“I don’t believe it should be Manawatū, Taranaki, Whanganui,” Davey said.
“You get about 300,000 people and you have one council, and you only have six councillors, a mayor or whatever – call them a chief executive – and that’s it.
“And you drive really hard.”
Davey’s scheme would slash elected members by 95%: currently, voters are choosing 142 district and regional councillors for the area’s 377,000 people.
Davey explained why he wanted to stretch his tenure to 21 years.
“Farming. Farming is the biggest ball game of this country,” said the regional manager turned director of Ravensdown, the farmer co-op for fertiliser and agrichemicals.
The audience at Waitoitoi Memorial Hall last week barely outnumbered the five Taranaki Regional Council (TRC) candidates and three New Plymouth District Council candidates.
Mostly farmers, they demanded relief from annual rates as high as $40,000 – but the predominant grumble was councils ignoring rural people.
Builder, surfer and TRC candidate Chris Wilkes said the audience clearly wanted locally-engaged councils but Davey’s merger would disenfranchise rural communities and small towns “from here to Horowhenua”.
“A lot of areas would be unrepresented,” said the beekeeping environmentalist, who spent 15 years on the committee of Kiwis Against Seabed Mining opposing the South Taranaki Bight mining bid that is being assessed under the Fast-track Approvals Act.
He said Taranaki should have two councils – north and south – not four, to avoid “four people doing the same jobs”.
Candidate Lee Kennedy manages Inglewood’s Farmlands co-operative store and wanted reform, but not Davey’s mega-council.
“How do we make sure that the smaller communities like the Inglewoods and the Waitaras aren’t lost?”
Fossil fuels and farming have been dominant talking points at TRC for decades but more calls for ecological protection have sharpened conflict – especially over waterways degradation.
The fight over resource use versus ecological protection continued at the candidate meeting but polarisation was tempered in a community hall with fewer than two dozen people.
Candidate Tama Blackburn’s career spans meat processing, Australian mines, oil and gas drilling, and a mountain and surf tourism venture.
From working as a conservation department ranger, he became science and innovation lead for the Taranaki Mounga ecological restoration project, and he is now taiao (environment) manager for his iwi, neighbouring Maniapoto.
Blackburn said councils working with hapū and iwi were implementing solutions to problems the audience was worried about: better techniques and species for streambank planting, household rainwater storage systems and flood mitigation.
“These are concepts that we can learn from the past when we had open wetlands, swamps – we watched how it caught the water and released it nice and slowly.”
As Federated Farmers’ Taranaki president, Leedom Gibbs already speaks on TRC’s powerful policy and planning committee.
Now a candidate, Gibbs warned the next council faced a flood of Government reform and must make it work for Taranaki “to honour what the farmers already doing”.
“But also to recognise that there are some things in the environment that need to be improved, for ecology.
“Because biodiversity is really, really important and it is important that we take as much of the biota of the earth with us as we go.”
There was talk of dung beetles, culverts and former cops becoming overzealous compliance officers.
Retired farmer Graham Northcott had not lost much vocal power despite his 82 years.
“What the hell do you mean by the environment?” he bellowed from the rear.
“Because a lot of us have been looking after it all our lives and some of the ideas that people at the top have got are bloody destructive.”
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
