 You're listening to The Crunch with Cam Slater, right here on RCR, reality check radio. Ken Turner is the Waitakere Ward counsellor. He's a mechanic and therefore a practical guy seeking practical solutions to many of the problems currently besetting Auckland. He's on the line to discuss some of his frustrations and battles with the bureaucrats. Ken Turner, welcome to The Crunch. All right, good morning. I'm about to be here. Well, Ken, you're probably wondering why I'm calling you and having a conversation. I've got to say it's because I get mail or email and text messages every week and people suggest guests for the show. Somebody sent me a message last week saying, could I recommend Ken Turner as a guest? West Auckland counsellor, he'll have a story of wanton waste for you. He is battling the bureaucrats for us, let alone what's happening out west. So that's why you're on The Crunch today. Very good. So you've obviously got a few fans out west. I know that you are a mechanic by trade. That makes you a practical person. Are you looking to provide some practical solutions in your term in Auckland Council? Yes, absolutely. That's what made me stand in the very beginning, lean the drains and fix the potholes. And I still wear my overalls as often as I can. They're my comfort zone. I was 57 before I started trying to be political, and I suppose the driver was. I looked at councils, actions and policies and thought, why the hell would you do that? Or what is the common sense in that? Yeah, I mean, this is the refrain that we're getting a lot. I mean, I have on each show every week Cam's Buddies where I call up some mates and they give me five minutes or 10 minutes of their thoughts for the day. Last week, we were talking about Auckland Council and the new mayor and a year later on where we're at. And they expressed extreme frustration that a lot of the promises in the past and even in the past year seem to fall on deaf ears. It's like ratepayers are treated as wallets or pockets to be picked by the council. It may not be the councillors. Certainly it is the governing body that is making the decisions, but it's the council officers, the civil servants, so to speak, that are spending what many people think as frivolous waste of money. A good example would be these raised bumps on almost every pedestrian crossing that's appeared in Auckland. So are you looking at battling that and is it difficult in the council to constantly fight these bureaucrats or dreaming up new ways to spend our money? Well, let's just break it down to the fact that we're all human and the place is full of people. And I promise the people who voted for me that I would not be one of those councillors who begs for their vote at election time and then immediately turns 180 and regurgitates council spin back to them. And I'm sticking to that. But I also now get a feel and an understanding observation of the system. And as soon as I was elected and started on my campaign of being honest, if that's the truth for it, I was well massaged by the bureaucracy to keep me in line, including the fact that it was shown to me that when I signed when I was sworn in, I signed that I was now part of council and statutorily I am now part of council, even though your stipend is paid as a contractor. And I took me a little while to find get my feet under the table and turn around and say, well, yeah, maybe that's technically legally true. But the public set my job description. And that's who I will be responding to. And that's the job description I will be following. There's a lot of good people in there wanting to do their job. I think most of them. But the machine just takes over a systemic failure. And so I get a lot of my information from insiders. So yeah, it's it's, I think it's the time frames that has shocked me. I'm glad I didn't start this any earlier in life. But then on the other hand, I should have done because this whole thing works in a glacially slow speeds. I've had some wins and been very happy. But the potholes are gaining on me. Well, that's the thing isn't I mean, most people think that councils should provide basic essentials for to keep a city operating that removal of waste, reticulation of water, fixing the roads, all those sorts of things. But we've seen this explosion of multicolored cycle ways we've got outside my apartment in Takapuna here. You know, we had two nights where the council or contractors to the council went and painted this big red stripe across the road and marked it with 30 kilometers an hour. Not a single person I've spoken to in Takapuna ever asked for the roads around Takapuna to be set to 30 kilometers an hour. We've got vast waves of roads, particularly in the rural areas where the speed limits been dropped from 100 to 80 and sometimes even 60 kilometers an hour. Nobody asked for this. So how does this happen? How do these things occur when nobody actually asked for it? So it's an ideology. And you know, I'm looking everywhere for practical explanations. So is the public. And when what they're told to be the truth and what they observe is the truth is so far apart that it becomes very unsettling, which is which is half of all the sort of problem out there. And it's not just council. It's it's also it's government driven or has been for some time. It's these big campaign messages zero deaths by 2050. It's impossible. It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. But that allows a whole bunch of subtitles to start to take life and take all the funding. So it was very interesting on the local board. The local board to a degree had more constraints. And so therefore you had to be more targeted and what you want to spend on the governing body, just in being the governing body, we seem to have that fire level view. So man, can we waste some money? Well, they call it optioneering. And, you know, sort of just trying to I'm struggling for words because the process is is wasteful. I suppose is what I should say that there I have seen in many project prices where the the