Simeonism. It’s got into almost everything: health, transport, housing, resource management, urban renewal, energy, education, climate change, governance. It’s obviously there in the decision not to proceed with a visitor bed levy: a decision whose consequences reach far beyond tourism and hospitality. It’s especially there in National’s election mantra “no new taxes”.
It’s a war, being waged against Auckland. Not just by Simeon, of course, and not just against Auckland. The whole country suffers from the bumper-sticker reduction of economic management to “no new taxes”. But while this war is a National Party project, it’s leader is Simeon Brown, the party’s campaign chair, its minister of health, energy and, formerly, transport and Auckland itself. His appalling ideology reigns supreme.
Simeonism even seeped into the launch this week of the fourth annual State of the City report, commissioned by the Committee for Auckland, which benchmarks Auckland against a number of other mid-size developed cities.
There was some sterling talk about innovation and seizing opportunities. Nick Smith, the new vice chancellor at the University of Auckland, suggested the city was “on the verge of moving up a division”. This was a touch heroic. In fact, while the city is moving up the rankings for innovation and some other factors, it has dropped 26 places overall.
So what did the minister for Auckland say? Simon Watts has inherited the job from Brown and he told the gathering he was “determined” that Auckland succeeds, and “of course progess is uneven, but it’s how we bounce back that matters, it’s all about the 10-year goals”. He said he wanted to stress the word “confidence”.
He didn’t name anything: not a single project, event, policy or programme. An entire speech without proper nouns. He had nothing to announce, no insights to share, no help to offer and not even any specific comments on the report. Had he read it? Had he read even the executive summary? At the end of the session he reverted to culture-war cracks about cycleways. Pure Simeonism.
More on this report below. But first …
“No new taxes” and the bed levy
Christopher Luxon launched the “no new taxes” mantra by quoting in full the original user of the slogan, George H.W. Bush. “Read my lips! No new taxes,” declared Bush, campaigning to become the US president in 1988.
It’s very clever, and it’s awful. What “No new taxes” really means is that our health system will collapse.
It’s already on the way. Primary healthcare is badly underfunded, so it’s hard for most people to get to see a doctor, vaccine rates are too low and rates of respiratory disease and other diseases of poverty are rising. This isn’t normal and nor is it just a bit of an issue in a bad winter. I don’t think primary healthcare has been in such dire straits in my lifetime.
And nor have hospitals. Because people can’t get to see a doctor, they’re more likely to end up in hospital, especially in emergency departments, which are now frequently operating in crisis mode. But because they are also underfunded, there isn’t much they can do about it.
Auckland, with by far the largest number of people vulnerable to poor health, is especially badly affected. Who’s the minister of health? Oh yes. Simeon Brown.
Let’s look at that abandoned visitor bed levy. There’s no reason to do this except to allow us to read the lips about “no new taxes”. It comes direct from campaign HQ and it tells us a lot about Simeonism.
It defies common sense: The government could have presented the levy as a payment made by visitors, to provide revenue for services like public toilets that would otherwise be a burden on ratepayers.
A user-pays option to relieve pressure on general taxation: it should be one of the easiest things for a fiscally prudent government to promote. Except under Simeonism, “no new taxes” is even easier.
At the Auckland event this week, Watts told media a bed levy of a few dollars a night would be an unfair charge on “Aucklanders going away for a skiing weekend to Queenstown”. It was hard not to laugh.
It ignores global reality: Visitor levies of all kinds are common around the world. Wild guess, but I suspect Aucklanders who take ski trips to Queenstown are familiar with this. And, for that matter, don’t object.
It disempowers local authorities: National campaigned hard on “localism” in the 2023 election, but it has done the reverse in government. Councils should be able to decide such matters for themselves.
It breaks a deal: Trust in government, right? Supposed to be something politicians want and need. In the Auckland Deal, signed only five months ago, the government agreed to explore a visitor bed levy. A promise already broken. An abuse of power.
Mayor Wayne Brown says the decision “represents a complete lack of commitment on the part of some politicians in Wellington”.
