Breaker Meurant in Rodney

by JAN CORBETT

Murray Sampson sits in the waiting room of his Silverdale veterinary clinic trying to explain what the last six months on the Rodney District Council have been like.

He moves closer to demonstrate how no one could possibly understand the difficulties of dealing with a man of Ross Meurant's passionate personality and force of will. "He hadn't been there more than two months before he had someone in tears."

From the large round window in front of him, ex-councillor Sampson gazes across the road that until recently was the main highway through Silverdale and Orewa and the gateway to the north.

That this old route has now been replaced by the new motorway to Puhoi that sweeps around the back of Orewa rather than directly through it, is one of the reasons passions about an impotent council are running high in the beachside settlement. The other reason is that Rodney is providing the entire country with the bitter spectacle of what happens when local councils go bad.

For although road signs welcome travellers to the Hibiscus Coast, Auckland's playground, for this council governing a large and disparate area on metropolitan Auckland's northern boundary, it has lately been no fun at all.

"You're not dealing with a normal situation here," says Sampson. "I wouldn't have resigned if I thought I could have stayed and done something useful. It's difficult to explain how bizarre it is. It's of huge constitutional significance."

Indeed it is. Never before has the Minister of Local Government had to decide whether to sack a democratically elected council and replace it with a bureaucrat until the next elections in 2001. But that is certainly what the review authority recommended when it concluded that the Rodney District Council is irreparably dysfunctional, that some of its members either do not understand the law or deliberately ignore it, and "the interests of the community are not viewed as paramount to much of the RDC's work."

As a result, say the reviewers, Rodney is paralysed at a crucial stage in its development. Right now it doesn't even have an annual plan.

Asked for a summary of what he believes led to the crisis in Rodney, Sampson reaches for this report and highlights the paragraph describing the actions of one councillor - whom it does not name - as "inappropriate, disrespectful of colleagues and management and may be considered to be morally or legally questionable." Yet the report also makes it clear that on their own, the councillor's actions should not have produced the present crisis. Lack of firm political leadership takes equal blame.

Sampson regrets that the review authority did not name names. So he issued his own press release declaring his belief that the unnamed councillor was Ross Meurant, who, says Sampson, "threatens people with defamation actions every day or two. I've had no response from Meurant or his lawyer. My defence would be that it's the truth."

Ross Meurant was the earthquake the Rodney District Council was not built to withstand. And there is no doubt he set out to attack what he saw as the excessive power wielded by longtime general manager Brian Sharplin. According to Meurant, even the late Sir Robert Muldoon accused Sharplin of running a private fiefdom in Rodney. There is also little doubt that Sharplin was deeply unsettled by Meurant's attacks.

But there are those on the council who will say that the 1998 election did not deliver just one domineering and fearfully opinionated councillor to Rodney, but two - Murray Sampson being the other.

And in the view of councillor Jill Jeffs, the highest-polling candidate in 1998 and one of the longer serving with 11 years on council behind her, it was the clash between these two, combined with a mayor who wanted to be liked rather than to lead, which pushed Rodney into the debacle.

Ex-mayor Doug Armstrong, who with five other councillors made local government history by resigning en masse after the damning ministerial review, will not be interviewed until after Local Government Minister Sandra Lee has made her decision about Rodney's future. Nor will Sharplin. Meurant did not return phone calls.

Long before Meurant was elected to council, Sharplin would have said the Rodney District is a difficult one to manage. Outside the five biggest metropolitan cities, no other area of the country is growing faster - a trend that will only increase now that the new Albany-Puhoi motorway makes it even more accessible for commuters.

Rodney takes in a large, disparate area from the Kaipara to Kawau Island, incorporating the lifestyle blocks and vineyards of Kumeu, the retirement homes of Orewa and Whangaparaoa, the farmers and small business people of Helensville, Warkworth, Wellsford and Matakana.

Despite the rapid population growth along the already more heavily populated Hibiscus Coast (up 26 per cent since 1991), overall Rodney is sparsely settled with only 75,000 people and 35,000 rateable properties. It contributes 6 per cent of the income to the Auckland Regional Council. But with no major urban centre or significant commercial and industrial rating base, keeping up with the roading and sewerage demands of the resident and increasingly larger visitor population is more difficult than for more affluent councils.

Challenging though the job may be, since October 1998 Sharplin's chief worry appears to have been councillor Meurant, a man he accused at the review authority hearings of pursuing "a premeditated, relentless campaign of harassment and intimidation; to quite clearly try to destroy my career, my professional reputation and me."

The first public hints of an impending crisis in Rodney came in September when Meurant laid an assault charge against Sharplin. His accusation was that Sharplin had shoved a chair into the back of his legs. The police considered the incident too trivial to prosecute, a decision Meurant, a former police inspector, has taken to the Police Complaints Authority.

By October police of a different kind were called in when Sharplin himself summonsed the Audit Office after Meurant accused him of financial mismanagement.

In keeping with his exemplary record in local government, Sharplin received the all-clear only to have Meurant, in his evidence to the review authority, accuse the Audit Office of unprofessional bias in its support of Sharplin.

From the early-1980s, when he first appeared in the headlines, Meurant has seldom been far from controversy. It started with criticism of the police hierarchy in his book about his experiences running the Red Squad - the special police unit formed to quell the anti-tour protesters during the 1981 Springbok tour.

His maiden speech to Parliament in 1987 as the new MP for Hobson was easy headline fodder, warning, as it did, that Maori radicals were planning to overthrow the government.

Soon after newspapers ran photographs of Meurant standing in the charred remains of the garage alongside his Northcote home. He called it an attempt to intimidate, but the police never did find the arsonist.

By 1990 while still in opposition he was introducing South African property developers to New Zealand timber suppliers, in defiance of a bipartisan policy not to encourage business dealings with the republic while apartheid remained in force.

