Why can't we ever agree on how to fix local government?
An AI-generated image of two politicians standing at lecterns having a debate.
I’m a passionate advocate for local government and the importance of its role in helping to support our communities as they grow and thrive. However, while there’s near uniform agreement that the current local government system is unsustainable, like many issues our society faces there’s little agreement on how exactly to fix things and the reason behind that is, unsurprisingly, politics.
Cross party political consensus behind reforming local government is a rare thing. The last major reforms of the sector in 1989 came on the back of the wide-ranging reforms of the Fourth Labour Government. That the ideological bent of the Fourth Labour Government flowed nicely into that of the Fourth National Government meant that the changes were essentially left to be, especially as the incoming government in 1990 had bigger fish to fry.
The only significant reform in the 35 years since 1989 took place with the amalgamation of Auckland’s seven local and one regional authority into the single “super-city” in 2010. In this case there was some general cross party consensus between the outgoing Labour Government and incoming National-led Government that things had to change in Auckland and that there wasn’t a strong enough consolidated voice for the city and its region. But beyond that, it was more a case of the National-led Government using the convenient timing of Labour’s Royal Commission process to implement their own preferred changes which they felt would support the changes they wanted, with a resultant review delivering a different model to what the Royal Commission had proposed.
As I’ve discussed before, making changes to local government is a deeply political process and there are landmines waiting at nearly every step. This in particular has meant that attempts by communities and councils to change to their own structures have become nearly impossible. The only successful example being the Banks Peninsula District/Christchurch City merger which got over the line at a referendum in 2005. Beyond that, mergers either fail to get over the start line at the Local Government Commission, or they can’t overcome the politics at play when it comes to a referendum.
Politics ultimately seems to beach central government’s attempts as well. Jacinda Ardern’s Sixth Labour Government knew that its Three Waters reform and replacement of the Resource Management Act would necessitate changes to the local government system, with water reform likely to render many councils financially unsustainable and the new resource management system seeing many of their planning responsibilities regionalised. Their response to this, after much public pressure (including from myself calling for a Royal Commission) was to launch the Review into the Future for Local Government.
The politics of Three Waters reform and RMA replacement quickly turned into poisoned chalices for Labour, with National and ACT in particular milking both for political capital. So it was with little surprise that the incoming National-led Coalition Government was quick to dispense with not only only those two reforms, but also rejected the work of the Future for Local Government Review as well. To be honest, not even the local government sector could agree on the recommendations of the Future for Local Government Review either, so that made it even easier for National to pull the plug on it.
Timing, as they say, is everything in politics, and it’s clear that getting the necessary alignment of political factors when it comes to local government reform is always going to be difficult. Not only do you have the natural political tensions and opportunism at play between the opposing sides in Parliament, but you also have to navigate numerous communities up and down the country who will have differing thoughts about what changes should be made to local government and the relative pros and cons of the trade offs involved. Chuck in hundreds of elected representatives in local government up and down the country, many of whom are going to champion views that run contrary to any suggested changes in a reform, and it’s not surprising that these things always get bogged down and ultimately strangled in a morass of political realism.
It’s this dynamic that’s landed us where we are today.
National, through their fierce leveraging of opposition to Labour’s reform work, have effectively put themselves in a position where to make any major changes to the local government system they’ll end up not only having to redo some of the work already done by bodies like the Future for Local Government Review, but they’re also likely to land in political positions that are contradictory to what they stood for when Labour was attempting its reforms.
This is, of course, just part and parcel of politics, and we’ve already seen the commitment to localism that was previously championed by the parties currently in government conveniently be forgotten. So it’s not beyond the realm of reason that at some point they’ll be able to justify flipping back on other positions around local government, but for now their trajectory seems to be one of trying to buy themselves more time through iteration, rather than reformation.
I don’t think anyone, even those in government, truly believe that current reforms such as Local Water Done Well and Regional Deals are anything more than temporary solutions. But until the political currents align again to produce a scenario where wholesale reform becomes politically permissible, the erosion of local democracy’s capability to deliver for its communities sadly seems set to continue.
