Editorial - Tuesday December 4, 2012

Unseemly haste

THE Far North District Council has every right to tell the Local Government Commission how it believes local government in the district should be structured. It is not the council that will make the decision, however, and in the fullness of time voters will have the opportunity to oppose (or support) any reform proposal.

But if last week's decision to present a proposal to the LGC was within the council's legal rights, it fell well outside its moral obligations to the people it represents.

The council has gone to some effort, and expense, to persuade the people of the Far North that their future would be best served by a unitary authority, with another to be formed in Whangarei. The working party that has come to this conclusion, or more accurately has set out to vindicate it, cannot claim to have met the council's obligations in terms of consultation, however. What it has done is present one side of the argument. No effort has been made to present a balanced case, the entire focus being on persuading voters to buy a reform process that some members of the council clearly favour, and have done for some time.

Mayor Wayne Brown is the unitary authority cheerleader, and while much of what he says in terms of removing what he sees as an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy from local government in the Far North might make sense, his reasoning is open to question. Mr Brown has long argued that the Northland Regional Council is superfluous to requirements because many ratepayers have no idea which council does what.

The district council cops flak for shortcomings on the part of the regional council, he says, and is not infrequently expected by the ill-informed to undertake tasks that are the regional council's responsibility. That hardly constitutes an argument for another major restructuring.

It would not be surprising if a great many people in this district had no idea whatsoever regarding how local government works, but that is irrelevant.

Three issues that will need to be addressed by voters at some point are how they will be represented on a new authority (in terms of the "balance of power") what the costs of operating a unitary authority will be, and whether there is value in maintaining a second tier of local government that serves as a watchdog over the other.

The balance of power is unlikely to be an issue in the event of a unitary authority being established within what is now the Far North District. There would seem to be no reason for making major changes to the electoral system adopted when the district council was fashioned from two boroughs and four counties in 1989, but the council is blatantly using the spectre of a single unitary authority being imposed upon Northland, and the Far North being "governed" by Whangarei, to garner support.

Dark mutterings about that possibility are a shameful ploy. If there is evidence that the government is looking at forming one unitary authority for the entire region then we would like to see it. No offence, but assertions of this nature from a council with a very clear agenda should be looked upon with great suspicion.

Of greater moment to many people will be the cost of operating a unitary authority. Again, promises of significant savings (currently claimed to be in the region of $11 million a year) are meaningless without detail. The elusive economies of scale that formed one of the major motivations for the amalgamations of 1989 didn't materialise then, and unless the nature of local government has changed radically over the last couple of decades are not likely to materialise now.

It would be unfair to attempt to compare the costs of local government prior to 1989 with those of 2012. Successive governments have devolved all manner of responsibilities to ratepayers, while the imposition of rules and regulations for almost every conceivable human activity have also made a major contribution to rate increases over recent years. There is no point harking back to the days when Kaitaia and Kaikohe had their borough councils and the four Far North counties were equally autonomous, but we need more than glib assurances that big bucks will be saved by forming a unitary authority if we are to make an informed decision.

Frankly it is difficult to see where those savings will come from, given that the roles that a unitary authority would inherit from the regional council would in many cases seem to be beyond the capacity or ability of existing district council staff. We need to know what additional staff will be needed, where those people will come from and how much they will cost.

While we are assured that a unitary authority will be cheaper to run than a district council and our share of a regional council, the new authority will clearly need more people, and expensive people at that. And if two unitary authorities are to be formed in Northland both will need additional staff, a prospect that would seem to defeat the purpose in terms of saving money and achieving efficiencies.

Maybe two unitary authorities could share the extra staff, given that neither would be in a position to employ them full-time, as they are currently employed by the regional council. No attempt has been made yet to explain that.

Then there is the watchdog issue. Granted, unitary authorities appear to work well in other parts of the country, but the Far North District Council doesn't have the flashest record when it comes to meeting government-imposed environmental standards. If a unitary authority is formed there will be no second party; applications for consents for the likes of sewerage schemes will effectively be made internally. There may well be a very good counter-argument to this, in which case we would like to hear it.

Lurking in the background of all this is the apparent threat that if we don't take the initiative the government will make a decision for us. Some councillors would have us believe that this threat is not only real but imminent. We need to see the evidence for that too.

Whatever happens there will be a process, and if experience is anything to go by it will be a protracted one. Certainly, if local government reform is to take place it would be much better for this district to be in the driver's seat than a passenger, but that does not absolve the council from presenting a proper, detailed case for change - or resisting change, as the best case scenario might be. The process of debating this issue amongst ourselves has not even begun yet, despite the district council's obvious view to the contrary.

One councillor who voted in favour of forwarding the proposal to the LGC last week reportedly did so, at least in part, because two people in a pub had told him that they did not wish to be governed by Whangarei. If that is the basis upon which this council is making momentous decisions on our behalf we should be preparing to choose who receives our votes next year with much greater care than we did in 2010.

This is our decision to make, and while a unitary authority in the Far North might be a much more palatable option than one for Northland, the process of genuinely consulting, and persuading voters that that will serve them better than the status quo, has not yet begun.