More calls for Brown to go

Matt McCarten writes:

Until this week Brown’s crime has been mainly about moral hypocrisy by using his wholesome family image to help his career for years while being privately the opposite. Without doubt, if any council employees had used council property or work time for trysts, they would have been fired with the mayor’s blessing.

This week the findings of the investigation take things to another level. His conduct crossed from his personal misbehaviour to the professional compromise of the office of mayor. …

Brown won’t get another term, regardless of what happens. So he should forget about himself and spend his energy doing big meaningful things for the people who put him there. That’s the mayor’s pathway to redemption.

Otherwise he may as well resign now and put himself, his family and us out of our misery.

Kerre Woodham also writes:

You’d have thought that shame would have seen him depart the mayoralty but the shame gene appears to be missing from his DNA.

I suppose he’s hoping the Christmas and New Year break will take the heat off him and when everyone comes back to work next year, it will be as if nothing ever happened.

But unless there’s a seismic shift, he’s going to be the most impotent mayor in the history of local body politics (which is ironic, really, isn’t it?)

People don’t want to work with him. Ratepayers are contemptuous of him. And politicians in Central Government will be wary of him, because nobody likes being around a loser, so it will make it more difficult to lobby for Auckland’s interests in Wellington.

On that note the HoS reports:

Auckland councillor Dick Quax, an outspoken critic of Mayor Len Brown, has called on him to withdraw from hosting Prince William and wife Catherine early next year.

The couple and their baby George will visit New Zealand in April.

Yesterday, Quax said Brown should not be greeting the royals after his two-year extramarital affair with Bevan Chuang and a review that found he had accepted free hotel rooms and upgrades.

“I’d be absolutely horrified if he was the face and the representative of Auckland meeting Prince William, his wife and their baby.”

That would be embarrassing.

And the HoS editorial:

When Santa Claus packs his sleigh ahead of his delivery run in the next couple of days, it’s fair to assume he won’t be needing a lot of space for parcels for one Len Brown, of Manukau in Auckland.

“Have you been a good boy this year, Len,” is a question the Auckland Mayor would, surely, dread right now.

It has been a horrendous end to 2013 for a man who should have had so much to celebrate. He won a landslide victory in the Supercity mayoralty and had another term or two firmly in mind. But his lengthy affair with Bevan Chuang, an independent report that cleared him of legal wrongdoing but revealed freebies and the use of a ratepayer-funded cellphone to support the affair, his forgetfulness over council policies on transparency, and a media pack that has turned on him all mean one thing – Mayor Len is dead man walking.

Len’s sole supporter remains Brian Rudman it seems.