Viewpoint – Good people needed

In my February column, I wrote about attributes of a good council candidate. I have considered the desirability of some sort of pre-selection process, but there is a risk of that process being in conflict with the principles of open democracy. I do think though that there should be a means of enabling the voting public to know more about what a candidate has to offer than just a billboard or the maximum of 100 words that come out with the voting paper.  No-one seems to have picked that up.

In the business world, private company board members are usually appointed because of their skills and expertise in relation to the enterprise (or because they are related to the owner). In local government there is no such threshold. Any NZ citizen over the age of 18 may stand as long as they are on the electoral roll. What we get is like the proverbial Forrest Gump box of chocolates. 

Further, I am concerned about the poor voter turnout for local body elections – on average well below 50% nationwide. Local Government NZ recently produced a draft paper on election reform to address this problem. They highlighted the problems with the current postal voting system – fewer people have mail boxes, there are fewer post boxes and postal services are reducing their coverage in response to less demand for delivery of paper mail. More people, especially younger people generally want to do stuff on line instead. Digital options for voting have been looked into, but the risks of results being corrupted by hackers seem unsolvable. There are also risks with postal voting – in the past there have been rumours of voting papers being “harvested” from letter boxes for the benefit of an individual candidate.

One of the 28 recommendations Local Government NZ is promoting as a solution is to change to in-person voting at a polling booth as for central government elections, and using national infrastructure to do this. I suspect this will likely come with an extra cost; it would be in the national interest if this cost was met centrally. This has a nice feel to it – so often the Parliament of the day has solved a problem by handing it to local government but without the funding to support it. This proposed voting reform would be an opportunity to return the favour. As Nelson Mayor Nick Smith said: “Reform is needed now to strengthen the democratic mandate local government has to represent communities across New Zealand.”

Kaipara District Council did not contribute to the proposal as regrettably, at the beginning of the current term, KDC cancelled its membership of LGNZ, not something I voted for.

Election season is now upon us. Best wishes to all who put themselves forward as candidates; we need good people to step up to ensure a positive future for our district.