Since MP Chris Tremain kicked things off a month or two back with his own ads on the subject, the word "prosperity" has featured large in various quotable people's musings.
It's a fine word, and I'm all for it. But generally when you see it espoused by groups such as this it translates to a helping hand for business.
Which is exceedingly strange, because a bunch of capitalists asking local bodies to help fund and promote their businesses is a socialist idea.
Remember who actually owns and ostensibly runs local councils - ordinary residents and ratepayers. You and me.
So, on top of buying their products and services, or taking a minimum wage to work for them while they take the cream, we'd be being asked to put our hands in our own pockets and gift money to local business owners so that they can increase turnover.
That only makes sense if we were a socialist state where the profits would be redistributed equally to those who contribute to making them. But they wouldn't be, would they?
And it's not as if they don't already have their own organisations for self-promotion: the chamber of commerce, local retailers' and wholesalers' and manufacturers' and growers' forums, lobby groups for all manner of splinter interests.
If that isn't enough, they're not doing much of a job, these business groups, are they?
But evidently it's not. Evidently they can't co-ordinate to promote their way out of a paper bag, for their own self-interest, if they want us to pay to do it for them.
Now the focus has altered to "better performance". Again, a fine concept; but surely asking councils for a regional study to point the way to achieving better performance is reinventing the wheel. After all, that's what councils already do, all the time; it's part of their basic brief.
Ah, but this is a comprehensive study. Yes? And? Same wheel, in regional council terms.
So the real agenda must be amalgamation, mustn't it. Putting together three or five or six local bodies into one, for the supposed sake of efficiency.
Or, in the ginger group's words, for the better performance of Hawke's Bay.
Again, this may sound fine in theory, but anyone who's gone through such regional restructuring will tell you there's more bite than gain in many respects, for to a large extent making a council - as any bureaucracy - bigger only makes it less efficient, not more.
As for backing this initiative, councils are damned if they do (HDC & HBRC) and damned if they don't (NCC). Either making a rope for their own necks or portrayed as betraying their electorates. I've already debunked many of the myths of amalgamation in a piece I wrote a year back, but I'll happily reiterate them soon for anyone who missed - or has forgotten - that column.
Right now, suffice to say that the biggest minus in the idea of amalgamation is loss of democracy. If people think councillors are too remote and out-of-touch now, imagine how less-accessible they'll be when there's only two or three to represent the whole of Napier, for example, or one for CHB - with correspondingly lesser impact, too.
And the other major loss - the real reason why the investment and developer types are increasingly slavering to the fore - is that if you do away with the regional council and its environmental focus there will be no checks and balances on a unified council's decisions.
At that point, money speaks loudest. Which is why it's speaking loudly now.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