actual construction of whatever the asset is is under 50% of the total bill. In fact, I haven't been shown one and they're in the tens. I haven't been shown one yet where the construction price was anything like the full the full bill. I mean, you know, yesterday I was out in Manukau and, you know, I used to not many people know this, but I used to run a crew when Manukau City Council was around clearing drains, maintaining parks, doing all those sorts of things. And I look on how we did things back then. It was a few years ago now, but it's not more than 20 years. And, you know, I was watching these guys on the side of the road clearing the sumps, you know, with those greats that are on the side of the road. We used to drive up with it. Yeah, cesspits. We used to drive up with a sucker truck. Our guy would jump out, lift the great stick the tube down, suck all the guts out of the thing, put the great back down, drive on. Well, what I saw yesterday in Manukau, same zone, same drain cesspits that we used to drill. He had a truck. He had a another little ute in front with a little sign on it saying warning men working. There's another little ute behind him. There was an STMS person. There was cones for Africa, like more cones than then need Kelly, you know, they were everywhere, all to drain a sump, which normally would take about 30 seconds to a minute each time. But because of this, they were having to set the cones at each sump and then set the traffic management and do all this sort of nonsense. I was sitting there thinking, I said to my mate who used to run this crew with me, look at this. We never used to do that. And I think that's an example of out of control rules and regulations that somebody's dreamed up to say, let's make this safer. But how many people who were sucking sumps ever got run over by a car? Like it had been done. I mean, you have to hit a truck first, you know, to get us. The first thing that comes to mind is, and there's a lot of people going to have to ride push bikes to offset the carbon from that. And I'm saying that to council all the time when I'm in the meetings, I'm trying to, we just send me one big contradiction. But the other thing is, there's so many things in each one of these situations. If you stand in the middle of the road and look down the road and view it in cross section, the tarmac carriageway is any water on that, stormwater on that is the concern of Auckland Transport. And the cesspit and the first pipe discharging from the cesspit. Any subsequent pipe after that is then the responsibility of healthy waters. So the two people who are going to maintain the system ownership changes halfway under the road because the pipe is usually running to the downhill side. Then any leaf litter that's sitting on top of the cesspit is community facilities responsibility. And if the water that is causing problems say we've got some flooding issue or something like that drainage issue, if the water is deemed to be coming from the environment towards the road rather than from the environment from the road back towards the gutters, then it's designed to be deemed to be a council. I don't know whether that's community facilities, healthy waters or so. When you see a bunch of jerkins standing on the side of the road, they're really just ever debating who's going to play. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. We are swimming in information. For every person doing a simple job, some might say a dummy's job, but dummies can't do them. For every person doing that job, there are 10 people riding on their back, measuring, monitoring and analyzing their every action. And that is an employment tsunami in itself. It's also where all the money goes and it achieves nothing. And you talk about, you know, I actually put up a post maybe why the nice person sent you my name. On the Huea Road, 22 kilometers, I saw one man with a little pointy pickup stick so he didn't have to bend his back picking up litter with two vehicles in front of him and two vehicles, one vehicle behind him and they went both directions on that road. The carbon emissions, the cost. And then you go home during the weekend and here's a good couple of locals taking a stroll with a bag in their hands picking up rubbish as they go. It's just insane stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know, we used to fix potholes and roads and especially in the parks. And so I know a little bit about how roads are constructed and how they're repaired. And I drive around and I look at these so called repairs and they're quick and dirty, but they don't meet the transit specifications that we were marked and monitored and controlled on. So like, you know, you'll see them drive up, you know, four or five trucks to fill a pothole and you'll see them dump a couple of shovel falls of hot mix into this thing, tamp it down and drive off. And you sit there and you think, well, where's the crack ceiling? Where's the stopping of the ingress of water into because what people don't know is that potholes and roads and, you know, massive issues with roads are not caused by the vehicles on the roads. They're caused by water getting into the surface of the road. And so you have to seal the cracks. Well, crack ceilings are a cost effective way of putting off having to do massive digouts and potholes and things like that, but doesn't seem to be any of that. You know, there's some key roads around, again, around here in Takapuna because I see them. They've got crocodile cracking happening. The roads are slumping because the water's getting underneath the surface. The potholes are emerging and now they're just digging up a whole road. Well, a dig out and replacing the entire surface is a whole level of expense, far greater than going around and crack ceiling or doing small pothole repairs. But it seems there's no, it's like the money hasn't been spent on preventative maintenance, which means that we're spending a vast amount more on remedial maintenance. Yeah, we've lost sight of reality and we