Bruce Bisset: Time for the young to stand up for council seats

Bruce Bisset, the last time he stood as a local body candidate.

It's been a rollicking three years for local government in Hawke's Bay, and while the term's not over yet it may surprise some folk to find candidate nominations for this year's local body elections open in just three weeks' time, on July 19.

That's when any of the armchair critics with gumption can put their hands up to stand and see if they can do a better job – or at least a different one – from the incumbents, should they win a seat.

Before you ask, no, that won't include me; I've run in seven elections now, and with my win/loss record standing at three to four and age griping at both body and memory I reluctantly must admit my time for warming a council seat is past.

Besides, it's more fun using my insider knowledge and journalistic training to skim stones across the sometimes way-too-placid waters of politics and see how many ripples I can make.

Not that those waters have been calm for long this term. Every council in the region has had conundrums to deal with, several of them complex and controversial, from water use and purity to race relations to sale of assets to expensive vanity projects to the housing shortage – an extensive list.

Hopefully those issues, and the at-times volatile community debate around them, will not only encourage people to stand but others to at least get themselves enrolled and then make their votes count when postal voting begins in September.

Certainly it's no secret we need greater participation in the electoral process to maintain a semblance of representative democracy; it's difficult for councillors to claim a mandate for change when less than half the electorate bothers to vote.

Yet change – indeed, sweeping change – is what is now needed. With climate and ecological crises overshadowing our species future, the tide is coming in for younger energetic people with radical ideas to rise to the challenge and assume the reins of governance – for their own good.

We older generations have a duty to help and encourage them do that, I suggest.

On the one hand, there are a good dozen or more current councillors I rate as past their use-by date who should now stand down; on the other, we should recognise that "experience" in life does not necessarily equate to ability to manage the challenges of the future.

Indeed, those challenges are better met by folk who have grown up tech-savvy, and fully aware of (but not afraid of) the enormity of the task.

That it is enormous is driven home by the regional council's acknowledgement the increasingly disturbing effects of climate change are not just a crisis but an emergency that requires urgent top priority attention.

Even the shallowest analysis of the situation must recognise that society itself has to change, in fundamental ways, if we are to have any hope of surviving (let alone thriving) through the coming decades.

Those of us in the "lucky generations" who have lived through what history may well regard as the best of all times have spent the world's natural wealth in doing so, and should now accept it's time to stand aside.

If we can do that with grace, and lend support to a new young breed of politicians trying to redress our faults, then our heirs will at least have something to thank us for.

Whereas if we cling to our needless rapacious consumption in pursuit of the fiction of money even when we can see the tsunami of extinction rolling in from the horizon, we will leave our children nothing to save.