Garth George: Bigger doesn't mean better

It seems to me that every time it rains heavily in the Bay of Plenty - and heaven knows we've had far too much of it over the holiday break - somewhere or other, particularly on the east coast, there is a flood.

And, more often than not, these floods cause widespread mayhem and loss in urban areas as well as severe damage to productive farmlands.

What makes me wonder about this constant and expensive trouble is that this country has been making efforts to solve flooding and erosion problems since 1941, when the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Act was passed and the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Council was set up.

The aims of the council were to promote soil conservation, prevent and reduce erosion, prevent flood damage and use land in a way that would achieve these aims.

The act set up catchment districts and the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Council established catchment boards, which had elected and non-elected members, whose main purpose was to minimise and prevent damage by floods and erosion.

By 1945, they covered the whole of New Zealand.

These local catchment boards did a wonderful job in ameliorating flooding and soil erosion and I well recall back in the late 1950s and early 1960s covering the Southland Catchment Board's monthly meetings for the local newspaper in Invercargill.

The elected members of those boards were all local men, generally farmers, who had intimate personal knowledge of the board's area and its people, and the unelected ones were expert engineers and conservationists.

Then, in the 1970s and 80s along came a whole bunch of local government rationalisations that reduced the catchment boards and other government bodies that had proliferated over a century from more than 800 to just 86.

Newly created regional councils inherited a range of resource management responsibilities from the existing boards and councils, including for flood and erosion control functions transferred from the catchment boards.

And that, I reckon, is when the magnificent work that had been done by local catchment boards either stopped making progress or began to unravel. The trouble is that the deeply flawed "bigger is better" philosophy of local government was bound to fail on any measure you like to name - democracy, governance, efficiency, cost-saving, whatever - because the bigger a local authority is, the less say the ratepayers have in what happens to the place where they live.

We have had ample evidence for years that the larger local authorities created through the last lot of amalgamations have failed to deliver the "economies of scale" that were the main excuse used to justify them in the first place.

They have turned out to be more expensive and cumbersome than the smaller bodies they replaced, mainly because of the legions of bureaucrats with which they have become infested.

For conclusive evidence we need look no further than at our rates demands and at the diminution of the services once provided out of them.

My concern, however, is not the economic failure of local body amalgamation, but the social failure.

I wonder about the extent to which the disappearance of smaller local bodies has contributed to a loss of a sense of identity, particularly among young people; to an evaporation of civic pride, neighbourliness and community spirit; and to a corresponding increase in adult carelessness, youthful aimlessness and urban crime.

It seems to me that our long-lost smaller civic entities - such as the Bay of Plenty's cities, boroughs and counties and, particularly, catchment boards were, with the intimate local knowledge of their members, much more effective in governing and improving their regions.

Perhaps, then, in view of our persistent flood problems, it is time to bring back the catchment boards - at least.

Garth George can be contacted at garth.george@hotmail.com