have lost a generation of experience in our contracting entities. But let's just, let's just go to where this big picture, this big thinking rubbish causes all these problems. Here's a piece that I've been working on and you know, examples of savings. Multi-million dollar savings have been ratified across 12 projects. The total value of the projects is X and the 22% savings has been made. Three projects have embedded carbon savings of 65% with one at 100% e.g. build nothing. All projects have health and safety reductions from building nothing to building less to building differently. The only thing there that is a health and safety savings is building differently. They're talking themselves into a corner with zero carbon by 2050, zero road deaths we've said by, you know, it just, it's bollocks. Yes, it's absolute bollocks. And, you know, that's like me saying, I've got a, in my little mechanical business, the staff and my good people run it like they're on these days and that's how come I'm spare for this sort of stuff. But it's like me saying to them, okay, well, it's a 24-hour day and you only work for eight. I've sent you home for 16. So that's 16 hours that you're no longer exposed to my health and safety risk. So we've got, we're down to 33% already. Boy, we've met our targets. And that, what happens is that trickles down to the core services. So in West Auckland where I am, the contractor there has just September a year ago was given a $220 million base contract for five years. And then there's other stuff on top of that. I have tried to get their contracts through my support staff and things because I was looking for what you were looking for. I was looking for the key performance indicators. I was looking to see how we judge those potholes. And if the key performance indicator is only so many potholes per 100 meters or something, how we measure it, because I was suspicious, like you have just said, that as long as the road surface is level without a hollow in it, it complies, you know, all I've been given so far is two parts of the contract, which are extremely heavy reading, and it's all just waffle full of ideology and no specification. Yeah. And that, that, that seems to be what I'm running into all the time. Yeah, I mean, it seems that, I mean, we thought it was bad when we were doing it with Manukau City Council. You know, they have put the tender out for the job for fixing the potholes in the roads and draining the sumps and the cess pits and, you know, getting rid of leaf litter and all that sort of clearing. This was the funniest one, right? Clearing boat ramps of sand. Like you go, you go out there, you've got a contract that says you have to have the boat ramps clear of sand. You go out there because somebody's called up because there's a, you know, a hole of sand on the thing. You get out there with all your guys, you clear it in about two or three hours, then the tide comes in and guess where the sand is, right? It's back on the, back on the thing, but they would come out and mark it a week later and go, oh, that's a fail because there's sand on the boat ramp. So they had auditors that would come around and do these things and check on stuff weeks, sometimes months later, when you've had 57 tides go through the place. It was just insane, the level of expenditure of ancillary staff to grade the contractor. And we were watching what other contractors were doing and it was like they were ignoring it. They just didn't care because they knew that when it came around, if they got a failure on a pothole or something like that, they'd go, oh, well, you know, it's three months ago that we did that job. Of course, it's going to fail. Potholes are temporary solution. We need to do a big dig out there. And then they would do that and get and build the council for even more. It was nuts. Look, this goes down to outcomes based. Our maintenance system has got a new policy and it's called outcomes based. Now, in reality, that means that rather going around on a regular pattern, they just turn up to anyone who complains or requests for service, as they say, which means another name, new fancy name for a complaint. So in reality, it's a breakdown service and a bad one at that. It's self-monitored. It's almost unexplainable and certainly it's irrational. And, you know, with our floods, et cetera. Yes, we have had some extraordinary amounts of rain. I don't think unprecedented in my lifetime. I remember when I was about six or seven, one in our valley, but the drains need better maintenance. The rivers need maintenance. You can't just say, oh, we're going to turn this into an SCA, a significant ecological area. You can't just say we're going to turn this into an SCA. We're going to use best environmental practice, plant up beside the creek and walk away, not in an urban area. Spray and walk away seems to be our policies, where we go to so much trouble to initiate process and then we walk away. Yeah, they start the process. They have meetings. They have a meeting here and a meeting there, and there's a copious amount of trees slayed to produce the paper for the minutes for the meeting and all of the so-called outcomes, but nothing actually gets done. Well, there's a guy I know well, lives in my area, and he was a pig color. He started off as a pig hunter and then they closed up the attackaries, so he got himself a culling job and he was happy. How convenient. And he was a good color. Yeah, he was. And we also need the pigs gone. Yeah. He's just after about, oh, it must be getting close to 20 years, maybe 18 years of culling. He's just walked away from that contract. And he told me the other day, when I started, a couple of rangers would pull up with me on the side of the road. We'd point out some landmarks and I'd be told, get in there and get it cleaned out between that point and that point. Of course, the landmarks weren't just the pointy bits you could see. All parties understood the terrain, how those animals act inside that terrain, what season it was. There was