There has been a lot of discussion about the upcoming decisions on Local Body amalgamation that are due to be released. A number of different views are being expressed with a growing amount of support for doing virtually nothing. By this I mean for TCDC to stay as it is but take over the Waikato Regional Council tasks that apply to the Coromandel.
One advocate for this option is The Informer journalist, Geoffrey Robinson who, in issue 1220 of the Informer, wrote about the options presented by Council stating, “What each of the amalgamation options can guarantee is a dramatic and permanent loss of political self-determination and local control”.
I do not disagree with this comment, but it is incomplete in that it fails to mention we have this situation now. My view was supported by Johnathan Ayling in the NZ Herald of 30 July. He wrote about the “democratic void” in local governments stating, “Voters elect mayors and councillors assuming they possess the authority to implement the platforms on which they campaigned”. Most of us are coming to realise they do not, possibly the main reason for low turnouts of voters in local elections.
The current Thames Coromandel District Council has virtually removed political self-determination and local control from our communities. Most of our councillors stood for election with platforms that included empowering communities and providing transparency. Evidence would suggest our representatives do not possess the authority to implement the required changes. So why do a group of people feel we are better off staying with this undemocratic mess?
The real battle we should focus on is regaining community control of community governance. The secondary battle is to lower costs, and therefore the financial burden on ratepayers. Both of these two points should be fought for now, regardless of any amalgamation option; but let’s look at them in a bit of detail.
Community control
A council basically consists of a number of communities and a centralised bureaucracy. The current situation is that our rates go to this bureaucracy which decides where the money will go and allocates some pocket money for community control. It should be the other way around; rates should go to the community who purchase required centralised services from the bureaucracy and allocates the bulk to community projects. Under such a model it does not really matter where that central bureaucracy resides, most decision making is carried out at community level so the bureaucracy could be in Thames, Hamilton, Wellington or wherever else.
The cost of centralised services should be lowered by having a larger entity deliver these services. As an example, let us consider IT. The IT department provides facilities that enable things such as the processing of rates, financial accounting etc. Such services could be provided from a centralised point; it does not need to be replicated at every council. You could think of the individual wards as being branches of NZ Local Government Inc. There are 224 wards (branches) in New Zealand Local Government Inc being serviced by almost 80 IT Systems and teams. As a comparison the ANZ bank has between 200 and 300 locations (branches) in New Zealand, and they are serviced by one centralised system. Easy to see why banks make more profit than councils.
There has already been indications that some centralised decision making is to be made for local authorities. One that I am particularly in favour of is a national standard for land zones. Currently there are over 1100 unique planning zones in New Zealand which puts a massive overhead onto the building development process with differing rules between councils that development companies must adhere to. As a comparison, countries that use a national zoning system usually have between 10 and 20 zones which is much simpler and easier to work with. An organisation of local governance that has central decision making of a structural nature and regional centralisation of a pared down bureaucracy would seem to be more efficient but only if community power is restored to the communities.
Such changes should lead to improvement in local governance, but this won’t happen. I am pretty sure TCDC staff will have our council approve the model where we amalgamate with Hauraki, Matamata-Piako. The reason being that under this model TCDC will be the biggest fish which would imply better chances of job protection for TCDC staff. As they say, “turkeys do not vote for an early Christmas”.
