After endless fluffing about trying to avoid any improvements to Auckland regional governance, the bureaucrats have suddenly realised an election looms and they'd better show willing by trying to rush through a minor reform or two by "no later than 31 August 2007". When you look at the underwhelming reforms this "final" report proposes, you have to wonder why they bothered.

This version is even more bland than the original, which is hardly surprising after a last round of sandpapering by those with most to lose, the incumbent officials and politicians of Auckland's divided local government.

Now it's up to Local Government Minister Mark Burton and his Cabinet colleagues to try to make something of it. Turning it into paper aeroplanes might be a good place to start, because if Mr Burton thought the March version was yawn-making, this one is likely to have the whole Cabinet nodding off.

The authors as good as acknowledged the uphill battle they faced. "All feedback ... was supportive of the need for, and desirability of, change within the Auckland region." Then came the big BUT.

"History and past grievances about attitudes and behaviours have produced a lack of trust and tensions between different spheres of government resulting in a concern/unwillingness to cede control. The tensions between regional and local interests also affect the preferences expressed by the different councils about the different models for membership and voting."

There were concerns about "becoming involved in a process whereby an individual council's interest/perspective may become secondary to, or compromised by, the collective interest."

Given this degree of suspicion, the outcome was inevitable. A lowest-common-denominator solution that is less about achieving stronger regional government and more about a weak federalism, that upholds the parochialism of the fringes and the self-interest of threatened bureaucrats and politicians.

The two main objectives of the less-than-grand plan seem to involve tying a few cultural bells and whistles on to the existing Auckland Regional Council and renaming it "Greater Auckland", and replacing the regional growth forum with a regional sustainable development forum (RSDF) tasked with developing a One Plan, which everyone will, more or less, be required to respect.

I say "more or less" because there's a section labelled "sanctions/levers" that suggests the One Plan will not be as all-powerful as it sounds.