a whole bunch of base understanding of nature and animals and now, he doesn't go anywhere near the site visit, he ends up getting called into town and he finds himself in an office with 15 people who wouldn't know which end of the pig was the head until they tried to feed a biscuit. And that's the reality of the situation. The people who are not all, there's a lot of good people there and I want to work with them so if anyone's listening, I want to work with you. But there are people in there who, including us politicians, because the areas I have no understanding of, we're making decisions on things we don't understand. And so it's, and we're also really trying to jam so much into our time that we don't have time to do the due diligence we should. It just makes me think digressing a little bit, but a meeting a little while ago, a 600 page agenda and 41 attachments. Do you think I read all that? Do you think anybody in the place read all that? No, not even the person who stapled them all together. Absolutely. Well, a lot of it. Well, that's the other problem. That's the other problem to mirror some of my colleagues. We've gone paperless and I'm coping with that, although there are times when you need to print it out to be able to, especially when you're really drilling down on it. But it comes to us in a special portal to make sure that we're not naughty people and spread it all around the place. And that portal is almost impossible to work with. It really is. I sometimes have it open and you can open it in multiple times. So I sometimes have it open 10 times across my screen trying to follow stuff. Big is not beautiful. And I think the Super City has been a problem. I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? The Super City was supposed to deliver cost savings. It was supposed to reduce the head count of council staff with the Super City. We've now got a third more staff than we had back when there was three city councils in Auckland. We haven't got any better services for that. Maybe the water situation is probably better now that it's done city-wide. I don't know enough about that. But it seems that there are no savings. Our rate spills are increasing every year. We don't get anything extra for that. In fact, what we get is a whole lot more inconvenience because now we've got these pedestrian crossings that are large jatterbars. We've got 30 kilometres in our zones when there's no record anywhere to be seen of any sort of injuries on these roads. Most of them are fender benders. And we've got health and safety, road cones, everything for Africa just to make our life difficult. But they're not even maintaining the roads. So that makes it even more difficult and now everyone complains about SUVs. But it's actually the necessary vehicle you need to have to get it. I almost feel like I'm back in Suva where I was born, where there's more potholes than there is road surface. And everyone drives around in SUVs because that's what you need. We've almost become a third world city, but we're all going rah, rah, rah. We're a first world city, but we're not, are we? No, well, no, you, you summarise my thinking most of the time. I think we are recoverable like we are close to what we used to be. We are watching a slide. We're not at the bottom and we just have to catch ourselves and come to our senses and get back to core services and reality. Again, I think it's the data wave. I think it's all, there's so much data that all this IT stuff, it's an employer in itself. And when you look at the problems council has and our CCOs with data, data management, look at all kinds of transport. My heart goes out to them. They got some malicious wear and some people rent somewhere, attack them. So they say. But think of the dollars that was spent recovering that that could have gone to their core purpose. And I don't believe that they say, and I've heard this said several times, oh, well, you have to measure it to be able to manage it. Yeah, right. But again, our measuring capabilities are the only things that are first world. And there's no connection between that and the fix. Yes, I know that I know this personally, because it affected us. And it's the reason why we cease doing the job is that, you know, they talk about what gets measured gets done. And then they dream up these measures. And it might be a surprise to you to know that a large number of contracts, because most of the work the council does, they don't do themselves anymore. Any contract. Yeah, they contract everything. And in those contracts, there's little clauses that say something like, if your business that's doing this job has any machinery, or trucks, or youths or vehicles, they have to be signed written in a certain way. So that it looks like it's the council doing the work, even though it's a contractor. And on top of that, there's a minimum standard for the vehicles and equipment and everything like that, so that it doesn't look shabby. And so you might have a very cost effective crew that is going around fixing potholes in parks. And they've got a 20 year old truck and a 30 year old grader, or something like that. It's very cost effective. They're very good workers and they do their job. But along comes the clipboard carrying council officer and says, well, this truck's 20 years old. I would draw your attention to this clause here. Your vehicles need to be no more than five years old. And so the business is now faced with having to expend capital on vehicles that are going to end up looking like the one that's 20 years old in five years and have to replace it again and again and again. And that cost needs to be passed on to the end user, which is the rate power ultimately, but the council. But then the council says, oh, no, we've got a sinking lead on these things. So we can only fix this number of potholes or do this many meters of cracks. And you've now got these huge capital expenses. And you can only build X number of dollars. It doesn't make financial sense. So only the very large contractors