Garth George: Bigger-is-better disease a growing cancer

Since I don't live there any more, thank God, I don't really care if metropolitan Auckland has one local authority or 50.

The trouble is that the deeply flawed "bigger is better" philosophy of local government, borrowed from big business, is likely, like a deadly infection, to spread to other parts of New Zealand.

And it is bound to fail on any measure you like to name - democracy, governance, efficiency, cost-saving, whatever - because the bigger a local authority is, the less say the ratepayers have in what happens to the place where they live.

We have had ample evidence for years that the larger local authorities created through the last lot of amalgamations have failed to deliver the "economies of scale" which were the main excuse used to justify them in the first place.

They have turned out to be more expensive and cumbersome than the smaller bodies they replaced, mainly because of the legions of bureaucrats with which they have become infested.

For conclusive evidence we need look no further than at our rates demands, and at the diminution of the services once provided out of them.

My concern, however, is not the economic failure of local body amalgamation, but the social failure.

I wonder about the extent to which the disappearance of smaller local bodies has contributed to a loss of a sense of identity, particularly among young people; to an evaporation of civic pride, neighbourliness and community spirit; and to a corresponding increase in adult carelessness, youthful aimlessness and urban crime.

It seems to me that our long-lost smaller civic entities - such as Auckland's boroughs, rural boroughs, cities and counties, for instance - were to a significant extent self-policing. Civic pride, neighbourliness and community spirit often saw to that.

Yet now, even in face of the evidence, it is proposed to do away altogether with local councils and have one great big cumbersome bureaucracy to govern the entire Auckland conurbation.

Which reminds me, alarmingly, of the words of the 19th century French author Honore de Balzac, who wrote: "Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."

And that's the real problem. For a start the proposals put forward by the Government - which took one look at the multimillion-dollar report of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance and decided it didn't fit its ideology - envisage a super mayor with vast executive power.

Who do you know that has the intelligence, the ability, the wisdom, the humility and the vision to fulfil that role? None of the present crop of Auckland mayors, that's for sure.

This is not a job for a parish pump politician, so where do Aucklanders look for a paragon of organisation and master of compromise who can lead the Auckland conurbation out of chaos.

The only person I can think of who might have been able to make a fist of it has, unfortunately for her home town, buggered off to New York to become one of the most powerful pygmies in probably the biggest bureaucratic mechanism in the world.

Then there is the council itself with 12 councillors elected from wards and eight elected at large. This reeks of the MMP electoral system in which only a proportion of the MPs are accountable to voters.

This is an invitation to all sorts of self-important pygmies to put their names forward for election so they can, if elected, lord it over their fellows and attend lots of cocktail parties and public toilet openings.

My advice to Aucklanders is to forget about the dollars - and it will cost you all far more than you envisaged in your worst nightmares - and think about the people, both those to be governed and those to govern.

Because if you don't you will be saddled with pygmies when what you need is giants.

Meanwhile, down here in the Bay of Plenty, the mayors of the province's seven local authorities are already talking about investigating a big amalgamation. And that makes as much sense as the Auckland scheme.

Granted, Whakatane, Opotiki and Kawerau districts could well become one - they have a population of only 49,000 between them and are contiguous - but Rotorua and Tauranga are totally different cities and any amalgamation of them would be a disaster.

That is the same problem Auckland faces: Auckland City, Waitakere City, North Shore City and Manukau City are all unique. Lumping them all together under an administration centred in downtown Auckland City makes as much sense as New Zealand amalgamating with Australia and coming under Canberra's rule.

John Key and Rodney Hide might care to ponder this question: where does inclusivism end, and the deprivation of personal choice and responsibility, of which they are so fond, begin?