Auckland's new masters have been handed a conundrum which will take longer than a single term to master.
As the battle for the hearts and minds of voters of the new Auckland Super City stutters along, my thoughts keep flicking back to Robert Muldoon's dispiriting benediction on becoming prime minister in 1975. He hoped, he said, to leave New Zealand "no worse off than I found it."
Sir Robert failed to achieve even this modest target, and was roundly criticised for that, and for his defeatism. Looking forward three years, if the inaugural mayor and council can stand up at the end of their first term and honestly show they've left the city no worse off than they found it, they'll have done remarkably well. For what Local Government Minister Rodney Hide has presented them, is a Rubik's cube of a governance system that could take much longer than one term to master.
The biggest challenge facing the new council will be persuading Aucklanders the upheaval was a good thing, because this was a revolution engineered and driven by the business and political elites, not by the general public.
A May Herald-Digipoll survey underlined this, with only 33 per cent believing the Super City would be a better place to live in, compared to 49 per cent who said it would be worse. Even more (53 per cent) thought a single council would be worse for them personally, while 59 per cent opposed the setting up of unelected boards to run 75 per cent of services like roads and water.
The cost of the revolution is also leaving a sour taste. Prime Minister John Key and Hide ordered the restructuring, but are forcing ratepayers to pay the set-up costs - $200.8 million at last count. And despite all the initial propagandising about the substantial savings that would accompany reform, the proponents have now washed their hands of such promises. On the eve of the Royal Commission meeting in 2007, the Employers and Manufacturers Association ran full page advertisements in this paper promising rate reductions of $200 million a year, or $400 per ratepayer. The Royal Commission joined the chorus, talking of annual savings of $76 million to $113 million by 2015.
But by early last year, Hide was in full retreat, saying it was "too early to say" whether rates and costs would go down and that the key issue was "good governance."
Here too, there is widespread disgruntlement, particularly about hiving off 75 per cent of council business to unelected, "council-controlled" organisations. There's also concern over whether the local boards will be able to deliver the enhanced local democracy promised by the Government.
Though the mayor and council will have their time cut out persuading the citizenry of better times ahead, behind the scenes the bureaucrats will be slaving away trying to rewire four cities, three districts and one regional council, into one giant entity, all the time trying to present a "business as usual" public face. Given this scenario, if the mayor can stand up in three years' time and declare Auckland is no worse than when he took power, his worship - at least we can be sure it will be a he - will have done very well.
