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All in Opinion
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by everything that’s going on. It feels like there's an ever growing and seemingly endless list of things that you want to, or feel expected to, care about. It can be disheartening to see those in power often plow ahead with changes without any interest in listening, let alone compromising. Instead of disengaging, it's important to keep on trying to make a difference, as nothing will ever get fixed if we walk away from challenging issues and difficult times.
In the nearly 35 years since 850 local government entities were merged into 86, 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, city and regional deals on the horizon, and discussions about council amalgamations spreading, pressure for change is building.
Two pieces of media coverage from Radio New Zealand caught my eye this morning. First was an interesting explainer from Radio New Zealand’s Katie Kenny, “Missing mayor, record rates rises, and Tauranga's election: What's going on with councils?”. The second was RNZ’s The Detail podcast “A tale of two mayors” where Tom Kitchin spoke with The New Zealand Herald’s Simon Wilson and Georgina Campbell about their perspectives on the mayors of Auckland and Wellington respectively.
A process which began more than three years ago to much fanfare was extinguished in the blink of an eye on the evening of Friday 5 July as Local Government Minister Simeon Brown quietly put the Future for Local Government Review out of its misery via a Beehive press release. Now it looks like progressive iterations, rather than wholesale reformation, is on the cards for local government.
In the National-led Coalition’s third quarter action plan one item hasn’t received the attention it deserves - Cabinet deciding of the framework for National’s city and regional deals. So what might be on the cards for local government when negotiating these deals finally gets underway?
