KEY POINTS:
After endless fluffing about trying to avoid any improvements to Auckland regional governance, the bureaucrats have suddenly realised an election looms and they'd better show willing by trying to rush through a minor reform or two by "no later than 31 August 2007". When you look at the underwhelming reforms this "final" report proposes, you have to wonder why they bothered.
This version is even more bland than the original, which is hardly surprising after a last round of sandpapering by those with most to lose, the incumbent officials and politicians of Auckland's divided local government.
Now it's up to Local Government Minister Mark Burton and his Cabinet colleagues to try to make something of it. Turning it into paper aeroplanes might be a good place to start, because if Mr Burton thought the March version was yawn-making, this one is likely to have the whole Cabinet nodding off.
The authors as good as acknowledged the uphill battle they faced. "All feedback ... was supportive of the need for, and desirability of, change within the Auckland region." Then came the big BUT.
"History and past grievances about attitudes and behaviours have produced a lack of trust and tensions between different spheres of government resulting in a concern/unwillingness to cede control. The tensions between regional and local interests also affect the preferences expressed by the different councils about the different models for membership and voting."
There were concerns about "becoming involved in a process whereby an individual council's interest/perspective may become secondary to, or compromised by, the collective interest."
Given this degree of suspicion, the outcome was inevitable. A lowest-common-denominator solution that is less about achieving stronger regional government and more about a weak federalism, that upholds the parochialism of the fringes and the self-interest of threatened bureaucrats and politicians.
The two main objectives of the less-than-grand plan seem to involve tying a few cultural bells and whistles on to the existing Auckland Regional Council and renaming it "Greater Auckland", and replacing the regional growth forum with a regional sustainable development forum (RSDF) tasked with developing a One Plan, which everyone will, more or less, be required to respect.
I say "more or less" because there's a section labelled "sanctions/levers" that suggests the One Plan will not be as all-powerful as it sounds.
The report notes "incentives and sanctions could include moral persuasion; peer pressure; financial penalties; exclusion from benefits of participation in other regional programmes ... "
It's the RSDF which the report wants everyone signed up to by August to "enable candidates and electors to be clearer about the future arrangements."
The RSDF, which is to be a standing committee of Greater Auckland, will have only four voting members from the regional body compared to 11 votes coming from district and city council representatives. To me, this rather contradicts the not-so-veiled instruction in a letter from Mr Burton on June 7 to those in Auckland drawing up the final plan, that "ministers wish further joint work to recognise the importance of the direct accountability of elected representatives to their constituents for decisions made on their behalf, including expenditure of public funds and stewardship of public assets. This includes the need to preserve and strengthen the accountability of a directly elected regional council to its community for regional outcomes and decisions and would include strategic decisions in the context of the One Plan."
Also, "that ministers prefer a strong regional council over a more autonomous RSDF or mixed accountability model".
To me that's a pretty clear suggestion that the city politicians butt out of regional decision-making and leave it to those elected regionally to get on with their task. A regional planning body that is outnumbered 11 to 4 by parochial local politicians hardly follows this directive.
That seems to be the view of the existing regional council which, in its submission to the minister last week, argued that the existing Regional Growth Forum should adopt the RSDF name and take on the task of developing One Plan.
Only the parochial at heart could fault this offer. After all, isn't that what a regional council is designed to do?
