Time to revisit how we make changes to local government

AI-generated image of nine ducks trying to get in a row

On 1 November 1989 one of the largest reforms of local government in New Zealand took place. 850 entities merged into a two-tier system of 86 regional and territorial authorities. In the nearly 35 years since that massive overhaul, there has been some additional rationalisation, most notably with the formation of the single Auckland Council, but the system and its boundaries remain mostly the same. However, with water reforms progressing and discussions about council amalgamations spreading, pressure for change is building.

Of course, this conversation isn’t anything new. There have been numerous unsuccessful attempts at using the available Local Government Commission processes for amalgamation, with Banks Peninsula merging with Christchurch City being a lonely success story. Then there was my own call for a Royal Commission into local government, followed soon after by the Review into the Future for Local Government whose recommendations were recently thrown out by Local Government Minister Simeon Brown.

At the time of writing, there are multiple discussions taking place. Two of these are in the Wellington region with parallel council-led attempts to create a single Wairarapa authority and multiple merged authorities in the rest of the region. In the South Island residents are lobbying for a separate unitary authority for South Canterbury and North Otago, while Southland District Council’s Mayor is pushing for the areas four councils to be merged down into two. There are probably others, but there’s only so much you can cover when trying to follow the goings-on of 78 councils.

Despite enthusiasm from his ministerial colleague and Hutt South MP Chris Bishop, Simeon Brown is leaving the ball firmly in the court of councils to work together to progress any ideas. There’s no mention from him of there being two other avenues available - either a proposal initiated by residents or central government intervening as it did with Auckland, most likely because of the critical rhetoric of the parties in government about the previous Labour Government’s Three Waters reforms.

The problem with leaving things in councils’ hands, and I’m speaking from personal experience here, is that councils and the councillors who make them up make herding cats look easy. The reorganisation efforts in Wellington are already running into differing priorities and politics from mayors and councils, while the residents’ initiated approach in South Canterbury and North Otago has some major thresholds to overcome before it will begin to be taken seriously. If we look further back, the previous attempts at amalgamation are littered with defeats either at the ballot box or not even making it to that starting line.

There is one thing you’ll find councils agree on, and that is that the status quo is untenable. It was a common theme throughout consultations on Three Waters and the Future for Local Government review, and it continues to this day. The problem is that neither they, nor their residents, can agree on what the solution should be. The status quo, as broken as it may be, also has an incredible inertia to it, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The incumbency of the system is the devil we know.

As much as I’m an advocate for trying to achieve these things through a grassroots campaign that builds support from the ground up, even if you do that the politics that inevitably play out during a referendum are hugely difficult to overcome. The Nelson/Tasman, Hawke’s Bay, and previous Wairarapa referendums are all evidence of just how difficult this pathway can be. You need a very fortuitous alignment of factors to get things over the line such as Banks Peninsula did.

Along with the political factors at play, there’s also a question of timing. The Government’s Local Water Done Well reforms are going to mean changes for councils as they decide how to meet the requirements of the legislation. They need to develop Water Service Delivery Plans within 12 months of the legislation passing Parliament that demonstrate how they will make their water services financially sustainable, meet water regulations, and accommodate growth. For many councils this will require significant changes to the way they operate that in turn will feed into any likely proposals for reorganisation.

All of this is also before we even know what framework will govern the city and regional deals that the Government is keen to negotiate with councils. If they’re simply lists of infrastructure and economic development initiatives that central and local government co-fund, then that’s fairly simple. But if they’re closer to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, then things will get even more complicated.

Suffice to say, if in normal times it’s difficult for councils or residents to get all their ducks in a row to push ahead with reorganisation proposals, it becomes nearly impossible when major reforms are taking place despite those reforms adding to the need for wholesale change.

It may well be that the Government is effectively wanting to hit pause on any other local government changes until after water reform and city/region deals have washed through the system, especially as their work programme seems to include yet another attempt to replace the Resource Management Act. All things considered, that could be a politically defendable position. If that’s the case, then they need to say so to stop everyone wasting their time pursuing proposals that aren’t ever going to go anywhere.

If not, then the Government needs to get to work on thinking about how they’re going to handle what seems to be a growing stream of calls for reorganisation and how it might look to address some of the barriers that these proposals face in advancing.

Its options could beefing up the Local Government Commission’s resourcing, changing the law to try and strike a difference balance between change and the status quo, or it could put in place a separate review or Royal Commission of its own to investigate local government reorganisation, albeit with a much narrower focus than the Future for Local Government Review.

As much as councils need to be smarter and more politically-savvy about how they approach the topic of reorganisation, it’s also true that the current framework for progressing these is so heavily slanted in favour of the status quo that it’s little wonder so little has changed in nearly four decades without central government intervening.

That needs to change if we’re to avoid headlines similar to those in the United Kingdom in recent years of councils effectively going bankrupt.