KEY POINTS:
Local government often heralds change on the national scene. At last year's municipal elections conservative tickets recovered control of the Auckland City Council among others, a foretaste of the National Party's capture of two more Auckland seats last Saturday and an almost clean sweep of the party vote in northern, western and isthmus electorates.
Now the council is looking at some rigorous budgetary savings that could presage what is needed on a national scale. Encouraged by the parliamentary election result perhaps, the council is aiming its knife at some pet projects of the previous era: walkways, cycleways, public transport, parkland.
Electoral change usually brings a culture change in public policy and Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee is probably swimming against the tide when he continues to promote walking and cycling on the harbour bridge. He wants the national Transport Agency to set aside one lane at weekends, just to see how many might want to enjoy the traffic.
It would be wrong, though, to suggest the city council has taken aim only at soft targets in its effort to contain projected costs over the next 10 years. It is looking hard at an $86 million cut in stormwater improvements, formerly to be financed from the "charitable payments" the previous council wanted to extract from its supply company Metrowater. It also contemplates savings in tests for seawater pollution at Waiheke beaches.
It might call a halt to parkland purchases and severely reduce footpath repairs. Park-and-ride terminals, planned swimming pools and other community facilities, library upgrades and other discretionary spending are being cut or deferred to save the ratepayers nearly $1 billion in capital outlays by 2019 and reduce projected borrowing by $600 million over a similar period.
The range and precision of the cuts gives confidence that they can be afforded without much loss of benefit. The chronic mistake of the previous era, locally and nationally, was to assume benefit could be measured by dollars committed or spent. Public bodies have a genius for wasting money and the reason is not entirely their own inefficiency.
Contractors and consultants supplying services to public bodies seem to load their prices when they know taxpayers or ratepayers will foot the bill. The most modest construction request can turn into an item of eye-watering expense when planning consultants, design consultants, resource management consents, public consultation procedures, revised schemes and gold-plated construction elements come to charge.
One way to change this culture of careless waste is to elect a hard-nosed council prepared to put the squeeze on its managers. Mayor Banks' council appears to have done that, sparing only a few prominent projects, such as the preparations for Rugby World Cup 2011 and the Auckland Arts Festival that announced its programme on Wednesday.
Just as politicians of the previous era were inclined to measure benefit by expenditure, they are inclined to believe expenditure cuts mean reduced services. That need not be so and must not be so. Aucklanders need not accept lower water quality at swimming beaches, or less maintenance of footpaths or any of the other supposed consequences of financing cuts.
Producers in the private sector frequently have to provide more with less. There is no reason the same cannot be expected of those in the public sector. Cuts are a cue for city managers to find efficiencies, demand better deals from suppliers and maintain all the standards ratepayers have a right to expect. That is the change.
