Auckland mayor Wayne Brown's election plea: 'Sod off'

"Keep out of it" and "sod off" are Wayne Brown's messages to government politicians at this election.

The Auckland mayor on Wednesday unveiled his manifesto for the election - a document laying out his priorities and hopes for the next government's stance regarding the city.

He agreed that he'd had a "gutsful" of thing being imposed on Auckland where the useful benefits were not as useful as the cost would suggest.

"That's pretty much it, really," he said.

He spoke about roading, complaining that in a country short of money for roading the transport authority was spending "ridiculous sums" on motorways in Auckland "without even telling me where they are".

"There is a $3.2 billion - which apparently they're thinking it might be $3.6b - set of 25 kilometres of highway going in between Warkworth and Te Hana which they've never even shown me what the route is.

"You can build a nice hotel for less than that, and that's for a road. And what is that going to do? It's seven minutes quicker ... I can only get one truck down and back in a day, anyhow."

He wanted a rational 30-year plan built on the best ways of delivering people and goods across the district with the money available.

"That doesn't allow for somebody to say, 'oh, let's put a motorway in somewhere or other, so we might get elected' - that's not a reason. Roads are there for the transport of people and goods, not for re-election purposes."

On housing, he decried the intervention over Auckland's unitary plan, and the Medium-Density Residential Standards that allowed three three-storey homes on each section, and the flip-flopping on that.

"They discovered all the people in the leafy suburbs, and the member for Epsom [David Seymour] suddenly thought 'oh, I might not get re-elected, so I don't like this'.

"Just sod off. We know how to have a rational way of developing, or we want to develop the city, and we do have multi-storey we've spent a whole lot of money putting trains and bus routes in."

He said New Zealand was the move centrally managed country in the world - "in other modern cities we would be running the police and the schools" - but Auckland was essentially a state government given it accounted for 40 percent of the population.

There had been some areas where the council and the government had worked well together, he said, "a long list".

"But then the election comes along, and they've got a seven-pronged attack on the public and they're each announcing more and more unaffordable things knowing full well that they can say 'oh, we would have done that but Winston or David or someone else wouldn't let me do it'.

"So I want them to say 'Wayne is not going to let you do it'. Think about me. Because I represent the city, and ... I had something which none of them will experience, it's a landslide."

Wayne Brown's manifesto listed five broad main priorities:

• Faster, better, cheaper public transport;
• Support growth in the right places;
• Support Auckland's global economic drive;
• Keep cutting stupid rules;
• Don't forget about resilience and the environment.