can now do it because they've got the capital wherewithal to do these things. Whereas before, there used to be little contractors around doing all of these jobs and doing them very well and to the standard. And now you've got these massive contractors that are doing it. They're lackadaisical about everything, but their trucks and their cars and everything looks really spick and span. So they passed that test, but they're not actually fixing anything because it's not worth their while to do it. Absolutely. And you touch on so much stuff there. And the smaller contractors working in their communities had the biggest driver to do a good job. And that was peer pressure. They were doing it for their neighbors. They were doing it for the people in their local community and everyone knew who they were. And they did a good job on them in the majority. I've been told in the past that they were ripping the system. I don't believe that at all. Even if they were, it was nowhere near as expensive as it is now with all this nonsense we go through. And then of course, the council has five super contract areas. And I've seen the contracts for those. And the social, council contracts have even got social outcomes in the procurement. You will have so many EG, AG, QP, whatever they are, you will have so many immigrants. You will have Pacifica. I know I challenged this at a board meeting many years ago. I said, oh, come on. I said, all I'm interested in is the outcomes. I don't measure on anything else. And I was challenged, oh, well, you wouldn't say that in public. I did. And it went off. Everybody said, yes, exactly. All we want is good competent people for the job. When I got elected as a local board member in 2018, I went in there and all of a sudden certain specific things that I'd never thought of became center point because, oh, wow, look at that. And we have to do something. And so that was, that was interesting. I've never lost sight of the drainage in the potholes, but man, there's always a mountain over the top of that pothole. And now that I've become a councillor, the same things happened. I walked in there and all of a sudden, oh, okay. So, and one of those mountains is the philosophy and the way that we have all these, it's almost the fault of being just high vision. A number of times, I'm told, oh, councillor, that's management, your governance. You've got to know what the management's up to to be able to do good governance decisions in my opinion. But I voted against the Auditor-General a few weeks ago. Now, they were having kittens beside me and in the end I abstained rather than vote against it. But the Auditor-General has to audit our yearly accounts. So they came in and they said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they said that our carbon, they mentioned our carbon targets in having, okay. And I said, oh, well, excuse me, is the statement that the animals on Council's farm parks is 20% of the Corporate Council's carbon emissions. Is that true? Well, we work with the figures we're given. Yeah, but you're an Auditor, not an accountant. Is that figure correct? And so I finally said, look, I'll give you the answer myself. It's not correct. It can't be correct, because the figures you audited for the Council Corporate is actually not the roadworks, not the maintenance, not the open space services. All it is is the Corporate. And because parks is the only thing that's really still inside that corporate control and structure and operation, you've measured the animals as 20% of our emissions. And then they, and as I challenged the figure and they said, well, these carbon targets are breaking down into A, B and C. And the ones you're talking about, Falcon, Hogan, Ventia, and all the contractors, not to just try to name those guys, all the guys out there doing the real work, their carbon emissions aren't going to be measured until I think they said 25, 26 or something. And I said, so not only is this today totally wrong, because the cows are only 2% of the problem and you've taken all the, we, the Council have taken all the other contributing amounts away. When you do count C, all of a sudden the headlines in the paper are going to be Council misses its carbon targets by 4,000%. Well, they just shoot all the animals that solve the problem, wouldn't it? Meet all the carbon targets immediately. Yeah, you just try to crank me up. I mean, this is ridiculous thing. I know somebody who supplies a product to the Council and they were called into a meeting several months ago. It was last minute, like, we need you to come in. And I said, well, sorry, you know, we've got other work. We normally are our only customer. We need you to come. They said, no, no, we need you to come in. They said, what's it about? Well, we need to talk to you because you haven't answered our questions about what you're doing in your business to supply us with product for our Council businesses. And what you're going to to do to reduce your carbon footprint so that our carbon footprint can be reduced. And they said, well, we grow these things and we supply them to your Council businesses, you know, for the things that they consume. We can't change how something grows. It's a product that grows. It grows. It has a limited lifetime. It gets harvested. It gets sent to the Council businesses. I'm just being really careful about what I'm saying here because it can be identified. And there's nothing we can do about changing the genetics of a living organism in order to meet your carbon footprint requirements for these business units that you're managing and the outputs of the things that we're providing to you for that. So I don't know how we can possibly meet it. And in hindsight, if we lose the contract because we won't answer your stupid questions about climate change, well, then so be it because your 5% of our company will go and get a customer somewhere else. But the reality is that you can't get these products anywhere else. So we're not answering your questions. And they dug in on that and it