It wrecks the framework for development: A larger question arises. If coherent, valuable, economically sound and jointly agreed commitments can so easily be sacrificed to facile electoral populism, how will we progress?
For Auckland, says the mayor, the lack of a bed levy will mean fewer events. That’s less economic activity for the city: less revenue for businesses providing all kinds of goods and services, less exposure to potential future visitors, less life in the city.
The real goals of “no new taxes”
“No new taxes” is a way of saying “fiscal responsibility!”, so it’s supposed to be a vote-getter. If you think of tax as the government stealing your money, maybe it is. But if you accept that tax is a contribution to a functioning society, it might seem rather different.
The “no new taxes” mantra has other goals, too. One of them is to be a smokescreen. Because although the government never stops telling us how fiscally responsible it is, that isn’t true.
Some people want a more functional welfare state, others prioritise debt repayment: whichever camp you’re in, the government’s economic management is rubbish. Unemployment is now at 5.6% and rising. Among people aged 15-24, it’s over 17%. Inflation has been above the official 1-3% target rate for almost a year and is now 4.1%. Interest rates are also rising, but productivity isn’t. In the last year a net 37,700 citizens abandoning ship, many of them young and highly educated.
Among people aged 15-24, the unemployment rate is over 17%.
As for debt, it’s also up. Gross debt is tracking to reach $278 billion in 2028/29: that’s 58% more than when the government came to power. One reason: National’s tax cuts, for landlords and others, were paid for entirely by borrowing.
But “no new taxes” is not only a smokescreen to hide this sorry record. There’s a deeper goal, and the abandoned bed levy, coupled with the proposed rates cap, points directly at it.
The rates cap will be 4%, which is less than the current rate of inflation. Councils will find it harder to meet their operating costs, so there’ll be fewer services, less maintenance, deteriorating assets, more dysfunction. That, in turn, undermines trust and confidence in councils. The longer they stay on that treadmill, the closer councils will come to being too dysfunctional to survive. Eventually we’ll be told the private sector will have to step in.
“No new taxes” means, eventually, turning public assets into profit centres for private operators.
The model is already in place in health, with private providers now regularly contracted to provide services paid for by the public sector.
Car brain!
Simeonism, it never stops. If the underfunding of health is its most morally disgraceful aspect, the reinforcement of car dependency just might be the most economically damaging.
Brown was the government’s first minister of transport and in that capacity, in 2024, he created the Government Policy Statement (GPS) on Transport, which provides the framework for transport policy and spending today. The current minister, Chris Bishop, has done precious little to amend the GPS, presumably because Simeonism reigns supreme.
Brown’s GPS embedded the focus on Roads of National Significance (RoNS), raised speed limits, sidelined a range of public transport initiatives and prohibited most funding for cycleways. In Auckland, this made a whole lot of roads more dangerous, especially around schools, which in turn puts more pressure on hospitals, because higher speeds increase the likelihood of serious crashes.
The GPS also set back efforts to manage road congestion, reduce carbon emissions and increase public health by providing good alternatives to driving. And in the crowning irony for Mr No New Taxes, it embedded the worst example of fiscal profligacy in the government’s entire programme: those RoNS have an estimated pricetag of more than $50 billion.
Bishop has now paused most of them, although they’re all still promised. But even the projects that are proceeding now, like Auckland’s new Warkworth to Te Hana highway, will be ruinously expensive. NZTA’s preferred option for a new Waitematā harbour crossing is not a RoNS but would also be ruinous if it was ever built.
No new taxes, but a ridiculously bloated spending programme.
Even cycleways offer a hilarious footnote to this profligacy. In 2025 Brown enthusiastically launched the last stage of Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai, the Glen Innes to Tāmaki shared path, which is being built largely on stilts over the water in Hobson Bay. That pathway will be a beautiful asset for the city, but it makes no sense in the programme of a government we’re supposed to believe is frugal. It’s the most expensive kind of cycleway you could imagine.
Why are they doing it? When I asked Brown, he said, gleefully, that it didn’t take any road space.
Roads are for cars, and drivers are encouraged to drive more often, at faster speeds, wherever and whenever they like. Car brain, and bugger the cost or the harm it does, is the essence of Simeonism.
