Democracy in peril, say city's critics

Panmure Community Action Group spokesman Keith Sharp. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

Auckland is beginning to resemble a turkey that has just received an invitation to Christmas dinner, says a community spokesman who had high hopes for the Super City.

"We all know the starring role that a turkey plays at Christmas - decapitated, plucked, gutted, stuffed, stitched up, roasted and carved up. And when the diners have eaten their fill, all you have left is a dead carcass."

Panmure Community Action Group spokesman Keith Sharp made the comments before an Auckland governance select committee hearing submissions on the Government's third and final piece of Super City legislation.

Mr Sharp said that for 10 years he had been disillusioned and frustrated with the "remote, wasteful, unaccountable and unwieldy" form of local government, and had hoped the Super City reforms would make New Zealand's largest city more democratic, efficient, accountable and responsive to citizens.

A simple, straightforward, two-tier system should have been simple to devise for a medium-sized city of 1.4 million people, he said.

Instead, those hopes had been dashed by the same old ideologically driven political power games and gerrymandering behaviour that made the current structure in Auckland so dysfunctional for so long.

"I do not trust the process that is going on now. I'm beginning to fear it," he said.

The lawyer for the Waitakere Ranges Protection Society, Douglas Allan, summed up a common theme at yesterday's hearings by saying the third bill "creates a corporate city, rather than a democratic city".

"The bill has far too much decision-making into the corporate, rather than the democratic, end of the spectrum."

Democracy, he said, was clumsy and led to political chopping and changing, but it provided the ability to correct things.

The society is opposed to a clause in the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill that repeals a section of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act.

Mr Allan said it had the potential to allow the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park, an Auckland asset, to be passed to Wellington. The simple solution, he said, was to replace the Auckland Regional Council, as owner, with the Auckland Council.

Ponsonby teacher Juliette Laird said Auckland was not a business, but a city in which the council's prime purpose was to meet the needs of people.

"My request to the Government and the select committee is that you remember that this is about people, not about making profit, a system that will work for the people of Auckland and making it a good place to live," she said.

Political activist Lisa Prager told MPs that their job was to represent Aucklanders, "not take us over with a fiefdom that will fail in the next four or five years".

"Your dreams of a Super City are so unpopular, undemocratic and unacceptable to the majority."