Auckland Council’s draft economic strategy names three priority precincts for growth. None of them is in east Auckland.
The strategy runs to 2040 and is meant to give the whole council group, including its arm’s-length companies, a single economic direction. Mayor Wayne Brown has named it a priority for the year.
Officers told the workshop it fills a gap in the Council’s planning, and that decisions on land use, infrastructure and transport are economic policy in their own right.
Howick Local Board chair Bruce Kendall, an Olympic sailing gold medallist, joined the Governing Body workshop online on Wednesday 5 August to tell councillors and officers what that leaves out.
“It’s interesting to note on this picture that the Howick Local Board area in East Tamaki is the biggest industrial area in New Zealand,” Kendall said.
“And yet there’s no rapid transport system to be able to get there.”
Business East Tamaki, the business association covering the precinct, says the area is home to about 2,000 businesses employing 30,000 people and generating $3 billion a year for the New Zealand economy.
The Council’s own papers put the cost of congestion to the Auckland economy at about $2.6 billion a year.
The precincts the draft names are the City Centre, Drury and the Northwest.
Its workforce chapter promises to build local skills “especially in the south and west”, and the single worked example it offers of a jobs and skills hub is Drury.
East Tamaki is not mentioned anywhere in the 30-page workshop document. Neither is Howick, Botany, Highbrook or Pakuranga.
Kendall argued the Council should chase its wins where they are largest rather than spread the effort evenly.
“When we’re looking at trying to do anything better, we always look where we can make the biggest gains and put our efforts there,” he said.
Brown said that thinking was partly behind the Council’s push into technology.
“That’s in a way why we’ve got into the tech sector, because that’s where we have had the biggest wins,” Brown said.
He pointed to Rocket Lab, which he said was now a $100 billion company, and to Auckland losing the SailGP regatta to another city.
“That’s why I was so disappointed about us losing SailGP. It’s an open window into our marine tech sector,” Brown said.
“We need Aucklanders making decisions about Auckland.”
He said Shenzhen had gone from a fishing village 40 years ago to a city built on the tech sector, on the back of a designated economic development area, and that he would raise the idea with central government at the next Auckland deal meeting without expecting much.
“The word economic development is unknown to them down in Wellington.”
Kendall was not the only member unhappy with the map on screen.
Manurewa-Papakura councillor Daniel Newman said it left out the industrial land in the south.
“It’s not showing on this map, which is frankly disappointing, bloody disappointing,” Newman said.
He asked how much commercial and industrial land in Auckland is zoned and sitting undeveloped.
“If the answer is that you don’t know, therein lies part of the issue,” Newman said.
Brown agreed land was piling up around Ardmore aerodrome and said he was glad Newman had raised it.
Councillors have a month to send officers their feedback before the strategy comes back with targets attached.