turned into a disciplinary issue with the Council that their contractor wasn't meeting the requirements, which were arbitrarily applied in the contract. And they've been supplying the Council for 40 years. Look, look, and we have to stand up for common sense and I beg everybody to say it straight how they find it and let us, the Council, struggle, Councillors struggle with the results of that. So the ports of Auckland, they've told Council and it's not, it's not, it was in the paper. I'm just thinking because I'm being careful too. They're not going to meet the carbon targets we've given them. They can't. And the straddle carriers are 70% of their emissions. And, you know, someone mentioned, oh, we could electrify them. Well, well, the fact is that the ports of Auckland is a very good CEO just recovered them from a terrible financial situation, which was basically all most of it, tied to trying to automate or autonomous the straddle carriers. So there's been hundreds of millions thrown down the drain because of all that. And then the real fact that we should be focusing on is if we move the ports of Auckland anywhere, and it would be kilometers away, anywhere with two hundred and billions of dollars, then the carbon and we were told at one stage that it was there was a figure I'm trying to remember 20 or 200 million kilograms of extra carbon emitted if we move the port from where it is, because sure, okay, it's an export port and import port, but the consumption is in Auckland. So therefore, 80% of that pork, I know it's high, I'm guessing that figure that with the majority of that port's activities go straight into Auckland. That's the most carbon efficient way you can get it straight into Auckland. So I looked around the room as that was being told to us and, and you know, there's people horrified and other people and other people, you know, we all took it our own way, but there's nothing we're going to do about that. There's nothing, but the best thing we can do about that is just make sure that the operation is efficient and as modern as possible and gets its core services done, concentrates on core services and applies the best of technology as it comes along. And we don't need to be leading edge either because there's a, there's a risk and a cost comes with that that we don't need to do again to digress. One of the things that really annoys me in council when I've started challenging it everywhere, we want to be exemplatory or exemplar. No, we don't. We just need to do our job. Do it well. We don't need to be the leader. Yeah. No, let someone else do the leading and we can look over their shoulder and go, well, that's good. Oh, that's proved itself. We'll adopt that. But we, but we got a whole bunch of people who want to get into their job and they want to be part of, you know, they want to be exemplar. It's not their money they're being exemplar on. I've been in business as a mechanic for 40 years. I've been a registration center. I've been a alternate fuel installer and I can tell you, man, that those things were fun, enjoyable and proud of the sort of conversions I did didn't make a bloody dollar. And by the time it all stopped, I made enough just to pay for all the special equipment I brought to do it. It's just ridiculous. There's these layers and layers and layers. I mean, you know, when the super city was formed, we were told we was going to be savings. We were also told at the time that the government had decided that they were going to have a new thing that for Auckland, it was only going to be for Auckland and it was never going to be anywhere else. And that was the creation of this independent Maori statutory board where assets of the council would now be jointly managed together with this independent Maori statutory board. And because we did that, that was going to honour the treaty and give Maori a voice. And that meant we didn't need to have Maori wards or separate Maori councillors. We had these unelected appointed EWA elite people who got their jobs because of who they know or who their family is. But that was going to solve all our problems. And then I saw last week, there was a proposal for and again, this is one of those things that you say is driven by government. Council had to assess or work out whether or not it needs to have a new level of bureaucracy and a new level of councillors that were elected on the basis of race and have Maori seats. Now, you were one of the 11 councillors that voted against that and said, you're actually voting against having it for the next election, but it hasn't made the argument or the discussion go away. It's just kick the can down the road for another term, basically. And then unholy hell broke loose that you were apparently now a racist along with the other 11. And we had Tau Henare tweeting that who isn't on the independent Maori statutory board in his unelected positions on these council committees being consulted about everything to do with Maori. And he announces on Twitter that he's unhappy with us, that what his message was was to quote, a message to those 11 councillors who voted no on Maori wards, in fact to the council at large, I will now vote no and oppose everything you put forward at any one of my committees, which are planning and CCOs. And I will also raise that strategy with our board, meaning the independent Maori statutory board at the next meeting. That just seems like brown male, U2, retribution and threats. Well, do you see it that way? No, I just take no notice of the bullshit. It's just, it's just politics. And we're all just humans. And they can apply whatever pressure they like. You know, I'm fourth generation, proudly fourth generation from the Waitakere's, got some land left over, I've got land there my own, I've gifted 25 acres of riparian right property to regional parks many years ago. My family, my extended family owner, a little hill there in the Waitakere's, which is left, is being incorporated in 1939 as Huwe Private Reserve. And on that is the most preserved pass side