Urgent Debates — Royal Commission on Auckland Governance—Government Response

I have received a letter from the Leader of the Opposition seeking to debate under Standing Order 380 the Government’s decisions on Auckland governance. This is a particular case of recent occurrence—the decisions were announced yesterday afternoon after the House had met—and it does involve ministerial responsibility. The announcement concerns governance arrangements that are of national significance, and I consider they do require the immediate attention of the House. I call upon the Leader of the Opposition to move the motion.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. As Mr Speaker has so rightly pointed out, the changes that are being recommended to the governance structures in Auckland are the biggest changes in the history of local government in Auckland. It is important that we get it right, and it is equally important that the people of Auckland have some say over their own future—that they get ownership over the changes they will live under and work through. I have to say that after the report of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, the changes that have been recommended by this Government take us in absolutely the wrong direction. The changes take us away from democratic governance, and the process the Government is intending to follow is equally undemocratic. There is no opportunity for Aucklanders to have meaningful participation in the process of change, because this Government has decided that what it wants for Auckland will be imposed on Auckland without any further consultation before the key decisions have been made.

Labour set up the royal commission; we make absolutely no apology for that. It was the right thing to do. We know that Auckland needs a strong regional structure to carry out the regional responsibilities that are required of such a government, whether it be in transport, the environment, water, or planning. We set up a royal commission that contained able, competent, and serious people. The royal commission report therefore merited a serious response and consideration. I congratulate the people who served on the royal commission. Having read the report, we have said that we think the regional structure is appropriate—

💬 Nathan Guy: It took you a while.

No, it did not take any time at all. The member, of course, is wrong; a statement went out immediately after the royal commission report, and it said that we supported the regional structure and the powers that went with it. But we also said that this was a step along the way.

We think there are some shortcomings in the royal commission’s report, and those shortcomings are as follows: “Regional government—strong, able to deliver the services that need to be delivered regionally, but do not take the ‘local’ out of local government.” We wanted the responsibilities that should be carried out at the level of the proposed local councils to actually be carried out at that local level, with the requisite powers and the funding to do so. And there was a possibility through those six local councils that that could have happened. They were of a scale whereby they could have been funded, I understand, to the extent of some hundreds of millions of dollars, in order to carry out local responsibilities.

We said that we had a problem with the voting system. What is wanted, when we have a city the size of the proposed new Auckland City, is representation that is fair and balanced across the city. You know, I remember the time before the reforms in 1989 when Auckland City did not have a ward system. And I remember, as a member of Parliament representing the south of the isthmus—Mount Roskill, and the Mount Albert area as well—that we had too few representatives, and that the representatives came from the wealthier, more affluent suburbs of town. But the reform in 1989 cured that, and the system worked well. Rodney Hide knows that in the letter he has received from six Auckland mayors and the Auckland Regional Council, they have all said they wanted a ward system for Auckland. That is the way we can guarantee that every part of our city is fairly represented. [Interruption] John Carter can talk! Paul Hutchison is sitting in front of him; he knows what his people told him at the local meeting. So does Wayne Mapp. He knows the discontent about the fact that the new system does not provide fair and balanced representation.

Now, in that respect, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance got it wrong. It said 10 “at large” seats and 10 ward seats. The changes that the Government has made in this area are only on the margin. I believe that Mr Hide and Mr Key are deliberately gerrymandering the system to ensure a permanent majority by those people representing the affluent side of town, at the expense of people in the poorer suburbs. I went with some of my colleagues to Ōtara on Monday, to a meeting of 150 people. The meeting was not called about the super-city specifically. It was about broad issues—they were predominately Pasifika. The most powerful issues that were raised that day were about the super-city and the need to have fair representation. It was about not losing the “local” out of local democracy, and not having their suburb, Ōtara, ruled from the other side of town by people who have no conception of their needs and the concerns that they have in their part of the city.

The third thing that Labour differed on with the royal commission was the need for checks and balances on the mayor. I think, on balance, we decided that having the mayor of the super-city elected “at large” was necessary. But we do not believe that this should be a presidential-style mayor. We believe that the deputy mayor should be elected from the Auckland Council. We believe that the chairs of the committees should be elected from the Auckland Council, and not by the mayor. We do not believe that some charismatic celebrity—or John Banks—could come along to govern the city and be given that power, and that he or she would give all Aucklanders the confidence that the right thing would be done for them, fairly, across the whole of Auckland.

I come to the question of consultation. It was clearly set out in the National Party manifesto, yet 3 months in, this arrogant Government is already ignoring what it promised in its manifesto. I will quote, for the National members of Parliament—particularly the Auckland members, because their constituents will hold them to account on this—the National manifesto: “We will consult with Aucklanders once the findings of the royal commission are known.”

