Howard Sutton and Keith Sharp: Citizens deserve basic democracy

Howard Sutton and Keith Sharp. Photos / Glenn Jeffrey

The committee of the Panmure Community Action Group believes the restructuring of Auckland local government should have been simpler than this.

All we are talking about is how a small to medium-sized city in a Western-style democracy should be managed and administered to suit its functions as a business, manufacturing and trading centre and a home to 1.4 million people.

While we agree with the widely held view that the current system of Auckland governance is not working, neither does the model proposed initially by the royal commission, nor the model now being proposed by the Government. They do not seem to show any genuine intent to resolve the most salient problem with Auckland governance.

That is a lack of basic democratic power for its citizens. This lack of basic democracy is the very reason that the current structure is so dysfunctional.

At its highest level, the regional and city councils are remote, wasteful, unaccountable, unwieldy and often inaccessible for the average citizen. At its lowest level, the Community Boards are under-funded, under-resourced and denied appropriate decision-making powers for the communities they represent.

We agree that the current three-tier system should be replaced by a two-tier system: a regional council tier to govern issues and assets relating to the entire Auckland region and a local council tier to administer all local issues and assets.

There seems to be little opposition to the concept of a council to govern region-wide issues. After all, Auckland has had the ARA and ARC to more or less carry out this function for decades.

However, the first stumbling block is clearly in the number, size and responsibility of the second-tier councils. Whether as few as six, as proposed by the royal commission, or as many as 30 as proposed by the Government, the models proposed so far seem intent on preventing these second-tier councils from having any genuine power in the overall scheme of things, leaving them with little more than a feeble, toothless "advocacy" role for their communities.

However many second-tier councils are eventually created, surely the logical aim must be to separate responsibility for regional and local issues, with clear lines of accountability and genuine administrative powers for each tier.

We contend that the division of responsibilities between the two tiers should be:

Auckland Council (region-wide) responsibilities for water (supply water, waste water, stormwater); regional parks, harbours, ports, airports; regional public transport, rail and arterial routes and bridges; regional planning, major regional stadiums, sports facilities, regional museums, art galleries and major events; civil defence; volcanic cones; waste management; regional rates collection and co-ordination of regional assets like the library system.

Local Council responsibilities to include local town planning; community planning; local parks and reserves; town centre management; roads and footpaths; local amenities (community centres, swimming pools, playing fields); street lighting; community events and libraries (under the wider regional co-ordination); local traffic issues; local rates collection and rubbish collection.

Under a restructured council system, the boundaries of the local councils should reflect a combination of community of interest and natural geographical area, plus a sense of historical and cultural identity. The thing that divides Auckland more than anything else is its complicated geography.

We may try to talk of Auckland as one city, but the truth is that the people of Whangaparaoa have very little contact with the people of Pukekohe, just as the people of Titirangi rarely meet the people of Maraetai.

Even in central Auckland, the Southern Motorway can create a psychological division between east and west. The people who live in each of Auckland's communities have a distinct sense of their own place and their own environment.

A new Auckland Council that tries to manage, administer and plan for a region the size of the one intended will have a major fight on its hands if the individual communities of this region feel even more disempowered by the new structure.

The second stumbling block is in the way the councillors would be elected.

We maintain it is essential to have direct representational connectivity between the two tiers.

Each community within the Auckland region must be able to directly elect their own representatives (however many that may be) to the Auckland Council through voting wards. We also contend that councillors must live in the communities that they represent.

We are totally opposed to the concept of "at large" councillors being elected. Such councillors are guaranteed to become little more than "celebrity councillors", representative of no community in Auckland but instead selected and funded only by powerful, self-interested lobby groups and political parties purely to serve their own ideological or financial aims.

The very fact that the term "celebrity councillor" is now firmly in the public mind should spell the death knell for that concept. No councillor elected under such a system in the future will be able to avoid the stigma that they serve masters other than the people of Auckland.

If the models being proposed by the Government fail to satisfy Aucklanders' rights and desires for a genuinely democratic local government system, then the new Auckland Council will be even more remote, unpopular and dysfunctional than the system we have now.

* Howard Sutton chairs the Panmure Community Action Group and Keith Sharp is its secretary.