The four parish pump panjandrums* who decided among themselves they should reorganise local body governance in the Auckland metropolis to suit themselves are not just barking mad, they're barking up the wrong tree.
Auckland's Dick Hubbard, perhaps, might be excused since he's a tyro with no political nous, but Manukau's Barry Curtis, Waitakere's Bob Harvey and North Shore's George Wood have been around long enough to know better.
Their efforts, of course, were doomed from the start because they chose not to take into their confidence the chairman of the regional council and the mayors of surrounding parishes and thus announced to one and all the whole business was shonky.
Just what their motives are remains obscure - although you can bet they're all to do with money and power - but the fact is they are simply doing what politicians always do - look for ways to treat symptoms instead of getting at root causes.
The malaise that afflicts local government, not just in metropolitan Auckland but throughout the nation, has nothing to do with how many or how few or how big or how small they are, or about rugby world cups for that matter. But everything to do with how they are financed.
The rating system which provides most local bodies with most of their income - based on levying homeowners according to the value of their properties - is antiquated, inefficient and thoroughly unjust.
And until we come up with a fresh means of financing our cities and districts they will continue to flounder financially and to impose heavier and heavier burdens on those of us who have the misfortune to be ratepayers.
For instance, I can't see why a bloke who owns a townhouse on a pocket handkerchief section in, say, Remuera or Kohimarama, should pay higher rates than I do for mine in Avondale just because his townhouse is worth probably twice what mine is.
He uses the same council-provided facilities and services I do - no more and no less - so what has the value of his property to do with how much he should pay in rates?
And what about those hundreds of thousands of people who aren't property owners and who use council-provided facilities day in and day out and contribute nothing to their cost?
There has to be a way of making the financing of local authorities more comprehensive and equitable. And that's what our mayors and councillors and senior bureaucrats should be applying themselves to instead of chasing after red herrings such as further reorganisations or amalgamations or whatever.
But isn't that always the way of it? Politicians of all stripes, national or local, have bottomless too-hard baskets in which they invariably file all the politically difficult questions.
Instead of plucking up courage to really get to the source of a problem, they spend their time and our money desperately trying to apply sticking plasters to suppurating sores on the body politic, which might or might not bring relief until the affliction returns with greater virulence.
I don't have an answer to the problem of local body financing but there has to be one. And it behoves our national and local politicians to get together and start looking for it, no matter how unpopular the outcome might make them.
In the meantime, while I have some sympathy f or those who whinge about increasing rates and charges, particularly those whose property values have gone off the clock, I wonder how many of us think of all the indispensable things we get for them, in my case for a bit over $26 a week.
At the press of a button all bodily wastes disappear into the sewers; stormwater gurgles away down council-laid drains so my house and section doesn't get flooded; and once a week a truck comes along and takes away all my household refuse.
When I drive out of my drive I travel on paved streets, nicely kerbed and channelled and, if it's at night, generally well-lit by street lighting. On busy roads there are traffic lights and roundabouts to keep the traffic flowing (well, that's the principle, anyway).
A vast array of different and often delightful parks and sports grounds are at my disposal, from the seaside to the Waitakeres, including one just at the end of my street which provides me with a pleasant spot for my early-morning constitutional.
Then there are the other invariably expensive facilities the councils have provided, most of which should have been left to private enterprise, including that new waterfront stadium with no parking.
But that's local bodies for you - run by mostly dull, pedestrian and often puffed-up mayors and councillors, and administered by boring, rigid and unimaginative bureaucrats.
For all that, as far as I'm concerned the jewel in the crown of the services provided by local authorities is their public libraries. What wondrous treasure houses of information, of knowledge, of entertainment they are.
You can have your internet and your television; give me a good book any time. I spend countless wonderful escapist hours with my nose in novels - something like 150 of them a year.
If I had to buy them, they would cost me between $4500 and $6000.
So I'd cheerfully pay my rates each year if the only service the council provided was the libraries.
*Panjandrum is a mock title for an important person or pompous official.
<i>Garth George</i>: Sticking plaster remedies fail to heal local body wounds
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