at the top of that hill in the Waitakere's. My granddaughter is part Maori ethnicity from North, and they live in Whangarei, we've got a couple of granddaughters, let's say, and my immediate family are the biggest shareholders in that private reserve. So my granddaughter, because of a few other funny things inside humanity, how it all works with our own family, our own whanau, my granddaughter probably will end up the largest shareholder in that European title, Hill of Significance to Maori in Auckland. She will be Minna Fenua in Whangarei. She will be Ma Tawaka in Auckland. This is the future. We're all going to be the same thing by the time this is the future. When it comes down to the Maori wards, et cetera, and the treaty, I'm no treaty specialist. I have no, I don't understand co-governance, I have no problem with partnership. I've had a bloody good partnership with my wife since we were 16. And also the trades are going brown, that Maori and Pacifica grossly outnumber the European in the trades. And they're all my mates. My good friend Jim was my foreman for 27 years, ran my business for the last 10 years as his own. A Maori guy, a decent bloke, his daughter and her husband have now taken it over and running it and stuff. It's just life. And if we're going to have, I support the Maori wards sets because they're democratic. But that's all we need. We've already got a special relationship, supposedly, legislatively. And I don't need to get into that. But the council treats mana whenua as a decision-making partner. They treat Matawaka as a key stakeholder, like most of the rest of the entities. And then we've got the independent Maori statutory board there, who are, from what I can see, have been set up as a Maori watchdog role. But they are populated by mana whenua. And there's a court case taking place at the moment inside Maori DIM challenging how that's set up. Let's just set this thing up, simply and properly, in a democratic manner. And I have not opposed to them having a couple of specific seats like the government. I don't know any better, any less. That's just my gut feel to it all. Common sense and practicality doesn't worry me, doesn't scare me. What scares me is academic ideology that is so disconnected from our daily lives, it has no point to me. But wasn't the proposal for the Maori wards to be on top of, or in addition to, the independent Maori statutory board? It wasn't the proposal, it was the fact. The fact is that the independent Maori statutory board comes with a under different legislation that council has no control over. So really what was happening the way I perceive it, there was presented to all parties a small opening to deliver some Maori ward seats to Auckland Council. And like everything else, not just Maori stuff, all of CalSTAP, we've got opportunistic actions all over the place. Someone wants to lock up a specific walking track in the Waitakres. And all of a sudden, carry dieback comes along. Man, that track's got no carry on it whatsoever. But we locked that anyway as a precautionary measure. And then all of a sudden it's going to get opened again. Oh, we don't want that. We don't want that way. I don't know why they don't want it. Maybe they don't want it because it's the end of a dead end road. Maybe they don't want it because they think they've got some fancy coloured frog download or something or other. But they go utilizing any action they can for the long-term purpose rather than working on the purpose. That's how I see it. And so we end up with third-world results because we don't use first-world common sense. I don't know how better to explain myself because I tell you, I struggle with understanding what I see happening in front of me on a daily basis. I have no problem with Maori friends having a seat beside me or more on council because the ones out there on the street have some bloody common sense, man. And if I can inject common sense into council, I'll use any syringe I can get my hands on. So that's the thing, isn't it? Because if you do have common sense and you resonate with the public, and when I say the public, I'm not talking about segregating it by dividing it on the basis of race or whether or not you're from, I mean, I was born in Fiji. Do I say I'm Fijian all the time? Well, no, I don't. But I was born in Fiji, but I don't use that as a crutch. And so I look at these things and I think, why have we all of a sudden diverged from being ratepayers or the public into separating people by race or class or whatever? A classic example is when all the councils were amalgamated, there was a homogenization process for rates that went on so that everyone could theoretically have a core set of rates that were based not on where you live, but because these are the core services that are provided. Because you've got suburbs like O'Racky, Remiwara, Epsom that are paying huge amounts of rates because it's based on property values. It is a progressive tax system. But the reality is that they take all the money from those areas, but they also spend it in those areas. And so the poorer areas get less money spent on the further out you are from the center of governance in Auckland Council, the less services you get. So as a hero was living in Whangapara paying homogenized rates, but there was no council rubbish service in Whangapara. If you want your rubbish picked up, you have to pay for it. Parts of the North Shore, you have to pay for your rubbish to be picked up. But in Auckland Central in Manukau, the rubbish is picked up by the council. And so there are still these structural and systemic issues to do with rating and services that exist. And we've got large amounts of rural people in the boundaries of Auckland, and their roads are appalling, particularly in Rodney. And I'll be talking to Greg Sayers about that later on. There is a perception that Auckland Council still concentrates on the CBD and not so much to further out you get. That's my observation. I sit in the amount of debate we have, which is CBD centric is huge. And