KEY POINTS:
It was a great title: "How we all learned to stop worrying and love our councils". But perhaps it's time to stop and reflect. Before we rush off to the altar, let's have a good look at what really lies behind this love affair.
First, should we really get carried away with the apparently high scores Auckland councils achieved in the recent Herald-DigiPoll surveys? Most councils, most of the time, get rankings above 80 per cent in ratepayer satisfaction surveys.
It happens because most people most of the time have little or nothing to do with their councils. They are reasonably happy with the state of the streets, parks, libraries, rubbish collection and so on.
Usually, it is only if they have dealings with the regulatory side of the council that they start to get crotchety. It might be dog control, it might be the complexity and cost of getting a building permit or resource consent, it might be problems with a health inspector or a liquor licensing application.
They probably know very little about how efficient the council actually is, whether it is spending too much or too little to get the performance the community wants, or whether it is managing its balance sheet effectively.
That requires a different set of judgments from the standard survey and usually much more effort in getting to understand the complexities of council business than most people want to put in.
This is not to say that the survey findings should be disregarded. The point is simply that they should not be confused with an informed and careful assessment of how well or poorly Auckland councils, or any other councils for that matter, are performing.
Surveys, also, are usually only as good as the questions they ask. When most Aucklanders supported merging all of Auckland's councils into one Greater Auckland Council, did they really understand what this would mean?
The debate on the future governance of Auckland has confused two quite separate issues:
What is the best means of managing large-scale regional infrastructure? And what makes for good local governance?
The drivers for the reform of Auckland's local government come from problems with major infrastructure (water, wastewater, stormwater, roading, public transport) and regionwide planning.
Local governance is something quite different. It is about the quality of your local neighbourhood - the particular part in the hundreds of square kilometres that make up Auckland that really means home to you.
Good local governance is the means through which you, your neighbours and your local community create and protect the environment you want in your immediate locality. It is not something that a single council, and a handful of councillors representing 1.3 million Aucklanders, can handle.
Worldwide, local government systems cope with these separate demands, quite sensibly, by using separate structures.
Major infrastructure needs to be managed regionally, with clear decision-making powers and responsibility and with a single voice rather than the clamour of different interests around the board or council table.
Local governance needs to manage locally at a scale where most citizens find it easy to interact with their elected council on anything that matters to them.
To see such an approach we need to look no farther than across the Tasman. In Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide water and wastewater services are handled at a metropolitan level (at least).
In contrast, for local governance, each metropolitan area is served by a number of councils. The City of Sydney has a population of just over 146,000, and the metropolitan area 44 councils.
The City of Melbourne has a population of 67,000, and the metropolitan area 31 councils. The City of Adelaide has a population of 15,300 and the metropolitan area 20 councils.
The current local government reforms in England are very much focused on how councils can engage with their communities, with a renewed interest in neighbourhood-level elements with the prospect of parish councils (often renamed as neighbourhood councils) being reborn as the building blocks of local democracy.
One of England's most influential think tanks recently observed that, with approximately 2600 residents per councillor, England might have enough councillors to supervise management but not enough to support local democracy.
It noted that most countries in Western Europe have fewer than 1000 residents per councillor.
Perhaps the standout example of ensuring that large-scale issues are dealt with through large-scale organisations, but local governance is genuinely local, is France.
It has 37,000 communes (broadly the equivalent of our local councils) serving a population of just over 60 million people, but a handful of major water companies looking after water and wastewater for the entire country.
On average, there is one councillor for each 117 residents. Regional organisation is about the effective management of large-scale activity, or activity which necessarily affects large areas (regional economic development is a good example).
Local governance is about the unique character of place, preserving and enhancing what you value most about the neighbourhood in which you live.
Most of us at one time or another get passionate about "our place" - the particular merits and qualities of our corner of the city in which we live. Putting all of this into one large pot called Greater Auckland risks sacrificing what Aucklanders most value, and to no purpose.
Good regional governance and good management of regional infrastructure are quite separate from good and responsive local governance.
It's time to sort out the love affair and make sure that you do have the right partners for a long and happy relationship with the kind of council that will enhance what you most value about where you live.
* Peter McKinlay is a consultant specialising in local government.