No new taxes, but a ridiculously bloated spending programme on roads.
And as a corollary, demonising on-road cycleways is its go-to attack line. They are the epitome of why councils can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, keep their costs down or listen to the public.
No matter than councillors who support them keep being re-elected, or that cycleways, even before the GPS, accounted for less than 1% of transport spending.
Remember Luxon, complaining recently about Wellington’s Molesworth St cycleway, which he said made it difficult for him to cross the road to get to work? What did he even mean? The risk of tripping on lane separators makes it harder to jay walk? Cyclists might run into him when he’s standing in a bike lane? What about the cars, or do they all stop when they see him coming? Has he ever thought to use the lights-controlled pedestrian crossing 10m up the road?
It does seem that car brain addles the pre-frontal cortex.
The greenfields absurdity
Unfortunately, car brain also has more serious consequences. It leads ministers to favour greenfields development. The new fast-track process has allowed rural areas around Auckland with elite soils to be primed for housing, even though some are on flood plains. They have no water, transport or other services, because those services are not in the 10-year or even 20-year workplans of the council agencies that build them.
The developers, supposedly, will pay for these services themselves, which is why fast-track commissioners approve these projects. But they won’t pay for the ongoing maintenance of roads and pipes, or for whole new highways that may one day have to be built, or for the libraries and swimming pools those new communities will demand. They’re not paying for the railway service in the far south of the city, or any bus services.
And they’re certainly not paying for any of wider social, environmental and economic impacts of building so far away. Emissions and the residents’ cost of living will both rise, because of their car dependency. “But we have to drive!” those residents say. Which is true, but only because bad planning rules have allowed those far-flung projects to proceed.
In some ways, Bishop is not a Simeonist: he’s the champion of the CRL and denser housing in the city. But the fast-track rules are his and the greenfields enthusiasm is also his. In effect, he’s a champion of car dependency further out.
And guess who benefits the most from greenfields growth and car dependency? Clue: it’s the original architects of the whole mindset that protests, “But we have to drive!” The fossil-fuel industry.
Energy failures
Which brings us to impact of Simeonism on Auckland energy.
Brown constantly blames the previous government’s ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration for every problem with energy supply today, but that’s nonsense. He’s the minister of energy, so I assumes he knows this.
Auckland is one of many parts of the country that could be a tremendous beneficiary of rooftop solar. All those sun-drenched factory and warehouse roofs you fly over, for starters. All those homes. All those schools and other government buildings.
What Brown’s programme boils down to is: the gentailers must not be disrupted, so the adoption of windfarms, solar farms and rooftop solar will be slow.
Guess who this helps? Same as before: the fossil-fuel industry.
And the rest, and the porkies
Not every part of the government’s war on Auckland is down to Simeon Brown. He’s not to blame for the collapse of housing construction and the exodus of thousands of tradies to Australia. That’s on Bishop.
Also on Bishop: the scary talk about “15-storey apartment blocks”, which could have been presented as a much more constructive discussion about density around train stations. (I have more to say about this in another post coming soon.)
It wasn’t Brown who came up with the move-on orders for rough sleepers, ignoring the advice of pretty much everyone working in the frontline with the homeless. Nor was it Brown who crashed the apprentice programme, failed to get the Ministry of Education moving on new schools or set about undermining the Treaty of Waitangi.
All these things have hurt Auckland as much or more than other parts of the country. As I said at the start, the war on Auckland is a National Party project. And Simeon Brown leads it.
It’s the ideology of Simeonism that has produced the anti-tax campaign. “Nine new taxes”, Brown proclaims, and “triple the taxes”, although these things are simply not true. Stuff did a very good fact check on the nine new taxes claim.
Just like his claims about the last government’s oil and gas exploration ban are untrue. And his claim that higher speed limits won’t cause more serious road crashes. And that healthcare is improving. And many of his other claims on social media about the opposition parties. He’s going to keep on saying these things, keep on with the TikToks and Insta and billboards, because he can.
