Bruce Bisset: Our region needs protecting

Mayor of Hastings Lawrence Yule would like the three Hawkes Bay Councils to be amalgamated into one body. Photo / Warren Buckland

Perhaps the only definitive message to be gleaned from the Local Government Commission's revised amalgamation proposal for Hawke's Bay is how ludicrously far central government is prepared to go to get rid of regional councils.

For as much as one might cheer the commission upholding democratic representation by merely swapping seats around so you have much the same number of elected officials but ostensibly under one roof instead of five, there's little practical difference between the proposed set-up and what already exists.

Except, that is, for the elimination of the much-maligned but increasingly vital "third tier" of local government: a separate regional council.

Not that the Bay - with the limited exception of the Hastings rural community board - ever had all three tiers (community boards, city and district councils, regional council) that the 1989 reforms instituted. But it had the two that make the lion's share of decisions - and counter-balance each other.

So as it stands, the new proposal is like a bad card trick: you pick two aces, the magician shuffles the pack in a dozen confusing ways, produces two aces and insists they're your cards - even though they're both of different suits to those you picked.

Since all the cards were aces, you're left arguing terms instead of substance; you may feel disgruntled but it's hard to mount a challenge. In reality, you've been conned.

The LGC's con is the tier two and tier three levels being replaced with tier one and tier two-and-a-half levels. We get local boards instead of councils; and a unitary council instead of a regional one.

And that's what this whole debate is about. Getting rid of the only body that provides checks and balances to the actions of city and district councils; the only body charged specifically with looking after the environment.

Because central government, at the behest of "market forces", wants to "free up" development opportunities and so supports the "one-stop shop" of a unitary council as the way to facilitate that.

That some irreplaceable piece of the natural or built environment gets trashed in the process because there's no local oversight is the price to be paid.

Oh, of course there's the EPA for appeals - if you can afford it. Or, more like, if you can be bothered, adjudicated as it is by government-appointed yes-men. Good luck with that.

See, I almost wouldn't mind the commission's proposal to put the Wairoa, Napier, Hastings, and CHB councils together while enabling local boards for local decisions in each area, if the Hawke's Bay regional council remained intact.

But remove it and the whole thing becomes a mockery. The arguments about "operational efficiency" and the "cost of democracy" and so on are - as the commission's revision ironically proves - completely baseless.

HBRC may, politically, have shown itself to be fractious and inept, but it's the only protection-mechanism we've got. Given the onset of more oil and mineral exploration and the spectre of fracking, not to mention the need to mitigate the effects of climate change, that's a protection we can ill afford to lose.

The snow-job the commission is planning early next year to sell its proposal - under the guise of "testing the level of support for change" - is clearly designed to minimise the likelihood of objection to a level that would trigger a poll.

The challenge for all Bay residents is not only to make sure a poll does happen, but to get past parochial bickering and deal with the bigger issue at stake: loss of environmental oversight.

That's the real agenda driving this process. It has to be rejected.

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet