The Government must know they are pushing the super city up hill in the face of an increasingly sceptical public and news media. This morning’s Herald declares:
The way it is shaping up, the single mayor and council will be a puppet show, purely for democratic appearances, while the real decisions are made by people the public has not elected and will never see. It cannot stand.
The Herald was talking about what it calls the Orwellian-named Council Controlled Organisations, but the issue of local boards is just as troubling to the Government right now, with widespread suspicion that the boards will be paper tigers. A good indicator is the level of Government spin.
Rodney Hide and his associate minister of local government John Carter are going around town saying their local boards will have the power to “make by-laws”, when they have specifically ruled out the local boards having any rule-making powers.
Have a listen to Hide on BFM’s The Wire yesterday. Breathtaking spin. And select committee chair John Carter has been trying to pull the wool over the eyes of submitters all week with this line about local boards being able to make by-laws.
The sad truth of the Hide super city model is that the local boards can only advocate to the Super Council for a by-law, and lobby them to pass it, just like any other lobby group in Auckland can. In fact, the government banned the local boards from having any regulatory powers in their second super city bill passed last year.
The Super Council is only allowed to delegate certain non-regulatory powers to local boards in areas like parks and libraries, except where a coordinated approach outweighs the benefits of a local decision, except where decision making would be more effective if integrated with other Council decisions, and except where the impact of a decision goes beyond the local board area.
You could drive a truck through all those exceptions. Does anyone really think the new Council will willingly delegate powers downwards to local boards?
Rodney Hide can spin all he likes about how local boards “are key to encouraging Aucklanders to become more actively engaged” but that won’t happen if the government leaves local boards as toothless talkshops.
The way it is shaping up, the single mayor and council will be a puppet show, purely for democratic appearances, while the real decisions are made by people the public has not elected and will never see. It cannot stand.
If this agenda is not opposed in Auckland, it will be applied in time to the rest of the country.
Need to make sure that the utterly flawed structure is totally abandoned and not simply propped up so it can limp along in a way that let’s the powermongers get away with saying it’s functioning properly and that superficial tinkering that makes things slightly more palatable doesn’t allow them to bleat “we listened to what the public wanted and fixed it – that’s what democracy’s all about”.
In reality the proposed structure is totally unsubstainable from a political buy-in point of view (without even considering the economic cost) as no Mp would be able to stand up in their electorate and support such centralised decison making.
I know you will like to take the credit Phil, but this structure will quickly collapse as a result of its own contradictions regardless. Wait until everyone sees their first couple of rate notices.
So what is Labour going to do about it, Phil? You could pick up plenty of votes by the 2011 election, given Aucklanders will have had a year of being screwed by Wellington-appointed CCO boards. What will Labour do differently?
Hide’s super city model was fundamentally broken from the outset, and only the time required by the parliamentary process, however rushed, has brought it’s failings to light. I’m sure Hide and his accomplices would have loved to bang all three bills through under urgency months ago, but the poor old bureaucrats and law drafters for once have actually worked to save Auckland. The question now is, has the government the balls to trash the centralised and corporatised model, leave the existing councils in place, go back to the drawing board, and start again. Pulling the Royal commission report out of the trash can would be a good starting point.
I think they should do nothing so the Key/English/Hide/Banks/Boag coalition falls so hard none of them will ever be able to get up again.
NACTS sole purpose of the Auckland restructure is to bring in dictatorships hidden behind a semblance of democracy. Exactly what you’d expect from a bunch of authoritarians.
So, what will Labour do about it?
The truth is that community boards cannot make bylaws currently so this maintains the status quo.
The ATA discussion document on local boards lists 7 pages of initial non-regulatory delegated functions that boards will have, and that is regardless of those the Auckland Council will delegate them, both regulatory and non-regulatory.
The local boards will have extensive control over local amenities – that is clear despite what you repeaters blather on about.
Gooner, how many community boards are the size of Dunedin? Get a grip, boy.
seven pages Jennifer, seven pages. And that’s just the start.
@Gooner 7 pages of incredibly minor delegations and 7 pages which the council can promptly undelegate if it chooses to and given how little they will have to do with Auckland been unaccountably, corporately run, they probably will…
The simple fact of the matter is strategically Labour should let this bill pass exactly as it is, this and a All Blacks loss in 2011 would assure them a landslide victory…
Gooner,
The ATA document is quite a well thought out document and does show some effort to explain how things are supposed to work.
If you can work out the mechanics of how it will work though, you must be a genius.
Gooner, if they went for a bigger font, they could have stretched the list of ‘maybes’ out to 14 pages. And they forgot to add taking out the trash after each meeting, also something they will have to do as they don’t have any staff.
The sky is also falling Jennifer.
Gooner, if it is, it’s falling on Hide.
I think the time has come to ask this question,
‘How is it, that the leader of a party that only received 3ish% of the vote, is making such a big influence on the way the local government is run in our countries biggest city’?
…
(a problem with MMP?)
@ Dylan. MMP needs some fine tuning but that is all. God forbid we return to FFP – or something similar – because we would be in even deeper pooh than we are now!
@ Phil Twyford. Slightly off topic I know but there has been a deafening silence from the Maori Party. Did they make any submissions or are they still hiding in the closet… ?
@Anne, at least with FFP elitest bastards like hide cant take 3% of the vote and change the face of auckland politics with it.
Plus it doesn’t have to be MMP or FFP… arent there like 4 other options well get to vote for?
Agreed Dylan, but I think the only other model which will deliver democracy as we know it is STV. The trouble with the
Single Transferable Vote is that it’s very complex and the bulk of the population will probably never get their heads around it. It took 3 or 4 elections before people started to understand MMP and it’s a much simpler system. I understand that one of the fine tuning MMP options available would solve the problem of a political party like ACT getting 5 seats out of one electorate despite only receiving 3% of the vote. Perhaps Phil (or someone) would like to do a post on the various options available so that we could at least discuss it with a greater degree of knowledge.
The problem is that all the tasks the local boards “could” do rely upon the Auckland Council delegating the tasks to them. If Auckland Council doesn’t want to delegate, then tough bikkies.
Furthermore, the local boards can’t really be delegated much of substance, just things like what colour they want the carpet of their library to be. And, it seems, they’d still need the OK of the Council to even do that.
I’m still yet to see the Local Boards being anything more than glorified elected lobby groups.
[deleted - abusive, Phil]
Dylan
with FPP Hide would be IN the National party and MORE likely to influence…
Oh dear… I said FFP instead of FPP. Where is the promised edit function? The Standard has one – very useful for correcting typos etc.
Anne – They ARE practising FFP – It’s the Fibbing F****** Poshers electoral system, Auckland is the first of many places to get it.
Oooh Spud… actually I can think of a better word than poshers
LOL
I was reading a local paper in Whakatane; of course Big Brother Tauranga and Western BOP (with the dynamic trio of Tolley, Bridges and Ryall drining it perhaps) are looking at a super city across the BOP region; of course us in Rotorua will have none of that malarkey.
If it is allowed to go through it will be like a row of dominoes, as other councils are dismantled and merges without democracy being allowed.