Say an untruth often enough and it gains truthiness. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It sounds true to some people. It seems probably true to a whole lot more, simply because they’ve heard it so often. Worse if all, it makes all information suspect. Respectable media start talking about accusations and counter-accusations, as if there’s an equivalence between scary nonsense and telling the truth. It’s required for “balance”.
Truthiness corrodes the entire political process in other ways. Nic Blakeley, the head of MBIE, has been censured by the privileges committee and by Brian Roche, the head of the state services commission, for lying to parliament. But Blakeley hasn’t been sacked.
Respectable media start talking about accusations and counter-accusations, as if there’s an equivalence between scary nonsense and telling the truth.
I don’t imagine either Blakeley or Roche believe lying is okay because cabinet ministers don’t always stick to the truth themselves. But when cabinet ministers trade in untruths, they create an environment where it’s easier for others to do it too.
It’s astonishing so many commentators regard Brown as a good politician, simply because he seems effective. He’s a terrible politician. He’s the very opposite of what we should expect from our politicians.
Infantilising the electorate
Simeonism means to deliberately ignore the challenges of the present and the future because you think there are no votes in it. It’s the deliberate abandonment of evidence and research, because you think voters don’t care. Climate crisis? Drive on!
It’s to reinforce, at every possible opportunity, the idea that if we all keep living the way we do now, we will one day soon find ourselves back in a time without worry. Which is to say, Simeonism believes the purpose of politics is to restore us to the innocence of childhood. Simeonism infantilises us.
Although, as Wayne Brown told media at the State of the City launch this week, National Party voters are “predominantly elderly people living in the leafy suburbs”.
Simeonism is to govern on behalf of those who benefit from the various elements of our time of crisis. The polycrisis, as economist Adam Tooze calls it. Simeonism turns its back on all those who are doing the good, real work to confront it. Nurses and doctors. Welfare workers. Urban planners. Renewable energy entrepreneurs. Child safety campaigners. Flood resilience engineers. Climate scientists. The people trying to strengthen community ties and civic authority. People who want politicians not to lie to them.
The thinkers and analysts who show us different ways to move forward. People like those who have produced substantial, well-researched State of the City reports, for four years now, hoping that someone in authority will take notice.
The state of the city
For the record, the report reveals Auckland has more than $6 billion of private investment in the “city-centre pipeline”. But despite this, the city struggles to maintain and increase investor confidence.
Although the health, digital, fintech and clean-energy sectors have pushed the city up to 17th among “300 stars for technology ecosystems”, we have what’s called a “conversion gap”. More investment is required for scaling up, and too many of the companies that do scale up then sell up or move offshore. Too many talented people – staff, university graduates and others – make the same move.
Here’s the problem: Every mid-size city in the world fancies itself as a tech innovation hub. What’s special about Auckland? The government has never answered this. Actually, the government doesn’t have an Auckland plan at all.
The usual answer is: the natural world. Look at all this beauty, look at all that fun you can have out in the wild.
But while the report rates the city’s wider environment as “exceptional”, we’re not looking after it. Transport emissions are in the worst 12% of comparable cities, a problem directly related to our being in the bottom 10% for housing density.
And we can add: emissions overall are not reducing, the Hauraki Gulf is overfished and parts of the city are frequently at risk of flooding.
Another problem: We don’t keep our visitors. Some 73% of international visitors pass through Auckland, but the city gets only 29% of their total spend in this country. They arrive, stay a night, and leave.
How do we make them stay longer? One way is to build things: a fabulous new museum, in my view, should be top of the list (more on this soon).
Another is to stage more events. But as Wayne Brown noted this week, scrapping the visitor bed levy will make this harder, because there’ll be less money available to secure the big shows and sports contests.
A third is to do much more to revitalise the city centre. More people living there would mean more streetlife, more shops, more entertainments, more bars and restaurants, and more safety too.
In a questions session, Mark Todd from Ockham Properties told the minister, Simon Watts, that we have “50% fewer people living in the central city than there should be” and “no time is being spent on that”. Watts said the government was tough on crime.
