EDITORIAL: They broke the rules. Again

26th November 2009

Last weekend we had a couple of days away, staying with friends way up in Northland, a good three hours drive, more or less. More, because we stopped and started, as you do on a weekend away, in places like the Matakana market and Pakiri Beach and a cafe in Mangawhai, and a long, deserted - apart from three or four long-liners with torpedo-powered kon-tikis and quad-bikes and anoraks and not many fish - beach. We had to drive through forest, farmland, lose our way on un-signposted metal roads once we'd left the nearest town, which was Wellsford. It felt, it was, a world away from Auckland.

Well, not anymore. This is Te Arai Point, and the Local Government Commission has decided it's to be the northern boundary of the new Republic of Auckland. The southern boundary stretches from the coast near Waiuku to Buckland, a suburb of Pukekohe, to Paparata, Paparimu, and meets the Firth of Thames at Matingarahi. Of course, it's still only a proposal - well, officially. We can make suggestions but there won't be any of that precious "consultation'' that's enshrined in just about every other Act of Parliament involving communities.

That northern area has as much in common with metropolitan Auckland, with Parnell and
Ponsonby, as it does with Papua New Guinea.

This, however, is the big picture. It's the small one that worries us. If, as they say, the devil is in the detail, there's plenty to be concerned about. This has been done without knowing what the details are.

Other commentators have already run down the batteries in their calculators as they point out that the new Auckland is quite possibly the most un-representative local authority devised (see Brian Rudman's column in Monday's Herald). That is not the commission's fault: John Key and his personally anointed Minister Against Local Government set an impossible task. The arithmetic didn't add up, and then they threw in some insoluble algebraic equations as well.

As Dr Richard Tong, a vastly experienced local body executive and community crusader, pointed out in our North Shore edition this week: The most troubling aspect of the Local
Government Commission's proposals is that the powers of the new boards have yet to be announced.

"They've set the amount of governance we will have for unknown roles and responsibilities. This is mad.''

The details of how the local boards will function and what decisions they will handle are to be disclosed in a third bill to be introduced to Parliament sometime next month. When everyone's mind is on Christmas.

So the Government continues to bulldoze its scheme to have the single-city in place for the October 2010 local body elections, a timeframe that allows no pause for thought, consideration, or consultation. This has been obvious from Day Zero, when Messrs Hide
and Key tore up the Royal Commission's report and came up with their own game plan. When the first of three Acts setting up the new council deliberately nuked the Local Government Act, which set out some measure of protection for democracy and involvement of local communities. When the select committee process was hijacked.

We shouldn't be too surprised that all the rules have been broken: the man in charge of the reform has shown that he is rather good at breaking the rules.

But perhaps the most short-sighted vision is the one that says all this will be in place by October 2010. Because in the year after that, we'll be getting our first rates bills, our water bills under the new Watercare (whoever owns it by then), paying our bus fares under the new transport authority (whoever owns our buses by then), had one year of the Dear Leader (whoever is elected to potentially the most powerful position in New Zealand politics).

And round about then we'll have a general election, with Auckland voters being the most powerful bloc in the country. If I were a Government MP in a marginal seat it would be - as the Manchester United manager puts it, when it's coming to the business end of the season - squeaky-bum time.

Oh! Perhaps that's it. The new boundaries are a cunning plan to make the North Harbour and Counties Manukau teams more competitive. That's all right, then.

- Ewan McDonald is editor of The Aucklander