A year later the MP was in the news for acting as an agent for a British firm looking to buy surplus high-powered assault rifles from the Army. He later abandoned the deal.

Finally, in 1995, Prime Minister Jim Bolger was forced to sack Meurant as agriculture under-secretary when he refused to relinquish his directorship of Prok Bank, a Russian-owned bank registered in Vanuatu for tax purposes.

Meurant contested the 1996 election as the leader of the Right of Centre Party, losing to National's Lockwood Smith.

Describing his occupation thereafter as consultant and lobbyist, Meurant turned his attention to local body politics, where, again, he has thumbed his nose to authority.

"To the extent that I precipitated the inquiry, I plead guilty," he told the review authority.

He also pleaded guilty to not sitting down when the mayor called him to order and to being disrespectful to Sharplin.

"And in response to claims that senior staff felt intimidated by me, I say it is time they grew up and faced the reality that the days of their bulldozing policy through a sleeping and compliant council are gone."

What Sharplin saw as Meurant's orchestrated campaign to undermine him was to Meurant merely the unique experience of having "the whip of accountability cracked over his [Sharplin's] head."

That crack of the whip led eventually to a split on the council and the bizarre spectacle of councillors sitting before the review authority like children reporting to the principal after a playground dust-up. They told tales about who spent more time in whose office than anyone else, who took rides home from council meetings with whom, whose personal circumstances were more tragic. And Sharplin and Meurant went to considerable efforts to show each other up as the bigger bully, with particular emphasis on who has the better CV.

Sharplin canvassed the highlights from and praise he earned during his 35 years serving the people of Rodney - 22 of those years as chief executive.

Meurant took the opportunity to pick on Sharplin's "lack of exposure to tertiary education and excessive exposure to his own environment." He loaded his own evidence with frequent references to his intelligence and fortitude, his political acumen built up in his nine years experience as an MP, his academic qualifications - a masters degree in economics and public policy law, and glowing references he received while he was in the police force.

There is perhaps no image more gut-wrenching than the site of a grown man crying. But there is probably no better illustration of the stress the showdown with Meurant shovelled onto Sharplin than the series of pictures showing his emotion-wrung face as he broke down at the end of giving his evidence to the review authority.

For as his three volumes of carefully annotated evidence suggest, he has made a detailed study of his enemy from the day in 1996 when Meurant showed up at the council offices and allegedly threw his weight around after his election campaign vehicle was towed away because it broke roadside advertising bylaws.

Sharplin has chronicled it all. From Meurant's accusations of council corruption to his incessant note-taking in meetings to the ease with which he appears to control the local media.

He had accounts of overheard or reported conversations that led Sharplin to suspect Meurant of a plot against him, and notes of every instance he is aware of Meurant threatening councillors and staff with private investigators, phone taps or defamation proceedings. And it concerns Sharplin that three years after failing in his bid for re-election to Parliament, Meurant is still using House of Representatives stationery.

But what Sharplin particularly dislikes is Meurant's close association with local developers.

Meurant admitted to the inquiry that he introduced two major corporations to the Weiti Bridge project and that "they are both companies I have worked for as a consultant. However I was paid no remuneration for the introduction of those corporates to the Weiti project [a proposed shortcut between the North Shore and Whangaparaoa] and made this clear to council whenever I raised this issue."

Aggrieved councillors and Sharplin also pointed the finger at Meurant whenever stories began appearing in the press indicating the council was poised to approve high-rise developments on Orewa Beach which it had yet to discuss.

Meurant called this "a fantasy" in his evidence. It was the developer who had spoken to the press, he said. His opponents "couldn't even get a press clipping right."

Sharplin claims not to fully understand Meurant's associations with the developers or the nature of his interest.

It is ultimately because Meurant is so clearly pro-development for the Hibiscus Coast, and because other councillors have come to resent the tight control exercised by Sharplin, that he has been able to rally a modicum of support.

To the urban Hibiscus Coast councillors like Jill Jeffs, Rodney appears overly dominated by rural interests. Even its three MPS - Penny Webster, Sue Bradford and Lockwood Smith - are farmers.

Tensions between town and farm go way back, says Jeffs, who lives in the heart of Orewa. The rural constituents just want their roads sealed. The townies are not satisfied with improvements to libraries or community centres. They want the sort of development that will bring new business and tourism, especially since the dramatic fall in retail trade after the new motorway opened.

Since the 1970s the urban and rural rates in Rodney have been paid into separate accounts and can only be spent on their respective areas.

There was even a rural and urban committee, but in the midst of growing tensions on the council last September the rural-based councillors, with one vote from Hibiscus Coast, succeeded in having these committees disbanded.

Jeffs was horrified. She says she always tried to support what the rural block wanted to do on their patch, but that support was not reciprocated when the Hibiscus Coast was battling sewerage, reticulation or traffic-flow problems.

"If Orewa dies they've got a ghost town," says Jeffs. "Do people in Puhoi want to travel to the North Shore to buy a pair of shoes?"

At the same time, the rural-based councillors voted themselves onto the committee to liaise with the general manager, leaving the Hibiscus Coast councillors, including Meurant, with no power over Sharplin's employment conditions and salary. That some councillors had been excluded from that important role was criticised by the review authority.

"I hadn't seen the general manager's contract, and yet I got the highest vote here," says Jeffs.

Jeffs, who also suffered attacks from Meurant in his first few months in office, says they now understand and respect each other. She says councils need to hear strong and divergent views. But she also says council managers have to let democracy function.

"If we disagree with councillor Meurant, the general manager should trust us to vote on it."

On Monday Local Government Minister Sandra Lee will ask the cabinet to sort out the mess in Rodney.