KEY POINTS:
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Auckland should look to Brisbane and avoid the "Sydney mess", says Australian academic Graham Sansom.
"If you want a model, don't come to Sydney," he told a seminar in Auckland yesterday on metropolitan governance for the region.
Sydney's 40 councils were dominated by a jealous State Government lacking vision and responsible for huge infrastructure backlogs and pegging rate increases among other things.
Mr Sansom, the director of the Centre for Local Government at Sydney's University of Technology, said the commission should be looking at local government reform in south-east Queensland, where 17 councils fanning out from the Brisbane City Council were being reduced to 10.
It was worth looking at how local councils in south-east Queensland co-operated on things like planning and the consensus leadership provided by the Lord Mayor of Brisbane.
Mr Sansom said there had been quite a lot of opposition to reducing the number of urban and rural councils to 10, which excluded changes to Brisbane City Council.
It would be "well worth watching" how the community felt with the new boundaries, which come into effect at local body elections in March.
The idea of reducing the seven councils in Auckland into a super-city or fewer councils was treated with scepticism by some, including Waitakere City councillor Penny Hulse.
"The really interesting issue for me is that we haven't fully quantified the problem and fully identified what it is that Wellington is hoping to achieve by the [commission]. We are still not grasping the real issue that is adequate funding for the revitalisation of Auckland's infrastructure," she said.
The idea of an executive mayor for Auckland was picked up and promoted at the seminar by Peter McKinlay, the director of the local government centre at Auckland University of Technology. Mr McKinlay said the overriding argument for an elected mayor at large for Auckland was to know who to hold accountable and "shoot" if things went wrong.
He gave the example of the Greater London Authority (GLA), where Ken Livingstone was executive mayor and made significant decisions on the big issues of transport, congestion charges, economic development, strategic planning and policing.
Mr McKinlay said one of the reasons for setting up the GLA was nobody spoke for London and it had no place in international forums.
"The same applies for Auckland. Nobody internationally can speak for Auckland region in an economic sense. The Government can speak for New Zealand. John Banks can speak for [Auckland] City but when it comes to the region, we are not players in terms of being able to engage internationally."
