Chad Taylor

Another city, not my own

As a born and bred Aucklander I have the right to have mixed feelings about my home town if not diss it outright, but sitting here as I am on the other side of the world it's still difficult to watch the feckless wholesale fuck-up that is the Rugby World Cup. More specifically, it's difficult to watch the greed, mismanagement and small-town, me-too overreaching of New Zealand officials who would sell their grandmother and not even at a good price to satisfy their fantastical imaginations about what possible tourists might possibly want from the event. To wit, one Murray McCully, many years in bumbling opposition but now finally with his tiny hands on the tiller, agitating for legislative approval in the dead of summer in order to reshape one of the most beautiful working waterfronts in the world into a typically fucked up, hasty, shit-ass -- let's say it: typically Auckland collapse of architecture. Aucklanders don't need it, tourists don't want it, six out of 13 city councillors can't even be fucked turning up to debate it and the country won't profit from it, but hardworking little eager beaver Murray is pushing for it in what has become trademark National / John Key style: in secret, under the table, behind closed doors, under urgency. This is what Auckland has come to: John Banks as the voice of reason. As always, catching the blood from the stone are local architectural compromisers Jasmax.

It reminds me of certain other well-earning men who fronted up in the 1980s with business talk of a trickle-down economy and "economic benefits" that never materialised for anyone but themselves. Massive over-capitalisation, skyhook "business" jargon, a shit-eating grin, a perennial loss flicked off to the ratepayers and government-funded retirement for Wellington MPs' sunset years while one of the prettiest cities in the southern globe lies pebble-dashed in their wake. Auckland: the boom times are back.