The Metro Goldwyn Mayor
Metropolitan Mayors of Auckland
1962-1965: Dove-Myer Robinson (Civic Reform) [1]
1962 def: Hugh Lambie (Independent)
1965-1968: Keith Hay (Independent) [2]
1965 def: Dove-Myer Robinson (Independent), George Forsyth (Labour)
1968-1977: Dove-Myer Robinson (Independent) [3]
1968 def: Keith Hay (Independent), George Forsyth (Independent Labour)
1971 def: Ted Flynn (Civic Action)
1974 def: Jim Anderton (Labour)
1977-1980: Jim Anderton (Labour) [4]
1977 def: Dove-Myer Robinson (Independent), Assid Corban (Independent)
1980-1983: Colin Kay (Ratewatchers) [5]
1980 def: Jim Anderton (Labour), Dove-Myer Robinson (Independent)
1983-1989: Cath Tizard (Labour) [6]
1983 def: Colin Kay (Ratewatchers), Lloyd Elsmore (Independent), Tim Shadbolt (Independent), Dove-Myer Robinson (Independent)
1986 def: Colin Kay (Independent)
[1] - Sir Dove-Myer 'Robbie' Robinson is remembered as the father of modern Auckland, having first involved himself in local politics to oppose a sewage plan that would have resulted in the beaches of the Waitemata Harbour being inundated with refuse whenever the wind came from the east. This took him a decade and a lot of his own money, and resulted in Robbie implementing his alternative (oxidation pools out of sight of his house) as Mayor of Auckland City. Unfortunately, the City Council was one of 32 territorial authorities in the city at the time; a problem which incited his second major campaign. The creation of the Auckland Regional Authority, along the lines of the Toronto Metro, was opposed tooth and nail by the existing local government Establishment, some of whom governed boroughs of as little as 8,500 people, but was finally carried through thanks to the support of Prime Minister Holyoake, who saw in Robbie a similarly self-made man. In 1962, Robinson was elected to command the new body he'd made for himself.
The ARA formed a top tier of local government, covering the 32 territorial authorities and a panoply of special purpose boards, such as the Drainage Board and the Airport Authority, which had already been created to co-ordinate matters too interconnected for the tiny boroughs to manage alone. Each borough elected two members, but Auckland City and Manukau elected more by a ward system, making 70 Councillors plus a Mayor elected at large. The populist Robbie, with his ticket backed by the Labour Party, did poorly in Manukau (upon which he had foisted his oxidation ponds) and in the small boroughs, but defeated the Mayor of Manukau, Hugh Lambie, in a close contest, as voters balked at Lambie's proposal to abolish the ARA before it had even been given a fair trial.
[2] - What ought to have been Robbie's apogee promptly became his annus horribilis. The over-represented conservative boroughs ensured a majority opposed to all of his zany schemes (for instance, bringing the electricity boards into the ARA), while his home life went from hectic to downright scandalous. Always a philanderer, he had married a much younger woman as his fourth wife while only Mayor of Auckland City, but repressed her desire to make a career of her own. In 1965, this resulted in a separation, after which both were hospitalised under mysterious circumstances. One rumour alleged that he'd chased her down the street with a meat cleaver - which is unlikely, as both of them were vegetarians. In any case, Robbie handily lost the Metro Mayor race to Keith Hay, the bible-bashing Mayor of Mount Roskill, while Labour stood a candidate against him for the first time. Hay's reign embarked on no big-ticket items but is well-regarded in hindsight for using the sizeable ARA rates to build social housing. However, his re-election efforts were spectacularly misguided - his hoardings featured a picture of himself and the Mayoress, with the slogan "Auckland Needs Both Of Us". Robbie, now a bachelor once more, was returned to office on a wave of sympathy.
[3] - Old enmities with the Auckland Establishment now healing, Robbie launched himself into his third big project - rapid rail for Auckland. The existing commuter services were run by the Railways Department on the trunk lines, and were infrequent and often delayed as freight had right of way. Robinson proposed a separate, standard-gauge network to go along with the new motorways which were springing up around Auckland, and set up a committee to draw up a proposal. Unfortunately, the General Manager of the ARA (and ex officio member of the committee), Ted Flynn, was resolutely opposed to rapid rail and obstructed the committee for two and a half years. Eventually, the irascible Robbie removed him (with questionable authority), only to be faced by him in the Metro Mayor race in 1968. By this stage, Robinson had both Labour and the Establishment back on-side due to the fact that the extensive rail plans serviced almost every borough, so Flynn was only supported by an anti-rail lobby group and did quite poorly.
