The Deputy Mayor of Seattle in North West USA called on my office this week to check on council’s preparation for the FIFA Women’s World Cup as they are hosting the next men’s cup.
Mostly the preparation was handled by Tataki Auckland Unlimited, council’s CCO in charge of events so other than leaning out over the top of Eden Park with a soccer ball in my hand, for promotion there wasn’t a lot to do as FIFA is very descriptive in what it requires.
Inevitably, the conversation with the Seattle Deputy Mayor turned to local government practices in both cities. Seattle has twice the population of Auckland and I was told they have nine councillors, but she said she would prefer only seven. I swooned.
She was more than surprised to be told that we have the horrendous number of 20 councillors, quite a few of whom think there should be fewer as long as it is the others who lose their jobs. The really shocking thing is that we also have 21 local boards along with their salary-seeking members plus the members of the Independent Maori Statutory Board, resulting in around 174 elected officials.
Nobody can name them all and on top of that there are about 40 MPs in Auckland City area and nobody can name all of them either.
On top of all this, local government is saddled with legal obligations to consult on everything including budgets, which of course the Government neither needs to or bothers to, so our $5b budget gets discussed ad nauseum while the Minister of Finance just announces his $150b without even telling his own party members.
Consultation is expensive and not followed by voting councillors in many cases. Labour Party councillors come under pressure from unions and some vote according to that pressure rather than what citizens wanted. All very inefficient and unhelpful.
To add to the mess that makes us democratically overloaded, the city is divided into wards that don’t match the local board areas and bizarrely the most densely populated area in NZ, being the Auckland CBD including Ponsonby where I live along with your readers, has been attached to two islands – Waiheke and the least densely populated area of Aotea Great Barrier.
All this courtesy of Rodney Hide, who should have stuck to ballroom dancing.
As a final difficulty, there is now a call for more precipitation democracy, whatever that is, as some representatives are not satisfied with 174 of us talking to the public and want even more. No wonder getting decisions is so hard.
(Wayne Brown)
Mayor of Auckland
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Published: 31 July 2023