Viewpoint – Too many cooks?

The Deputy Mayor of Seattle called on my office recently to check on council’s preparation for the FIFIA Women’s World Cup, as Seattle is hosting the next men’s cup.

Most of 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 football in my hand for promotion, there wasn’t a lot for me 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 half the population of Auckland and I was told they have nine councillors, but the Deputy Mayor 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 less – 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 earning 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 and nobody can name them all either.

In addition, local government is saddled with legal obligations to consult on everything, including budgets, which of course the government neither needs or bothers to.

Our $5 billion budget gets discussed ad nauseum while the Minister of Finance can just announce his $150 billion budget without even needing to tell his own caucus.

Consultation is expensive and not followed by voting councillors in many cases.

To add to the mess that makes us democratically overloaded, the city is divided into wards that don’t match the local board areas. Bizarrely the most densely populated area in New Zealand, being the Auckland CBD including Ponsonby, where I live, has been attached to two islands – Waiheke, and the least densely populated area of Aotea Great Barrier.

All this courtesy of Rodney Hide, who, in my opinion, should have stuck to ballroom dancing. 

As a final difficulty, there is now a call for “more participative 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 made is so hard.