Samantha Motion: What happened at Tauranga's council could happen anywhere

The Tauranga City Council meets in December. Photo / File

OPINION

"We didn't need a nuclear bomb, we needed professional support."

That's what one Tauranga councillor, Heidi Hughes, wrote in a personal essay after her experience of just over a year in one of New Zealand's most embattled councils - soon set to be replaced with a Government-appointed commission - dubbed the nuclear option.

How did it come to this? It's the question many are asking.

What we really need to know, however, is how we stop it from happening again?

The core issues Tauranga faced are not unique, though they did reach an uncommon level of resonance and disruption that made some form of intervention necessary.

But tension is a natural and necessary part of democratic representation all around the country and could never be erased.

At local government level, the council arrangement is often compared to having 11 individual political parties around the table, each with an equal vote.

No surprise, then, that sometimes the tension between people advocating opposing positions overheat and boil over, or venture from the professional territory into personal.

In the age of social media, it's easier to do than ever - and easier for it to come back to bite.

Plenty of other councils have seen a share of this, and the divisions and disagreements can prove difficult to resolve, especially when they become entrenched.

Each council will have a process for resolving issues through codes of conduct, but from what I've seen when conduct complaints have played out in Rotorua and Tauranga, it's not exactly conducive to healing the divisions.

As council environments get more complex - especially councils under pressure from rampant growth - I predict we'll see more of these sorts of interpersonal issues.

People seeking public office can run on whatever particular platform they choose and voters can judge as they please.

Once the chosen few are sworn in, however, they must confront - together and individually -the varied gambit of issues competing for attention and a slice of the public purse.

There needs to be a way to identify councils - or allow them to identify themselves - where these pressures are acute and give the governance teams more tailored preparation and support in this initial period.

The same goes for when things start to fall apart. Any level of forced central government intervention is a bottom-of-the-cliff response.

There have got to be ways for central government and organisations such as Local Government New Zealand to step in sooner and offer different types of neutral, independent support, helping councils help themselves to get back on track or, at least, find some way to work together.

The nuclear bomb won't always be avoided, but intensive professional support should come first.

If support systems aren't improved, what happened in Tauranga could happen anywhere.