. I suspect it’s the former. Certainly the person I have got to know in the past fortnight is a very fine man indeed. Or maybe there are two John Banks, two sides to the one man – the father and the politician perhaps. I’d be happy to have the father continue as Mayor.

That people is an endorsement. Not only is it an endorsement it is an endorsement from Brian Edwards. That was the end paragraph. Now read this from the middle of the post.

Ten days ago I was one of five speakers at an Auckland Mayoral Fathers’ Breakfast at Sky City organised by Parents Inc., the organisation founded by Ian Grant. Each of us had seven minutes to give an inspirational address on fatherhood to the 750 men present. The Mayor of Auckland, formally hosting the event, spoke first.

I’ve heard a lot of speeches in my time and few have been memorable. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the seven minutes in which John Banks held that audience in the palm of his hand, enthralled. He did not, as his advisors have suggested, talk about his own traumatic childhood. He talked about the troubled kids he has met in the course of his job; kids on drugs, kids in trouble with the law, kids in borstals and prisons, lost boys and girls. A common theme, especially among the  boys, he observed, was the absence of a father in their lives. These were boys without role models, boys who didn’t know how to be men. Fathers mattered and fathers had a responsibility to teach their kids the difference between right and wrong.

Delivered entirely without notes, the short address was spellbinding, extremely moving, and entirely met the inspirational criteria laid down by the breakfast’s organisers. When he returned to the table, I said to him, ‘If you could talk like that during your campaign, you would certainly be the first Mayor of the Super City.’

When the illuminati of the left feel so compelled to write posts such as this then you realise very quickly that Len Brown’s campaign is over. When Brian Edwards puts a spike in that hard you KNOW Len Brown’s campaign is over.

I can’t but then I’m mentally ill and i’m certainly not trying to stand for Mayor. Word has it that Looney Len took last week off for stress leave….oh those yappy girls on the phone, David Lewis probably should have covered that off a bit more properly with the help.