Shearer David: General Debate 
Shearer David: General Debate 
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DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 I was one of the very lucky ones who were able to get to Eden Park on Friday night. I have to say to Ms Dyson that it was a terrific night to park in my electorate. It was a great night. The opening ceremony literally brought tears to my eyes. Like a lot of other people I was very proud to be a New Zealander and proud to see how our country and our diversity was portrayed and to see that we could have an opening like that that was positively world-beating. It was a great game too. It was not a great technical game of rugby but it was a good game. It was good to see the Tongans really giving it particularly in the second half. Auckland itself has been alive with red flags certainly all over my electorate and around the place. I do not have any problem with red flags all over Auckland. 
But the night was soured by events that did not go so well elsewhere. Our transport did not stack up as we thought it would. It was never great from the start and it certainly did not stack up. There were too many people down at the waterfront—370000 people made it down there on Friday. On a normal day 240000 would be using our transport system. The Government announced that it wanted to have party central down at the waterfront. It said: “Come on down to party central!”. The area held only 12000 people but the Government encouraged everybody to go down there. There was the biggest fireworks display in New Zealand’s history. Why would people not go down there on a great night to celebrate? So they went down and what happened? They certainly did not get the reception that we wanted. 
That was bad enough—that was bad enough—but that is fixable. We can do something about that. The council sat down on Friday night and said: “This isn’t what we wanted; this isn’t what we expected. Let’s see what’s wrong and see how we can fix it.” But instead of that we have had a whole lot of finger-pointing by this Government—a whole lot of finger-pointing particularly by Mr McCully. He swans in like he is some sort of tinpot banana republic dictator and tells everybody what he is going to do. He brings in his Wellington jackboot crowd his bureaucrats who think that somehow they can tell Auckland a city of 1.4 million people how to run their show and how to do it better. This is exactly what we do not want in Auckland. We do not want somebody who micro-manages a city right down to the colour of their costumes and T-shirts and who gets to say who sits in which corporate box and who does not. We want somebody who can work with our council who can sit down with our council and work out what went wrong and how we can do it better so that Auckland can turn on exactly what we want it to. And it can—it can. 
The thing that is most galling about this is not the fact that things did not work—that was bad enough—but the reaction from the Government of wanting to shift blame away from itself and on to the Auckland Council. McCully came walking in with not even the courtesy of a phone call to our mayor—not even the courtesy of picking up the phone and saying he is taking over. He just came in and said he is going to declare martial law down on Auckland’s waterfront. 
There is another way to do this which is to sit down and get on with the Auckland Council and do it together—do it together—so that we have a good outcome in the future and not a bad one. We have ended up with basically a peeing competition between Mr McCully Mr Joyce and Mr Key about who will really be in charge of the Rugby World Cup. We do not need this. We do not want Auckland to be portrayed around the world as some sort of banana republic. The International Rugby Board said to a number of people I know that it understands that the transport did not work very well. It did not work very well in France either when the Rugby World Cup was handled there. But we did not expect the Minister for the Rugby World Cup to come launching in like some banana republic dictator and lord it over everybody else. All that did was put the story into the international pages; it did not actually solve the problem. At the end of the day the Auckland Council will still have to get on and do exactly what it needs to do which is to quietly get on and fix it.