I have been shocked by how many of the Government’s members don’t seem to think there is anything strange about handing over government of our nation’s largest city to a whole lot of hand-picked business appointees.
The Herald is shocked too. As are most of the mayors, the Chamber of Commerce, and the overwhelming majority of the public who turned up to speak to the select committee on the third bill.
National and ACT are so imbued with neoliberalism they are quite happy to throw out our tradition of representative democracy, and replace it with a corporate governance model. That’s what they are doing. They are wrapping 90% of Council operations up into commercial entities with their own boards of directors and CEOs. These commercial entities can meet in secret and won’t have to publish agendas, minutes, or subject themselves to members of the public asking pesky questions. And that is the whole point of it, keep the people and their elected representatives out of it.
Transport, the waterfront, water, economic development, investments and regional facilities are all due to be corporatised so they can be managed behind a veil of commercial secrecy.
One private sector group at the select committee last week defended the proposal to structure transport into one of these commercial entities by saying this would avoid transport issues being “politicised”. He meant that people and politicians would no longer be able to argue publicly about priorities and what should be done.
I am not against the commercial model in all cases. There is a place for it, as there is for the State Owned Enterprise in central government. But this Government is going way too far, applying the commercial model to the vast majority of Council operations. Not a shred of comparative analysis is available to demonstrate they have considered different organisational models or applied some criteria to guide this decision making.
What is more, they are cutting the number of elected representatives for the region in half. I know the anti-politician crowd will celebrate that, but seriously, it will be all but impossible for 20 councillors to be accessible and give meaningful democratic representation to 1.4 million Aucklanders.
Add to that the heavy centralisation of power in the super council, leaving local boards with little in the way of real power, a far cry from the capable empowered local councils that the Royal Commission recommended.
It is a gutting of our democracy. Centralise power, take it away from communities and the city’s periphery and put it in the hands of a small number of politicians who will be remote from the people. Hand over administration of the city’s assets and services to council-owned companies, leaving the politicians to draft annual statements of corporate intent.
It all fits the contemporary neo-liberal fad for commercial governance. Small hand-picked boards in the privacy of boardrooms can make decisions efficiently. Democracy on the other hand is messy, time consuming and sometimes inefficient. There is always a balance to be struck but Aucklanders are now waking up to the fact that this Government is imposing an extremist unbalanced model.
The Government and the cheerleaders of this blighted project are forgetting some essential lessons about liberal democracy in the modern era. That the vote was a concession to contain the tensions generated by market capitalism; society and economy might be unfair but at least we can all vote Governments in and out. That the rulers rule because the ballot box allows the people to give their consent. That it is far from perfect but no one has come up with a better system yet.
ARC chairman Mike Lee put it well last week at the select committee when he described the third super city bill as Rogerpolitics. Rogernomics was the transformation of the economy in the interests of the few, now National and ACT are using the super city to do the same thing to Auckland local government.
