Brian Rudman: Democracy a pipe dream when all roads lead to Rome

Maybe I'm being excessively pessimistic, but it looks as though the proposed 20 to 30 local boards in the new Auckland Super City will be little more than part-pressure valves, part-whipping boys, for the Auckland Council proper.

The parliamentary select committee has tried to paint a picture of busy little councils dotted around the region, happily governing their semi-autonomous fiefdoms, at arm's length from the sway of the emperor-mayor and his council.

But wherever you look in their report, all roads inevitably lead back to Rome.

Rome controls the purse strings. Rome can also overrule any local decision that contradicts regional policy.

So, for example, if the locals of Manukau want to continue the free swimming pool policy of their existing council and the Auckland Council as a whole prefers the user-pays policy the other councils practise, who wins? On Friday, Associate Local Government Minister John Carter, who chaired the select committee, seemed to be saying the locals would. I have my doubts. The good folk of Waitakere and North Shore are hardly going to willingly subsidise Manukau swimmers' free dips, are they?

Not that I've got any better solution to the dilemma of ensuring some power remains in the hands of local communities.

The die was cast once the radical decision was made to start this reform with a clean slate and to design a new, centrally controlled city from the top down. What chance a federal solution when all the emphasis has been on the glories of having one leader and one council?

What better example of where the balance of power lies than that the local boards get no staff, but the mayor gets a personal slush fund of $2 million to $3 million to pay for a personal bureaucracy - the reasoning being he needs a team of loyal courtiers to protect him from, and to spy on, the manoeuvrings of the city's chief executive and bureaucracy. Happy days.

Labour politicians argue that there should be only 14-20 local boards to ensure they're large enough to be influential and viable. I suspect that as designed, whether there are 14 or 30, or even just the six recommended by the royal commission, they risk ending up as centres of frustration and impotence.

The great step forward in the select committee report, one which the Government says it backs, is that all 20 councillors will be selected on a ward basis. This gives local communities a real chance to elect their person to the top table and guarantees a spread of councillors from across the region.

Labour's minority report argues for more than the 20 councillors proposed and they have a point. As proposed, each ward will be larger than a parliamentary electorate, with councillors representing 49,000 voters and 70,000. There are 23 MPs in the Auckland region.

Labour says there should be 25 councillors, and given the weaknesses of the proposed local board structure, this would be a way to ensure local representation. Indeed, the least complicated solution would be to have a local board for each of the proposed wards.

There seems to be an antipathy among the designers of the Super City to linking the boards with the council structure. The fear is that councillors will get nobbled by local people and act parochially. But why shouldn't the ward councillors be kept abreast of local concerns. That's why they're elected on a ward basis.

Parliament operates on exactly the same basis, and MPs manage to act nationally - while keeping in touch with their local sides. Which is as it should be.

The one worry about the conversion to a full ward system is the National majority's nod towards multi-member wards.

The report argues it would "provide more opportunity for minority group representation".

This reasoning is flawed. Under the first-past-the-post voting system, there's more likelihood, in a multi-member ward, of the winning party achieving a clean sweep of all two or three of four seats on offer.

The best way to ensure minority representation in 2010 is for the party groupings which inevitably will emerge to stand representatives of minorities in winnable wards.

Then once the Super City is set up, our leaders should take seriously the ability that the Local Government Act gives them to introduce the Single Transferable Vote (STV) form of proportional voting in time for the 2013 local elections.