I've actually been penning a bit of a post about that as we speak. But look, let's just go back because I like looking at the common sense. The food scraps rubbish collection. I've been after that since I was on the local board since I first got my first presentation. So we're going to save carbon and all this sort of nonsense. No, it's not nonsense. I have no problem in saving anything because it saves money and makes it more efficient. And I do think that we are putting, we don't want all our eggs in one basket. But one entity could have aerobically composted our food scraps on Pukatutu. And I've seen a report where they would have saved a minimal amount of carbon emissions doing it. I don't know. Council decides we're going to truck it to Ripper Rower, put it into a digester to turn it into methane, to then supply or to sell that methane to a hot house complex, the biggest one in Australia beside it. That's why they went down there. Then they're going to take the leachate out of the bottom of the digester, put that in plastic bottles and truck it back to Auckland and sell it through our social enterprise shops as super duper fertilizer. So I said the other day, I've been working on this for ages, Ripper Rower. So I said, okay, what's your carbon emissions taking all these food scraps to Ripper Rower? This is a couple of years ago, I said that and oh, it's zero. How's it zero? Oh, it's a backhaul. Oh, so in other words, there's aggregate on the trucks, there's roading material on the trucks coming the other way. Yes. I said, well, we shouldn't be getting our roading material from Taupo either. We should be getting that closer. There's plenty closer. So then recently, just right now, I've got questions in about it. So the way I understand at the moment is that's insane. This is the first time I've heard that we're tracking. Oh, it's worse than that. We're tracking food. We're taking it to a point in South Auckland and squeezing the water out of it because they've realised, oh, it's 80% water. So we're tracking all the water. So we've got this water squeezing. It's a compressing water, which is a common thing for effluence to extract the water. This is pink food. I mean, we're talking about pink food here, right? So then they take it to Rapa Rava. Now, I've asked the question, because I'm pretty sure they'd have to add water to make it digest properly. Anyway, the issue I asked was, and it was mainly a financial issue that I was trying to pin down on. I'm trying to find out where the spendings go, et cetera. So I said, I understood that the council had put, and I won't say the figure because they tell me I was wrong, a large amount of money into this startup. And I was told, yes, we have, but no, we're near the amount you've mentioned, but we don't own any of the startup. We just put it in as a contribution at the beginning, and that gives us cheaper charges. So I said, okay, it's not cheaper. Pay for it. Let me finish. It gets better. So I said, okay, in the discussion, I became aware that we pay a gate charge per tonne for the food scraps we send in. So I said, okay, how much do we get for our methane? Oh, that varies. Well, okay, what's the average? Well, we don't really know because actually the methane income offsets our gate charge. Oh, okay. So trying to find a hard figure I could lock down on, I said, what does it cost us to cut the stuff down there? Oh, that's calculated in the gate charge too. So all of a sudden I start sniffing the private sector is probably rolling around like possums on dope laughing so much at these contracts. There is no visibility. So we are collecting it all. I can see about a thousand ways that that startup is tucking Auckland capital. And now to the defense of some of the people in there. And this is the problem. They can't. You can because you've been out there at the cold face. You know, I can because I've been tucked a bunch of times myself. And I've lost money by being just plain stupid. Yeah. And so here I am as a counselor, trying to get an understanding of the fiscal position of this project so that I can make good governance decisions. And it is totally invisible. It's totally cloaked in fog and smog and smoke. And my question is, is that by pure mistake or by construct? My suspicion is that it never made a business case in the beginning. And so therefore all the facts were hidden. So the business case couldn't be judged. Well, you know what you should do? You should take that go and sit down beside Morris Williamson and point him in that direction because he's got all the data from the financial system. Been there done that. We're working on it. Yeah, good. Because if he can find where it's buried in the spreadsheets, he will be the one that will find it buried. I've got the questions in right now. And so far the email back has been, oh, dear counselor, we're going to take some time getting it together. That's the answer for everything, isn't it? Well, Ken, it's been fascinating talking to you about all of this. And I suspect that we could go on and on and on for hours and hours about the systemic problems that are in the council. But we don't have that much time and neither do you. So I'm thanking you now for the time you have given us to give us a little insight into the issues at Auckland Council. And I appreciate you coming on the on the front with me. And I appreciate having a chat. It relieves my internal pressure valve. So thank you very much. You're most welcome and we'll have to have a chat again sometime. Okay, see you later. Thank you. You start off talking about a few things and one thing leads to another and here we are an hour later with a record of even more problems. Almost all of which are caused or exacerbated by the civil servants. We like to blame the councillors, but it's clear with the real blame lies. Tell me your thoughts on what Ken had to say by emailing inbox at realitycheck.radio or text to 2057. This is The Crunch with Cam Slater. Conversations with a side of controversy right here on RCR.