In Emily Perkins’ novel Lioness, the story turns on an allegation of cronyism and conflicts of interest between a property developer and a Wellington city councillor – a plot that makes sense in nearly every democracy in the world except New Zealand.
We like to do things differently, ie, badly, and our local government dysfunction runs in the opposite direction. Our councillors don’t have enough power to be crooked. They have little-to-no say about the operational decisions made by the agencies they allegedly govern. Their officials are largely autonomous; what meagre authority mayors and councillors wield can be overruled by central government at a whim. Now the Prime Minister is musing about abolishing regional councils entirely.
This is an election year for local bodies. Nominations open in mid-July. If you relish a career with minimal influence but considerable responsibility; if you’d like to spend your evenings being yelled at by residents furious about late buses, contaminated drinking water and rising rates, then patronised and ignored by the officials who deliver these services – or, increasingly, don’t – then life as a local body politician may be for you. At least the pay is terrible. Mayors, chairs and councils in large cities are generally paid full time, albeit far less than their council executives. For most of the rest the remuneration is part-time or an honorarium.
Voter turnout for local body elections has been drifting downwards for 30 years, with various culprits suggested: postal voting? disenfranchised youth? the death of local media? The most persuasive argument is the poor design of the system.
Not everything in New Zealand politics can be blamed on the fourth Labour government led by David Lange and his cabal of free-market radicals that reshaped our nation in the 1980s. Some of our gravest problems preceded them, others have emerged under the long centrist drift of the MMP era.
The demented quilt
But the systemic failures of local government? That’s almost entirely the fault of 1984-90 Labour. In 1989, then local government minister Michael Bassett reformed the entire structure of local government, passing two lengthy and complex bills under urgency with minimal consultation.
The bills rationalised the hundreds of tiny councils and boards that prior decades of slipshod legislation had laid across the nation like a demented quilt, replacing it with … a different demented slipshod quilt. Today there are 11 regional councils, 13 city councils and 53 district councils. There’s no formal relationship between regions and districts, or clear definitions of their roles. Some districts sprawl across multiple regions. There is much duplication and confusion.
True to its ideological principles, the Lange government established the councils on corporate governance models, run by chief executives appointed for five-year terms, who exercise operational independence. Like a business! But with a guaranteed revenue stream via local taxes and without proper accountability or oversight. There is much bureaucracy, empire building and territorial war between different agencies.
The bitter, protracted fights between Auckland Council and Auckland Transport, or Wellington City Council and Wellington Water, are symptoms of a chronic illness in the local body politic.
Each council produces its own long-term plan, setting out financial, infrastructure and strategic decisions over next 10 years. But these plans are revised every three years so the trend has been for councils to front-load spending decisions into the early years and defer cuts, rates increases or other difficult decisions to the back end of the decade.
When the plan is revised three years later, the same pattern repeats itself. This is the mechanism that allowed councils around the nation – most notoriously in Wellington – to postpone maintenance on their water infrastructure for decades, diverting the rates collected to fix the pipes into more appealing short-term projects.
The looming conflict in this year’s local body contest is the status of Māori wards. Before 2021, councils could introduce wards elected by voters registered on the Māori electoral roll, but they required a referendum to do so. These generally failed. In 2021, Labour’s local government minister, Nanaia Mahuta, abolished the need for a referendum – roughly half of the local bodies around the country quickly adopted Māori wards.
The coalition government rolled this back, part of its grand salt-of-the-earth approach to nearly every legislative achievement of its predecessor. Councils that established Māori wards under this amendment will be required to pass a referendum – at their own expense – to maintain them.
Acting local
Act has declared an intention to stand local candidates across the nation – they’re calling it Act Local – and it’s not hard to guess what the central issue of their campaigns will be. The Greens have been strengthening their presence in local body politics – once elected they like to declare climate emergencies then fly to international climate conferences. They’ll try to build on the momentum of the opposition to anti-treaty sentiment, Act in general, David Seymour specifically.
Surely the treaty principle of tino rangatiratanga creates an obligation for representation by Māori councillors who are as ineffective as the politicians elected via the general roll?
Any reform of the current mess is – theoretically – a good idea. Much of the work of regional councils is resource management, and Chris Bishop, the coalition’s minister for basically everything, is replacing the Resource Management Act, so there’s a logic to simplifying the current structure when the act changes, folding the regional bodies into the district and city councils.
Auckland already has a unitary council. It features an executive mayor with actual decision-making powers, in contrast to the largely ceremonial mayors who function as council chairs and press secretaries for their officials across the rest of the country.
After the 2028 local body election we could see the current fragmented and broken local government entities merged into cohesive and seamless authorities led by empowered councils.
Perhaps we’ll even have local politicians who are important enough to be corrupt – just like in the books.