So what do we hear from the Minister of Local Government? He said that the consultation has already happened and that there has been a royal commission where people had a chance to make submissions. Mr Hide can be forgiven for not wanting consultation because that is true to the ideology of his party. But what excuse do the National members have for reneging on a sincerely made promise that the people would be consulted? The manifesto did not say National would consult through a select committee—there will be a select committee process—but that it would consult people after the findings were known.

Everybody in this House knows that in order for the consultation to be meaningful and genuine, it must happen before the key decisions are made. We heard from the Government yesterday that the key decisions have been made. They were made within a week of getting the royal commission report and they did not involve this Government consulting even the opinion leaders in Auckland, let alone the wider communities.

National wants a fundamental change in Auckland. Some of those changes are necessary, but the Government is not prepared to take the time to get it right. In fact, I do not believe that it wants to get it right, in terms of fair representation. The Government is not prepared to honour its promise to go back to the people across Auckland and say to them that this is their city, they need to be involved in the decisions about the restructuring of local government, and they will be given the opportunity to do so. This is a decision being rammed through undemocratically, without regard to the democratic outcomes that we would all seek.

We should look—as the National Government should have looked—at what the royal commission itself said, because it did examine the issue of whether there should be six local councils or 20. It said—and I quote from the royal commission report, because obviously no National member has read it—that “significant change at the second-tier level to create a large number of community councils would have involved considerable costs and a significant and ongoing oversight role for the Auckland Council.”

Well, first of all, why has the Government not told us what this extra cost will be? There are projections within the royal commission report, but the Government has remained silent about this. It does say it will cost $240 million to restructure Auckland, and Aucklanders are being asked to pay that money—$240 million. There should be no taxation without representation. The Government wants Aucklanders to accept this and pay for it, but it is not prepared to consult Aucklanders about the cost.

Then the commission concluded: “The creation of 20 entirely new entities with new territories would, for uncertain gains, impose high transitional costs on the ratepayers of Auckland and cause major disruption to existing staff and services.” This conclusion was borne out by independent cost analysis. What part of that did the National Government, in ramming this through, not understand? It wants Aucklanders to put up $240 million, and it wants that sum to be increased because it has changed the rules of the game. What did the New Zealand Herald say about it today? It called the changes “startling changes”.

What National is doing is not bringing local democracy back into the system. It is making the unit so small that no power will be devolved. No meaningful decisions will be made at the community board level, and therefore there will not be participation by Aucklanders in what would be a farce if they thought they were doing things to influence the system. National is setting up a system where the majority on that council will be determined by “at large” elections. “At large” means that each of the eight councillors out of the 20 who will be elected will have a constituency of 850,000. That is 17 times larger than any of the electorates that electorate members represent. How can that be local government? How can people feel that they have access to their councillors when their councillors are responsible for 850,000 people? Who will benefit from a constituency as large as that? People will have to have the wealth and the resources if they are to put their information across an electorate of that size. This system is being designed to reward the business people and the wealthy people of the city, at the expense of the ordinary folk in the isthmus of west Auckland and South Auckland; make no mistake about that.

The Government has given no explanation of why a ward system is inappropriate and no explanation as to why we got it wrong in 1989 in requiring a ward system. A ward system has worked. The people in my electorate know who their ward representatives are. If they are in an electorate of 850,000, they might know the small number of people who will be ward councillors but they will not know the “at large” councillors. The new system is biased against fair and balanced representation. It takes the “local” out of local government. The system that is put forward will, I think, have another agenda in this term or—God forbid—in another term, and that is the privatisation of the regional assets. That is what National wants to do. National members said that. They were not keen to admit it before the last election, but they said that about Auckland International Airport Ltd. They will do it to the ports. Mark my words—this is part of the agenda of the National Government, if and when it thinks it can get away with it.

Finally, I will talk about the issue of Māori representation. There is a debate to be had about that, but that debate has not even happened. What happened to the mana-enhancing power of the Māori Party when, without consultation with the Māori Party and without consultation with Māori people across Auckland, the royal commission’s recommendations have been rejected? There was no talk, no discussion, no inquiry, and no respect. [Interruption] Wayne Mapp knows that. Wayne Mapp knows how people in Devonport feel about being swallowed up into a larger city without having an adequate level of local representation. Labour is after the reform of Auckland. We are after having sufficiently strong regional government to carry out the responsibilities at that level, but we are also determined that the “local” should be kept in local government, that the councils are meaningful, that they have the power and responsibility to ensure that people take them seriously, and that we have councillors who are accessible at that level. We are committed to having a system that ensures Auckland is not governed from the glass towers of Queen Street but by a representation that is fair across the whole city.

Debate interrupted.