By Mary Afemata of Local Democracy Reporting
After 16 years, Māngere Town Centre has a new manager, Vicky Hau.
She is on a mission to transform the town centre into a premiere shopping destination for the Pacific.
Of Tongan descent, Hau was born and raised in Māngere. Her parents migrated from Tonga and met in Ōtāhuhu before getting married and starting a family.
“They moved out here to Māngere East and that’s where we’ve been, like for our whole life.”
Hau spent most of her childhood at the local Tongan church in Māngere Bridge, which her parents founded, the “big blue church”.
She completed a Bachelor of Commerce at Otago University before returning to Auckland and dabbling in a few jobs before her career at the Ministry of Social Development.
Hau started as a processing officer before moving into management. After almost 12 years at MSD, she wanted a change.
“I’d been in there for so long and … I really wanted to work with an NGO or anything community-specific.”
She saw the role as an awesome opportunity and applied.
“I get to be based here in Māngere, work for Māngere, for the people of Māngere.”
Despite having other job offers, her connection to the community made the decision easy, she said.
“At the end of the day, it came back to the heart that I had for Māngere.”
“Also like my faith is important to me as with all Pacific and then I just think that this was just all part of God’s plan.”
Experience with a big organsiation gave Hau the skills to build units from the ground up, much like rebuilding and transforming Māngere Town Centre.
“I’ve stepped into a blank canvas, so to say, and then just kind of adding in the paint. But it’s been really cool because I’ve just been able to draw my previous experience of things and kind of how we run it.
“And the board, they’ve been really awesome,” she says and mentions the board Chair Lara Dolan who Hau credits for doing a lot of work in the background.
What does the town centre manager do?
“Making sure that we meet compliance, there’s a lot of things in the town centre that I’m working on improving because we’re not meeting compliance.”
“So I look after the day-to-day operations, everything that runs in the town centre. We also have staff like our cleaning staff, our security staff so I look after them as well.
“Strategically, it’s like looking at what improvements can we make and also … having a good relationship with local board council, with other bids, also with my own board, and the other businesses around here.”
Hau coordinates different things for key stakeholders and everyone involved in the town centre.
She also works to get more people into the town centre and having more events to create community engagement like the success of Zumba.
“Zumba is massive for us and that happens daily,” she said.
“So they go from 12 pm to 1 pm and then kind of like outside those hours we still have people coming … we still have the oldies hanging out and [we look at what] we provide for them.”
Plans to build a premier shopping destination
The town centre needs more Pacific businesses for the long-term, she said.
“One of the things that make us stand out is that you come here to buy your Pacific clothes you know, all of that stuff. Our produce, the food that we offer,” Hau says.
“Something that keeps me up at night is the rubbish… because we want to talk about improving the aesthetic for Māngere, we want to talk about having beautifying it, or beautification plan for the town centre but we’ve got to start looking at some of that stuff and that illegal dumping.”
Transforming the town centre and its aesthetics is a priority, despite the lack of money.
“We really want to jazz the place up but we don’t have the resources.
“We want to build something for our community we deserve… we deserve a Pacific hub, we deserve a hub that we can all come to,” she says but it’s not possible if the community don’t look after the property and area.
“We’ve got to stop destroying, we’ve got to start looking after it for ourselves.”
Hau’s salary and the salary of her staff, including the cleaning and security, are paid through the targeted rates.
Lack of resources and challenges
Despite the limited resources, Hau said students wearing school uniforms at the shopping centre instead of attending school were a particular concern.
“Working with the local police and also what else can we do for them because not only do they hang around there, they also pose a threat to the retailers because they can either come in shoplift or be really aggressive towards them, so safety of the town centre is big for us.”
“I guess we’ll have to be just really creative in terms of working with a community organisation, what does that look, or youth providers what does that look like, because I think that’s a big target of ours, is the youth that are just hanging around.”