Even so, Auckland had to wait for the election of the Third Labour Government in 1972 for the project to get the state funding it needed to get started. The legacy of the ART network is mixed: the standard-gauge lines take up room that could have been used to triple- or -quadruple-track the narrow-gauge freight lines, while speeds aren't appreciably higher than they would have been on narrow-gauge. Other issues include the expense of the underground City Rail Loop (Stage 1 of the project, and only completed in 1984) and the infrequency of the stations, which mean that most passengers have to take a bus to get to their local train station. However, this latter point does make the ART genuinely rapid, with transit times to Whangaparoa or the Airport hovering at around 30 minutes.
[4] - Robinson also implemented forward-thinking recycling and composting initiatives (he had been President of the NZ Humic Compost Society since before he entered politics) and is remembered today as a talisman of the Green movement, although he was of course an upstanding and successful businessman and keen capitalist. However, he endorsed a vote for Values at both the 1972 and 1975 elections, encouraging Labour to run against him for the Mayoralty. Jim Anderton, a Manukau City Councillor, laid the groundwork in 1974 by painting Robbie as a defanged stooge of the conservative element, but only managed to pull off a victory when the Citizens and Ratepayers endorsed the Westie winemaker Assid Corban to - as it turned out - split the vote. The new Mayor was of a whole new generation to Robinson, who was now in his seventies but still possessing the energy to be a vehement critic of his successor. Anderton waylaid progress on the City Rail Loop and diverted more funds to local suburban hubs as opposed to just making it easier for them to go shopping on Queen Street. He even temporarily redesignated the underground Civic ART station as a swimming pool, although it was drained soon after when nobody dared go down there. But the project went slowly on, amid mounting costs.
[5] - Anderton's high spending (a lot of which he was committed to by his predecessor) sparked the rise of the New Right in Auckland, with the formation of Ratewatchers as a genuine movement for the freezing of rates - which no conservatives had ever actually believed in before, even as they demanded it in the triennial elections. The former Citizens and Ratepayers member of Auckland City Council, Colin Kay, led the charge of the City and small boroughs against the South Auckland interloper Anderton, and defeated him on a very split vote. Meanwhile, Robinson made a doomed play to give his life meaning once more by donning the mayoral chains. Kay, however, quickly discovered that contracting out Council services and selling the Mayoral Daimler didn't actually save enough money to cut rates by as much as his supporters demanded, and was swept away when the conservative Establishment withdrew support.
[6] - Cath Tizard, a relatively youthful woman was part of the Labour aristocracy and had made a name for herself on her own terms by opposing Council house rent increases pushed by Robinson and Kay. Her victory, however, was marred by two things: firstly, the fact that the ailing Robinson called the people of Auckland "gutless, shallow and uncaring" for giving him such a paltry vote; secondly, the majority of conservatives on the ARA, permanent and unimpeachable by dint of representing the tiny boroughs. Under Tizard, the ART network began to really take shape, and the tendency of Auckland to sprawl in the general direction of Hamilton was arrested by high-density building along the rail corridors. These gains came at a price, though, because the boroughs served by the ART were all very much opposed to the intensification and rezoning of all their peaceful suburbs. Over the 1980s, relations between Mayor and Councillors, and between ARA and Councils, declined to historic lows of backbiting and recalcitrance.
On the plus side, the boroughs had never been more united among themselves, and this gave the Fourth Labour Government a unique opportunity to reform local government. Put off by the disputes between the two tiers in Auckland, the Government merged the patchwork of Councils, Boards and Authorities in New Zealand into a much smaller number of unitary authorities, cutting the 32 Auckland Councils down to just four - and most of the 32 were happy to put their differences aside in order to be rid of the Metro Mayor. As such, Cath Tizard served out her term until the Auckland Regional Authority was disestablished at the 1989 local elections.
The first Metro Mayor, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, had passed away just two months beforehand.