What do we want our city of Auckland to look like in the future? As a candidate for Auckland’s mayoralty, I’ve been thinking a lot about the sort of city I want my children and grandchildren to grow up in.

Firstly, I would like a city that preserves and sustains its natural beauty and environment. What makes our city so special to live in are our harbours, beaches, volcanic cones and parks.

We need to protect those things, to stop the deterioration of the quality of the water, with the Council’s State of the Environment Report warning that in over a quarter of our swimming spots, putting your head under water creates a moderate to high risk of becoming sick.

We need to increase access to our harbours and increase opportunities for recreation and leisure. That means not extending port activities further into the harbour and seriously considering whether it is possible, like Sydney did years ago, to move the commercial activities of the port to a better location. Imagine what we could do if we freed up the 77 hectares the Port occupies, for public access, parks and homes. Moving the Port also means taking out of the central City areas, the big, articulated lorries that clog up our city roads.

That leads directly to the second thing Auckland needs in order to make it a better place to live.

Most Aucklanders complain to me about how congested our roads are and how much longer it takes to get around the city. With the city growing by 800 extra people a week, it’s little wonder that without sufficient investment in transport infrastructure the gridlock is getting worse.

If Government is content for Auckland to grow at this pace, it has to make funding available to allow for better rail services, new light rail development, busways, better roads and provision for cycling and walking.

Thirdly, Kiwis have long cherished the dream of owning their own homes. Rapidly rising rents preventing people from being able to save and soaring house prices mean that home ownership in Auckland is the lowest is has been for almost 70 years. We need to create more supply of housing and reduce the pressure on prices that foreign investors create by bidding up the price of existing housing. Increasing housing density around town centres, transport hubs and arterial transport routes helps solve both the housing and transport crises Auckland faces.

Fourth, I want to see Auckland become New Zealand’s and then Australasia’s best performing city. The super city was created to achieve economies of scale and end duplication and waste. Some progress has been made but most of us believe the City must strive to achieve greater efficiency, eliminate waste and duplication, aim to do more with less, and stop further high rate increases.

Finally, I want Auckland to be a prosperous and exciting place to live. It is New Zealand’s only global city. For it to thrive, it needs to retain the best and the brightest New Zealanders and to attract new talent from overseas. To do this, it needs to be a centre of learning, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. Sir Paul Callaghan talked about making New Zealand a place where talent wanted to live. That means a city that attracts people because of choice and opportunity in jobs, learning and leisure. It means using our universities to promote innovation and to commercialise the good ideas that come from them. It means expanding enterprises that create highly skilled, high tech and highly paid jobs.

I visited one company, Rocket Lab, which is an example of what Auckland can achieve. I first met its CEO, Peter Beck, when I led a trade mission to North America way back in 2007. He wanted to create a new rocket system that could launch satellites into space more cheaply. His vision was highly ambitious but he has achieved it. He now employs at Mangere a hundred of the most highly skilled people from around the world and has attracted American venture capital and investment in his company. That will result in this country soon becoming one of just ten nations in the world capable of launching satellites. It is an example of what imagination, innovation and high-end investment can create in Auckland, bringing with it new jobs and high incomes.

Let’s start with the vision of what our city can be and work together to build an Auckland that is one of the really great cities in the world in which to live.