KEY POINTS:
The recent announcement of a new logo for the Auckland City Council took the citizens of this city by surprise. Even more surprising was the fact that few, if any, of the councillors seemed to know anything about this proposed change.
This raises the question of who effectively controls Auckland City - the mayor, the council, or the paid officers? More importantly, what do we know about the elected councillors and the bureaucrats who serve behind the scenes?
I believe the answer to that question is ... very little. Perhaps this explains the poor voter response this year and the reason that those who do vote choose the party the candidate represents, while knowing little or nothing about the person they have selected.
How often have we criticised the calibre of the people running this city, and the decisions being made? But how often have any of us offered ourselves for election to public office?
In short, the voters are getting the councils they deserve. How many went on to a council with specific proposals for change - more open government and more public participation, for example?
How many aspiring councillors expect to examine such issues as the city's airport requirements, funding a Rugby World Cup stadium, town planning restrictions and the complexity of building regulation? And in reality what chance would an individual councillor have to influence change?
Council meetings are often lengthy, debate often mediocre, and decisions frustratingly delayed through red tape and obfuscation.
So who would want the job of city councillor? As former Governor-General Lord Porritt once said: "Self-preservation, not principle, rules politicians." Sad, but true. So who runs the show?
It is here that the media would do the public a service by reporting more often on the open council meetings and the position taken by individual councillors on civic matters.
Too often council meetings are held in committee, at which times the press and public are excluded - and this makes the ratepayers suspicious. What are they trying to hide? What dreadful mistakes are they covering up? Who proposed the new logo in the first place?
General matters involving individuals and the council where litigation may be involved, and other so-called delicate matters which may be under negotiation with Government ministers or their departments, are typical in committee agenda items.
I have always believed that one of the first essentials of a democracy is a well-informed public, and if a public body is going to make mistakes - and it is inevitable that from time to time it will - I would prefer the public to be aware of those mistakes and given the chance to decide for itself whether a correction has been made.
The availability of all relevant information on a given matter, along with the opportunity to freely express its views on all issues, should be a basic right of our society. Yet we seem to find local and national government business enmeshed in secrecy.
The more that matters are discussed in secret, the more the leaks will occur and be followed inevitably by denials, protests, corrections and further confusion in the minds of the public. Thomas Jefferson got it right when he said "No government should be without censors. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence".
When deliberating on weighty civic matters, all councillors would do well to consider the three basic tenets used by journalists in deciding the public's right to know: Is it true? Is portrayal of the subject under discussion fair and accurate? Is it a matter of public interest?
If councillors can answer "yes" to those three questions they should have nothing to fear from the public's right to know, and will be instrumental in dispelling the present insidious cancer of secrecy that pervades local government bodies.
In this way city councillors may rise above the oft-quoted status attributed to them by the late H. L. Mencken: "[Governing bodies'] business, in superior countries, seldom attracts the service of really superior individuals; its eminentissimos are commonly nonentities who gain all their authority by belonging to it, and are of small importance otherwise.
"Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general, have come to a degree of power in the world that is unchallenged by that of any other group."
* Leone Harkness, an Aucklander, was a former Wellington City Councillor.
