Rudman's city: Nice little earners for Citrats' boys and girl

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Scaring a few votes out of the old and vulnerable by playing the law and order card during an election campaign is textbook right-wing populist electioneering.

But Mayor John Banks and his Citizens and Ratepayers Now allies on the Auckland City Council risk making fools of themselves with the creation of a special law and order committee.

The accompanying PR hoopla proclaimed Auckland as the only local body in New Zealand to have one, as though it's something to be proud of. The reason we are on our own might well be because every other local body in the country knows that law and order is not the business - core or otherwise - of city councils.

Just how phoney the whole thing is showed in the desperate attempts by bureaucrats and politicians alike to provide a list of functions for this committee.

A report from deputy mayor David Hay dated November 7 scratched around and came up with a list entitled "Field of Activities" which grandly listed, "Police and courts, public safety, safer communities, noise and graffiti."

Last Monday, in launching his "direction-setting" report about "building stronger communities", Mr Hay came up with a new list. Lording it over the courts was no longer there.

By then, it seems even he and Mr Banks - whose brainchild this committee was - realised that judges were not for pushing around, even by someone as exalted as the mayor of Auckland.

Mr Hay revealed "guiding strategies" for law and order in the city, most of which sound common sense enough - things such as lobbying central Government for more police, continuing the battle against graffiti, continuing to implement the Safer Communities programme and so on.

But do we need a fully fledged council committee to do that? Of course we don't.

An innovative anti-graffiti programme has been running for some time without any law and order committee to boss it about. So has a Safer Communities programme, lobbying of central Government and the like.

But then you don't need to be a cynic like me to realise that the committee's not really about doing things at all. It's there for two main reasons.

First, because Mr Banks demanded it. Second, because it helped the Citrats' hierarchy to come up with sufficient committee chairmanships to have one for each of its members.

Both Mr Banks and the Citrats campaigned on reducing council activities to "core business" and to taking the axe to the number of standing committees - then 17.

Interestingly enough, law and order doesn't appear on the Citrats' list of core business - unless "regulation and bylaw enforcement" and "traffic enforcement" fits the bill.

I notice in passing, however, that "public conveniences" do. How priorities change as you get on in years.

The other concern of the Citrats' leadership was keeping control of its councillors. Candidates had been forced to sign a loyalty pledge to honour and obey the philosophies and policies of the party. They had also agreed to fork out $750 a year, if successful, to the Citrats' machine for "organisational funding".

However, signing a loyalty pledge doesn't mean a lot in local politics. A better guarantee of support is locking your supporters into salaried chairmanships. This is what happened here.

The Citrats needed chairs (and honorariums) for its eight members - Mr Hay excluded - and for two "independent" fellow travellers. Miraculously the back-to-basics culling of the committees produced just the right number - eight standing committees paying their chairs $33,440 apiece and two enterprise boards paying their chairs $25,080 each.

To make up the right number, however, needed the creation of the new law and order committee. That it had nothing to do with "core" business seems to have been overlooked in the wild scramble to find a job for all the boys, or in this case the girls, in the form of Noelene Raffills, widow of former councillor Phil Raffills.

Mrs Raffills had bravely accompanied Mayor Banks on his first post-election march down Queen St to confront the boy-racers, and it was her husband who initiated the anti-graffiti programme, so as things go at Auckland City she seems more than highly qualified for the job. That's if there really was one. But there isn't.

The lobbying of police and central Government is surely the job of the mayor or his deputy. The anti-graffiti campaign has managed perfectly well without a special committee to oversee it. The same goes for Safer Auckland City, which is a partnership with police and Ngati Whatua and community organisations which has been working away since 1995.

Indeed, only last month Mr Banks signed up the city to a new agreement between the various partners. He did it without the aid of Mrs Raffills' committee.