KEY POINTS:
Surely they're joking? The Cabinet met yesterday to choose between two opposing solutions to Auckland's local governance woes, and somehow decided to back both of them. To be implemented simultaneously. Talk about adding confusion to dysfunction.
First the Government endorses the wishy-washy "reform" package that the local councils managed to agree on and orders it be implemented, but in the same breath it admits that things are so rotten in the state of Auckland affairs, that it will set up a royal commission of inquiry to report on the region's governance needs "over the foreseeable future".
If we need the radical surgery that appointing a royal commission implies, then why waste time tinkering around with option one? What local politician or bureaucrat is going to put their heart into rearranging the desks, when they can hear the commission's scaffold being erected outside?
By supporting the tinkering option, the Government is all but signalling the commission is just window dressing. A sign of action rather than action itself. That the commission's terms of reference are to be announced at some future time only adds to these suspicions.
If the Government wants Auckland to take its commitment to reform seriously, then it has to give the commission the power to produce and implement a final plan.
It's no use just asking it to come up with recommendations that can be shelved once received.
In 1989, special legislation gave the Local Government Commission the power to implement wide ranging governance reforms across New Zealand. Remarkably, it took six months for the commissioners to produce draft plans for virtually the whole country.
Auckland's royal commission needs the same wide-ranging powers. Let them hold hearings, produce a plan and have the legislative authority to implement it. Anything less is cheap theatre.
