Bill Sutton: Accountability needed at the top

Bill Sutton

In our system of democratic government, leadership at the highest levels is by elected representatives of the people.

Our representatives are of course advised and assisted by paid employees - council officers and government officials - who may often know more about policy issues than the politicians they report to. But on the rare occasions when council and government leaders make serious mistakes, it's not the job of their paid employees to hold them to account.

Not if they want to keep their jobs. So the difficult task of ensuring accountability, so essential to any healthy democracy, has to firstly be undertaken by the voters.

For voters to make informed decisions, they need to be informed. So I'm grateful to Pauline Doyle and Ken Keys for their recent Talking Points (HBT June 7 and July 3) pointing out some important facts, not previously widely known, relating to the Havelock North water poisoning disaster, which as we all know damaged the health of so many local people.

The new information is that back in 2009, council officers recommended a $4.9 million project to move Havelock North's water supply from the insecure Brookvale bore-field to a new more secure source in Whakatu.

The project was initially approved, but then in 2012 the Hastings District Council decided to abandon it. In 2013 the then mayor, Lawrence Yule, said "when I look at the implications of spending millions of dollars on upgrading bores, I am struggling to understand why we have to do this".

With the benefit of hindsight we can now conclude this decision was a terrible mistake. But then again, we all make mistakes. Why hold the former mayor to account 5 years later? The answer of course is that if voters don't hold their elected leaders to account, nobody will, and then there will be no accountability. We can look to history for myriad examples of what happens next.

It's instructive to compare the Hawke's Bay example with what happened recently in London, when the terrible Grenfell Tower fire claimed the lives of at least 80 people. The elected leader of the Kensington and Chelsea Council, and the deputy leader, have now both resigned.

The chief executive has stepped aside from all his other responsibilities to focus on the public inquiry. Both locals and outsiders can see that the relevant elected leaders are being held to account, and that officers seen to have given bad advice are likely to be held accountable also.

In Hawke's Bay we've experienced our own avoidable tragedy, the water poisoning, in which a far higher proportion of the population suffered serious health consequences, and from which many people have yet to recover and some never will.

So far, however, neither the mayor nor the chief executive have been seen to be held accountable.

Is that going to happen or not? And if it doesn't, what message will that send to our other elected leaders, and the officers who work for them?

Bill Sutton was Labour MP for the former Hawke's Bay electorate and later served as a Hawke's Bay regional councillor.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz