Auckland mayoralty: John Roughan - It's time true local government is revived

OPINION

Having voted for Wayne Brown I'm holding high hopes he can change the Auckland Council. He is clear-headed, assertive, I can't see him tolerating the windy reports officials write to keep the elected councillors sitting in their chamber all day contemplating climate change.

With less than a week of voting to go, there is real change in the air. You can sense it, not just from the polls but from the advertisements for his main rival, Efeso Collins. The ads appear to be professionally designed by his Labour Party backers and they've changed their tune from free buses to controlling Auckland Transport, Brown's issue.

I met Brown once when he bent my ear about something he was doing. He struck me as one of those can-do guys who can cut through nonsense to get things done. He is an engineer by profession but not a clubbable one. He likes to be a bit outrageous.

I admired the way he chaired the Auckland District Health Board, being unafraid to challenge doctors. His most recent public work, a report for the current Government endorsing New Zealand First's mad plan to move the port of Auckland to Marsden Point, was not his finest hour.

He is now proposing to rate the port for the value of its site, which goes halfway to the obvious solution – put the port back on the sharemarket, where cross shareholdings would quickly find the most efficient use of all the upper North Island ports taking account of their local council constraints.

Even the leftish councillor Chis Derby acknowledged a partial float would be the solution, briefly, before his colleagues hauled him back into line. We need a more businesslike council too.

The Auckland mayoralty is sometimes described as the second most powerful office in the land, presumably on the basis of population. It's not second, not even close. Local government has been steadily declining in power as central government has taken over its tasks or overridden its decisions.

That trend has reached a nadir with the unholy alliance of Labour and National recently to override protections for streets of stately old villas in Auckland's Unitary Plan.

We remember the Unitary Plan. It took years to go through a tortuous process of numerous stages. Now the council needn't have bothered. The Government has decided three-storey housing can be built, up to three buildings to a site, just about anywhere. So much for local government.

Auckland mayoral candidate Wayne Brown. Photo / Alex Burton

The Government has stepped in to permit higher density housing because it thinks councils are captured by "Nimbys". It is setting up "Three Waters" to remove infrastructure decisions from the influence of voters who get the water bills. So much for democracy, so much for the principle "no taxation without representation".

That was the cry that started the American Revolution. We need one too. But first we have to decide, do we want local government? This is a serious question.

We have a national population of five million, not much bigger than an average city elsewhere. There is an argument that we don't need more than one government. We are also pragmatic people. If one government can run everything, that suits us. We know who to blame when anything goes wrong.

We are susceptible to the argument that a single big government is better than several smaller ones. That's how we got the "Super City", a term used only with irony in Auckland now.

When I came here as a fledgling newspaper reporter in the 1970s, I covered councils on the North Shore. They were mostly boroughs with about 10 elected members. All knew every square metre of their territory. Needs were agreed, decisions made and members went back to paid jobs.

Later we were amalgamated into North Shore City ,which was sensible. The Shore was a natural community, the council felt close, elected members and staff lived locally. We had a regional council for wider concerns.

Today my council is remote. A local board is closer but seems unable to do more than relay requests to distant officers. Even they have limited power. Decisions about roads and drains and other facilities are made by "council-controlled organisations", another ironical term.

Local government has been deliberately designed to frustrate the popular will rather than express it. Elected representatives are sidelined with vacuous, verbose agendas about nothing specific. One day I watched the whole council sit all day discussing abstractions, a day I will never get back.

Wayne Brown, I'm sure, won't stand for it. He may give councillors more useful things to do and, whether they're left or right, most would probably welcome it. He might even manage to revive local democracy. Here's hoping.