KEY POINTS:
The old bogey of residents of wealthy Howick and Pakuranga wanting to break away from Manukau City bubbled away at the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Auckland Governance yesterday.
"Pakuranga and Howick don't have a community of interest with Mangere and Manurewa," said the chairman of the right-wing People's Choice ticket, Hamish Stevens.
He said the ticket had no political links, only to be reminded by one of the commissioners, David Shand, of its association with Act Party founder Sir Roger Douglas.
Several submitters appeared before the commission yesterday to express the view that Howick and Pakuranga would be better off under Auckland City Council or as a separate council in their own right.
Among them was Jami-Lee Ross, one of seven Manukau City councillors who are opposed to the model of reform arrived at by the council.
The council will today outline its model of amalgamating the seven territorial councils into three cities - northern, central and south - under a Greater Auckland Council. The southern council would include Manukau City, plus Franklin and Papakura District Councils.
Mr Ross and Mr Stevens both supported a two-tier model of a single regional body and strengthening the current disempowered community boards.
Mr Ross said the Manukau City Council model was flawed, focused on patch protection and did not take into account what was best for the region.
Commission chairman Peter Salmon, QC, said the panel had heard positive comments about Manukau and asked Mr Ross to comment on the council's approach to tackling problems unique to its part of Auckland.
Mr Ross said he believed the council got too involved in social issues.
Its primary focus should be providing services to ratepayers and leave social issues to central government, he said.
The commission also heard concerns yesterday about the amount of power wielded by council officers.
Former Howick Community Board chairman Russell Wylie said officers were calling the shots to such an extent that councillors often became puppets.
Matters would get worse under a three-city model, he said.
Manurewa resident and research librarian Bruce Ringer was opposed to the massive transfer of power into the hands of bureaucrats that a single city would bring.
"The thought makes my blood run cold," he said.
Mr Ringer told the commission not to change what works, but change what does not work. Transport was the area where local and regional government most clearly did not work.
Mr Ringer supported a southern council, saying breaking up the region into 30 or 40 so-called communities, divided among themselves and powerless against a big central body, would be disastrous for the Manukau-Counties region.
Traditionally, he said, the region had been treated by regional and central government as a convenient dumping ground for abattoirs, sewage treatment plants, power stations, state housing developments and no fewer than five rows of power pylons.
When South Auckland formed part of a larger administrative area for health it was starved of facilities for many years by the Auckland Hospital Board.
Matters began to improve only with the formation of the South Health Crown Health Enterprise in 1993.
Mr Ringer said good decisions could only be made, albeit sometimes imperfectly or inefficiently, by democratic processes.
"The waterfront stadium and the V8 supercars debacles, to my mind, showed democracy successfully at work."
