Spare Room Be our guest…

By Kirk MacGibbon

Here’s what I reckon: The ‘super-city experiment’ will mark the death knell for the Act party. Super Cityman Rodney Hide will go down fighting — a little confused as to how the dream died, but he will die and the peasantry will rejoice.

Local government reorganisation did Labour no favours in 1989, and this one will have just started on its mission to leave a lasting and painful reminder for everyone to see by the time of the next general election. Any redrawing of local body boundaries will inevitably come to resemble the debacle and social cultural devastation that accompanied the 19th century colonial expansion in Africa.

Hmm, how so? I hear you asking. Well, local government is about communities or, for the purposes of this illustration, about tribes. And for the past 20 years these tribes have existed in uneasy alliance under their respective tribal councils. It was always a little fraught, but a kind of balance of terror existed to keep their more radical tendencies in check. Now, all those boundaries will be swept aside (although ersatz political boundaries will remain to pander to the notion of democracy) to be replaced by an imperial administration that will preside over more than a quarter of the country’s population.

This kind of uber-authority is of course, right up the New Right’s alley. It will deliver savings, they claim, through there being only administration, not four. Contracts will be larger and competition will bring overall prices down. They will point to four different IT systems and four different systems to administer things like libraries and swimming pools and playgrounds. There will be efficiencies, they claim. And initially, that may be, just may be, true. But it will be a false dawn. Or maybe a dead cat bounce…

The difficulty is the part that comes next. With less contracts to go around there will be mergers, acquisitions and business failures among the existing contractors suppling services to the different councils. Eventually, and once the Imperial Council is up and running, only a handful will be left , competing for extremely large contracts. Small contractors simply won’t have the capacity or the capability to meet contract service levels. As competition withers away, so to will any savings and contract prices will start to rise. The Imperial Council will have much reduced leverage to force prices down, because there simply won’t be other suppliers of a sufficient size to tender for the work.

The next things to go will be community facilities like libraries, swimming pools and children’s playgrounds, and council service centres, particularly in those areas at the margins of the old council boundaries. Old tribal facilities will be closed because there are other, perfectly reasonable tribal facilities ‘just down the road’ so it ‘makes sense’ to close duplicated services.

The new Imperial Council, lead by a Lord Mayor elected at large – and answerable to no-one except the wealthy tribes who tend to be the ones that vote – will not care about old tribal traditions and tribal assets. ‘Let them eat Ponsonby,’ will be his faintly heard cry.

Then decisions will be made about which tribal areas (or suburban shopping centres) are most deserving of upgrade or refurbishment. Economic benefit will be the key yardstick for assessment. Money will start pouring into places like Ponsonby (actually that will be a good thing – the poor state of footpaths and total absence of any attempt at creating a cool, urban ‘strip’ is personally offensive to me ), Pt Chevalier (oops it already has), Westmere and Sandringham at the expense of poorer non-voting areas like, hmm, South Auckland – because no-one seriously believes doing up Otahuhu’s main drag is going to produce much in the way of economic development, do they?

Community events will not receive the level of support needed to survive, community groups will struggle for cash and many local initiatives will simply disappear, because if we’ve got a well-established, council-supported event in Grey Lynn Park then why would the same council fund an event on the same day in Onehunga? Doesn’t make sense, does it?

Finally, there will be agitation for changes to the way residential rates are levied and the wealthy political elite will finally be able to get rid of the hated ‘capital value’ rating system to something (anything) that means the poorer communities pay more – probably through higher user charges. Well, ok I don’t know about this last point, but everything I’ve said up to now is, I suggest, a pretty accurate summary of what will happen.

And what will happen with the assets owned by each of the original councils? Will Manukau’s airport shares be sold and invested, and the income used to subsidise the people of Manukau’s rates into the future, or turned into a fund to provide scholarships to the children of Manukau in perpetuity? I doubt it. The shares will be sold and used to pay for the undergrounding of the wastewater pipe across Hobson’s Bay, or some such thing.

The trouble with imposing efficient and effective local government through amalgamation is that it doesn’t address the key problems that afflict all local government, regardless of size. It is the twats that tend to get themselves elected to these institutions while the rest of us were busy with, well, life. Your average local body politician is a legend in his or her lunchtime (there are some notable exceptions, but not many) with the talent to match. About the only thing saving them from being adjudged total failures in life is the deluded view that getting elected validates an otherwise horribly unremarkable life.

And it’s the very nature of the democratic process that has to be followed, which makes local government so frustrating and byzantine. The political cycle of meetings, council committee meetings, community board meetings and the process of consultation surrounding each of them, makes it virtually impossible for clear and concerted actions to be taken. It is structurally inefficient. Throw in the above mentioned talent pool and about the best one can hope for is that lunatics (ie the ‘faceless bureaucrats’) end up running the asylum, much as they tend to do now.

The super-city will become like kryptonite to Rodney’s Clark Kent, except that Rodney won’t have the sense to fly off. He’ll go to his political grave protesting that ‘it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far better rest that I go to than I have ever known’(ok, I admit it, I’m rereading A Tale of Two Cities and believe me it was a struggle not to start this column with: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…Beautiful.)

But, while I’m sure it will seem unfair to ‘Rodders’ at the time, we’ll most definitely have executed the right man.

I could not end this epistle without commenting on new Transport Minister Steven Joyce’s ‘compromise’ plan for the Mt Albert-Waterview ring road. What a pussy! Its not often I agree with the sandal-wearing, moustachioed Green Party, but a tunnel is surely the only 21st century solution, regardless of cost. What was wrong with passing legislation enabling the new section to be tolled? Simple. It just doesn’t make sense to bulldoze people’s homes to make way for a motorway through one of our oldest suburbs. It’s a gutless decision. Jesus, we could have the unemployed working on a full noise, six lane tunnel for the next ten years… With just picks and shovels. Now that would be an example of using investment in infrastructure to create employment.

Read more posts by The Outlaw:
Giving Credit Where it’s Due
Independent Foreign Policy and Jetpacks
Of CEO Styles and Pedalling Wealth
Being Rankin’d and other tales from the Gulag Archipelago
Of History and Relevance
Humpty Dumpty and putting things back together again
Where’s Our Government?
Of Honeymoons and Little Men