Wayne Brown focused on the real problem. Two things had been holding back the conversion of empty office blocks, he said: the seismic code and the fire regulations. He praised former building and construction minister Chris Penk for “fixing” the seismic code, but the problem with the fire regs remains. “A building converted to apartments has five times fewer people in it than an office block, but the fire regulations are tougher. Why?”
He wondered who would now take this on. The new minister of building and construction is Simon Watts.
Brown said the lack of inner-city development was directly related to the government’s fast-track process, which encourages greenfields growth on the far-flung edges of the city.
“There’s so much unbuilt land right in the city,” he said, “we don’t need greenfields. We get constant lectures from the government about productivity, but greenfields growth is a drain on productivity.” It diverts resources, adds pressure on infrastructure and puts people so far away from everything they have to spend lots of time travelling.
“We are building a green, connected global city that links Aucklanders to high-value jobs and global capital,” said Brown. “To sustain this momentum, we must tackle the productivity drag caused by congestion and sprawl.” There is, he said, an obvious way to resolve this: “Hand the planning back to us.”
“Cities provide leadership when governments lose their way,” said Wayne Brown.
Watt said that wouldn’t happen, because the council’s planning had created problems with a lack of car parks and too many cycleways. “Your planners decide no car parks, all that dumb stuff … plenty of cycleways and no cyclists. It’s not what the people want.”
That was it, in a nutshell. The report, the event, the civic leaders who were there, the mayor, all were trying to focus on some big, difficult challenges. Watts dragged it back to cycleways. (I’ll report in more detail on the State of the City in a future post.)
Watts was not even wrong, that passions are inflamed about car parking in some suburbs and that issue needs some work. But it’s hardly a marker of council incompetence: the regulations he complained about come from the National Policy Statement on Urban Development, promulgated by the previous government and left in place by Watts’ own government.
And as Brown was quick to point out, apartments in the central city, which developers should be able to focus on, often don’t need a car park.
Simeonism. The instinct to inflame a peripheral issue for electoral advantage, instead of addressing the important stuff. The desire to control all decision-making, in case some local agency does something you don’t like.
By the way, after George “Read my lips” Bush Snr won the US presidential election in 1988, it took him just two years before he signed off on a new budget with, you guessed it, new taxes. You can read all the lips you want, but they’ll be rubbery.
It simply isn’t possible to govern well, whatever your politics, when you refuse to keep the relationship between revenue and spending under review. Either you will break your word, or you will govern stupidly, raging against cycleways while your health system collapses.
The war on Auckland has consequences.
“Cities provide leadership when governments lose their way,” said Wayne Brown. He pointed to Britain, where more power is being devolved to cities. “The government needs to get on board or get out of the way.”
Hopetown: a place to do things differently
Thanks for reading this far. I like to think of Hopetown as a place to celebrate the wonder of doing things differently and the possibility of doing them better, in music as in politics and all the rest.
RIP Dolly Parton, a glorious singer and songwriter who seems never to have made an enemy in any corner of the political or entertainment worlds, and who stood up, with a grin, to whoever needed standing up to. What she gave back was amazing. Free books for kids through her Imagination Library. Support for LGBTQ+ communities through Aids work and advocating for inclusivity in country music. Disaster relief after wildfires, floods and hurricanes. Funding for Covid vaccine development. A shelter for bald eagles that couldn’t be released into the wild. So many other medical, literacy, enviro and youth causes. The royalties from “I Will Always Love You” are used to revitalise a historically Black suburb in Nashville.
And as a fellow Appalachian wrote this week, she didn’t “come from nothing”. Dirt poor, sure, but loved and supported, in a home filled with music and part of a culturally rich community.
Shock horror but I’ve never liked “Jolene”, if it’s okay even to say that. Then I saw this and changed my mind. Jack White, y’all …
As a proud Aucklander, reading this made me feel physically ill. The damage Simeon and his cronies have done to this city with their stupid culture war etc. I fear low information voters will vote them back.
Simeon is trying to import US style culture wars. His whole mantra seems to be “make the liberals cry” rather than doing anything that remotely resembles governance. Gotta hope the electorate sees through this.