Wayne Brown’s proposed shake-up of Council Controlled Organisations just rearranging deckchairs - Steven Joyce

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown plans to make council-controlled organisations “democratically accountable".

THREE KEY FACTS

• Mayor Wayne Brown plans to make council-controlled organisations “democratically accountable”, sparking pushback from Auckland Transport and other agencies.
• Brown’s proposals aim to “dethrone” Auckland Transport and abolish Eke Panuku Auckland, citing long-standing issues.
• The reforms, effective from July 1 next year, could lead to job losses and increased workloads for council staff.

One of the favourite concepts I learned about during my Zoology degree many years ago, was “displacement behaviour”. This describes what happens when an animal can’t decide between two conflicting possible actions. It channels its indecision into doing something completely irrelevant to the choice at hand.

The easiest illustration of displacement behaviour might be a cat that has another cat infringing on its territory. It can’t decide whether to attack the other cat or run away, so it sits down and starts furiously washing itself.

To me, the Auckland Mayor and his proposed shake-up of Council Controlled Organisations is that cat. He’s being busy but his proposals are largely irrelevant to the task at hand. A big rearrangement of Auckland Council organisations, like the big merger of all our hospitals into Health New Zealand, will likely achieve nothing or even less than nothing. It is sure to be expensive and divert a lot of people from their jobs but, in a policy sense, it won’t change a thing.

Ever since the single Auckland Council has been created, the council-controlled organisations that came with that merger have been convenient whipping boys, with each mayor becoming more virulent in their criticism. Phil Goff in particular railed impotently against them, and Wayne Brown has continued the theme.

It’s a strange thing when they are simply delivery organisations, charged with undertaking the tasks council sets for them.

Council actually has most if not all the power it needs to control each organisation. It appoints and fires the board of each organisation and probably even more importantly, controls the level of funding. In politics it pays to remember the golden rule, “them with the gold rules”. It has all the power it needs to be an activist shareholder.

I had no difficulty for example changing the priorities at NZTA when I became Transport Minister back in 2008 to accommodate the first Roads Of National Significance, the building of which were certainly not anticipated by the previous Labour Government. Much as Simeon Brown is doing now.

So why the current mayor’s obsession (and that of Phil Goff before him) with council structures? The dirty little secret is that they lash out at the CCOs because they can’t persuade their fellow councillors to bend to their will and make decisions which will change the behaviour of those organisations. They know what they want to do, but they can’t convince a majority of their colleagues to agree. So nothing changes, and instead they just attack the CCOs. It’s like a form of entity abuse.

It gets worse. A former mayor, who shall remain nameless, secretly supported what his agencies were doing in the council’s name, but made a great show of attacking them publicly all the same.

Take Auckland Transport. The current mayor likes to call it the most loathed organisation in Auckland. But one of the big reasons it does what it does is to follow Auckland Council’s own, rather utopian, climate change policy. This policy encourages massive transport mode shifts as a way to fight climate change, and Auckland Transport dutifully does what it’s told, sometimes with ludicrous outcomes that offend car-driving Aucklanders.

The logical thing to do would be to change the council’s policy to something more sensible and have Auckland Transport follow that. But the mayor can’t get the votes, so he attacks the delivery agency instead. He complains he can’t even appoint people he likes to the boards. But that again is the responsibility of all of the council not just the mayor on his own. It requires consensus, which may or may not be a strength.

I’d support changing the rules to make it more explicit that Auckland Council is responsible for transport policy decisions, if only to stop successive mayors hiding behind their CCOs.

The other problem Auckland Transport has to deal with, like all public transport entities in this country, is that roughly 50% of its funds come from central Government. Therefore the Government of the day has quite a lot of say in what it does, by only co-funding activity that the current Government supports. That’s why up until about a year ago, raised pedestrian crossings were popping up all over Auckland. Not so much now.

You might say this is all dreary organisational plumbing. However, there is a more important problem with folding delivery agencies back into the core council. Councils and governments have delivery agencies because they tend to act more predictably and commercially than a core council might, and that’s important to the private sector they work with, who need to make their own investment decisions.

In the core council, every decision is a political decision and can be changed at any time, which makes it hard for the transport wallahs to work consistently with roading contractors and the like, and the city’s development arm to work with developers to get things built, particularly as infrastructure is very long-dated.

Consider the case of Wellington Water. Wellington Water is a politically led organisation, as opposed to the separated but council-controlled organisation which is Watercare in Auckland. Wellington Water has no ability to plan and contract for the longer term, without being second-guessed by councillors every five minutes, and not just one council but across six or seven. It’s no way to run a long-dated infrastructure organisation and that’s clear now for all to see.

What with the continuous pipe leaks and finger-pointing, and the longstanding funding deficit that has occurred in favour of convention centres and town halls, Wellington councils and their water are a circus. It’s ironic that the Auckland Mayor wants to recreate something similar for transport in our biggest city. You may not love Auckland Transport now, but if this goes ahead, prepare to be a lot more disappointed in the future.

So what should the Mayor do instead, and indeed mayors in our three big cities around the country? Perhaps the best thing for Wayne Brown would be to roll his sleeves up and work with his councillors to hammer out a reasonable middle-of-the-road view on transport policy for Auckland, and then give that to Auckland Transport to supply. Something, for example, that recognises a hierarchy of roads, with major arterials reserved for moving cars effectively, while local streets are slowed down to be more liveable. Rather than the wild policy swings of the left and right.

It will take time and a lot of effort, because the Mayor has some very different views to work with on his council. But that is the job, and it would be worth the endeavour. And it would achieve much more than his proposed rearranging of those proverbial deckchairs.