Letter to Manukau
28 August 2007
It’s a time of change
After 24 years of leading our City, Sir Barry Curtis is retiring. When nominations closed on 24 August, 11
leaders presented themselves to the City as Mayoral candidates. It will be an interesting contest over this next period
leading up to Voting Day on 29 September.
It’s time for a Brown to lead a Green city
A lot has changed in 25 years. We have grown together across the green fields of early Manukau. We now need to confront
some of our environmental challenges. Our landfill is not the ultimate answer to our minimizing our waste. We need a
long term option for collecting and disposing of our waste that does not discharge carbon. We all know that power pylons
marching across our city is not the answer to all our power requirements. I believe there is time for us to fully assess
whether we can recycle our waste to create an alternative source of energy.
It will be an exciting time to participate in new ways to plan for Manukau’s future transportation needs. Once we make
the commitment to engage this vexed issue across the region and at home in Manukau we will work out how to get our
children onto buses to and from school. We will move to actively wanting to put in place a ferry, bus and rail system
around our city to get our people to out of their cars.
We don’t need to gridlock ourselves and then panic. I look forward to leading a new Manukau Way that gets back to the
practice and visionary aspirations of our early years and together with our people, harness the ideas and the energy to
surge forward again.
What can I do?
We seriously have to get voting and get others to vote. So many people in our city do not vote because they do not
believe that it can make a positive difference in their lives. This why we need to mark 29 September as Voting Day and
remind ourselves that voting is important, that we can actually do this and we will, in true Manukau style, get it done.
Remember Voting Day is 29 September 2007
This is the time to be confident that we can Move Manukau Forward. This city is the birthplace of sporting champions and
many high achievers in every walk of life. There are still many doors to knock on before this campaign is over. I ask
for your support in this time of change and especially on Voting Day.
Len Brown
Ends