Opinion: The response to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s recent speech at Local Government NZ’s SuperLocal conference was something of a language lesson. Various delegates in the room declared it “disappointing”, “shocking” and “one of the most mana-diminishing, paternalistic and visionless speeches to a group of people I have ever heard”.
Political commentators, on the other hand, used the phrase “good politics” and reasoned that even if the speech was rude, it would have found welcoming ears among ratepayers. Especially, wrote one, for “Luxon’s belief that councils should be embarking on the same line-by-line reviews of spending that the government had”.
The opposite, really, is true. The Local Government Act 2002 requires councils to go through annual plans and long-term plans with a degree of detail and transparency that central government would find a shock for its own purposes. They must also expose their decisions to direct public feedback. (Former minister Maurice Williamson has been heard telling his Auckland Council colleagues that he never had to bother with the public so much when he was in the cabinet.)
Councils do have their own problems to answer for. A report from the Auditor-General, released a day before Luxon’s speech, found failures in measuring performance. It noted that while overall infrastructure spending, at $7 billion in 2022-23, was the highest in a decade, “councils are not replacing their assets at the same rate as they are being run down” and should be borrowing more to do so. It said 45 councils, up from 19 in 2020-21, failed to meet the “balanced budget benchmark” of ensuring they were raising enough revenue to meet spending plans (another thing central government doesn’t have to bother with).
Yet it’s difficult to divine the “laundry list of distractions and experiments that are plaguing council balance sheets across the country” described by Luxon in his speech. His example was an odd one: Wellington City Council’s $180 million commitment to the Tākina convention centre, the conference venue, was made more than a decade ago and could hardly be reversed by the people he was scolding.
Luxon’s X account declared he had “challenged councils to rein in the fantasies and get back to basics. Pick up the rubbish. Fix the pipes. And fill in the potholes.” So parks and libraries should be abandoned? He didn’t say. But National plans to (again) remove the requirement for councils to “promote the social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing of communities in the present and for the future”, reinstated to the Local Government Act by Labour in 2019. It may also impose caps on rates and control what councils can spend money on, no matter what locals vote for.
Local government’s issues are not all of its own making: it arguably can’t raise enough revenue to do its statutory jobs. So the government’s declaration of war – as Transport and Local Government Minister Simeon Brown picks fights over everything from pedestrian crossings to Māori wards – seems an odd way to pursue a solution. And, as well as it might play with many ratepayers, decades of campaigning on keeping the rates down is what got us into the current infrastructure predicament.
This could have some unexpected outcomes. Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown now works most closely and productively, not with his original centre-right supporters, but senior left-liberal councillors, who, in turn, politely wait for his occasional brainstorms to blow over. He has been so ferocious about defending local choices from Wellington meddling, it would be no surprise if the centre-left abstained from standing a candidate against him next year.
The day after Luxon’s speech, Brown’s X account trumpeted his council’s plans to restore the Wynyard Point waterfront area for the enjoyment of the public. It sounded very nice to have – and a bit like a dare.
