Bruce Bisset: Our new dictatorship by stealth

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.

The abhorrent aspect of the Local Government Commission's decision to amalgamate the whole of Hawke's Bay into a unitary authority was the inevitability of that outcome, marking it as dictatorship by stealth.

Meaning: A way to enable the rich to consolidate power and to circumvent care for the environment in order to profit from it, regardless of the common good.

See, the model for local governance is a three-tier approach: Regional councils, district and city councils, and community boards. Each has clear and distinct roles.

So for all LGC chair Basil Morrison's pomposity about there being only one option - his - now up for debate, I am left dumbfounded as to how the body charged with overseeing local government can be permitted to undermine the law.

For a unitary authority is, I contend, directly at odds with the intent of the Act - as laid down in 1989, at least. And, in consequence, is also at odds with the broader intent of the Resource Management Act.

Those two ground-breaking pieces of legislation together (from 1989 and 1991) set up an environmental and infrastructural planning regime that balanced needs against wants and care against chaos.

The mere fact they have been under constant sustained attack from the Right ever since in itself shows what perceptive and skilfully drafted laws they were.

The LGA was revised in 2001, allowing local authorities to step somewhat away from the model of 1989. Similarly, the RMA has undergone a number of "reforms" that have, in sum, significantly reduced its robustness.

But both still exist with, at their core, a principle of care: The one for specific communities of interest, the other with an holistic appreciation of how those communities are best managed.

Both have contained protection and enhancement of the "four wellbeings" - social, cultural, environmental, and economic - as the guiding rationale for said management. Yet nowhere in this decision do I see three of those upheld. Economic wellbeing - or the assumption of it - appears to have trumped all else.

As you might expect, with a National Government whose Minister for Local Government, Chris Tremain, all-but instructed the LGA to produce this result. As, no doubt, in the case of Northland; as it was for Auckland; and as will be for every other region until the despised environmental "gate-keepers", the regional councils, are done away with.

Leaving us only the jobs-for-the-boys rubber-stamping department known as the Environmental Protection Agency as a back-stop - a body that seems disinclined to embrace its charter of protecting the environment.

All so the rich can get richer and bugger the social, cultural, or environmental consequences.

Make no mistake: That's what this whole amalgamation drive is about. Setting up one-stop-shop colossi that only the wealthy can afford to get elected to and through which they can then do whatever they wish.

Morrison is a hatchet man. He got rid of community boards on Hauraki DC when he was mayor because he regarded them as an irrelevant distraction. How instructive that he winds up as LGC chair.

A similar lack of real consultation helps drive this whole revisionist campaign. The truth is never up for debate, only the consequences. After all, instead of tinkering the Right could simply repeal these laws.

But no. There'd be too much outcry; so they take the stealthy option, insisting it's in everyone's best interest. And look! It's within the law. Ha bloody ha.

That's the right of it.