Super city Mayor Len Brown’s PR machine has been in overdrive even before the super scandal hit the media this week. He saw it coming a week before and that’s when he thought it fit to take his wife of 20 years and his three daughters into confidence.
When Aucklanders – those who voted for him with their tick and those that did with their feet – took in the headlines and the gory details that would make a porn writer blush, Mayor Brown appears to already have been well advised and ready to make a beeline for TV3 on John Campbell’s 7pm slot for what came across as a well practiced mea culpa.
Campbell was unusually calm, almost pusillanimous, contrary to his usual belligerent, overpowering and interrupting self, leaving viewers in little doubt that the whole show was a planned PR coup which the mayor’s advisers in years to come could turn into a textbook example for successful PR.
And Auckland’s – and New Zealand’s – liberal brigade, like the snapper they are so fond of snaring around the country’s coast, swallowed that performance hook, line and sinker, going by the comments in favour of the mayor staying put on social media.
Mayor Brown has treated the Campbell Live mea culpa like a religious confession: All is forgiven at the altar of the almighty when you beg for forgiveness and you can begin with a clean slate. He has apologized to his family and his electorate as if that has given him the moral right to say that he will stay put. This time around though, he did not slap himself all over his face.
The post-modernist liberals say that in this day and age a leader should not be held to account by his personal transgressions and judged solely by his public performance.
One commentator has said that this sort of thinking was understandable a generation or two ago but is not mainstream now. Appallingly, a lady PR expert has gone on record saying that virility in men is admired and what Mr Brown did might actually be admired. We wonder what the commentator smokes and if the lady PR expert lives in a sheikhdom somewhere and is speaking from behind a veil.
The question here is not what the prevalent social mores in the age that we live in are. And it is appalling that people are squabbling over this completely sidelining the real issue here. The real, one single issue that is timeless, as old as human civilisation and one that will be cherished and respected till the end of civilised living.
That is the issue of trust.
Consider the following:
• Mayor Brown had his gig going for two long years (though he qualified it by saying “off and on” on Campbell Live). He never mentioned it to his family whom he only took into confidence when he came to know that the proverbial poo was about to hit the fan last week. He broke his family’s trust.
• Mayor Brown paraded his family in the media, portraying himself as being a loving family man; had a family portrait in his chambers, which he allegedly used for his trysts with a woman. He broke his vows of marriage and once again the trust of the people who were led to believe he was an ardent family man.
• Mayor Brown allegedly used office hours, office space and office resources in breach of the code of conduct rules of the public organisation that employed him. He broke the organisation’s, his employees’, his electorate’s and his ratepayers’ trust.
• Mayor Brown took the oath of office to work in the best interests of the city’s ratepayers adhering to the rules of the organisation he was elected to lead. He broke the trust of the democratic system that elected him.
This is to say nothing about the ethics around this sordid saga.
By acting in the way he has, he has betrayed the trust of every one. By owning up to his transgression only when he realised that it was the only way out and he had no other option may be dictated by the extreme survival instincts of a consummate, shameless politician but to turn that opportunistic mea culpa into a platform to justify his continuance is pure chicanery.
He has done nothing but cock a snook at every stakeholder in Auckland City, most of all its ratepayers.
If he refuses to step down he will be sworn in soon for a second term.
He will take another oath. Would you trust the oath he will take? Would you trust the city’s future to a man who is opaque, sneaky and who breaks everybody’s trust as if it’s a daily chore?
It would be a shame to leave the future fate of New Zealand’s economic powerhouse to a lame duck head who has forfeited his moral authority.
Hopefully the liberal ostriches will pull their heads out of the sand and see the light of day.
If New Zealanders put any value on trust, they should ease Len Brown out.