Brian Anderson The Western Front www.sunlive.co.nz

When my wife picked me up from the Chamber of Commerce conference on local government last Friday night she wanted to know why all of the senior council members were laughing so much.

They might have just been sharing some internet joke but it is a worry to have that same reaction to so many of the speakers' messages during the conference.

The speakers were great, describing the implications of the current changes in our society, but their message was not a laughing matter. Forget about the Auckland message or the new local government policies. A third of our small towns are past a tipping point for population decline and within just a few years two-thirds our small towns will be disappearing. Only four centres, Auckland Wellington, Queenstown and probably Hamilton or Tauranga will be showing any growth. This is a worldwide trend but already New Zealand women are not meeting a replacement target of2.1 babies and immigration is well below meeting the deficit. It is not the total population slowdown that is our main problem. There is a massive shift of young people to the big cities.

There is nothing new about young people being attracted to city life but currently over 80 per cent of all babies born in New Zealand are born in Auckland. They are growing up and working in Auckland and this is why the other problem we have of an ageing population is hitting our smaller towns first.

Throughout the discussion the ageing population was being seen as a plague of old people. I challenged this attitude in that if we indeed have a problem, the older people should be a vast resource of experience that should be tapped. Most of the people at the conference were in that category and didn't seem to notice they were talking about themselves.

The conference did explain how council core services are being taken over by Council Controlled Organisations that work a little like SOEs with Government. The four needs of the RMA – Social, Cultural, Economic and Health – are replaced by a more general requirement that places responsibility on councils to collaborate with the people. Councillors will have to spend more time out talking with the public gaining input rather than defending position. The mayors are being given more powers with more responsibility and more accountability. There is a call for more leadership from the top as well as from individuals in society. Of course there will be no more money so the laughter from our leaders at the end of the day suggesting that they are now happy that such changes will probably never occur in their time.

Sir Bob Harvey's message was that the time is now and he reported on the progress in collaboration that has followed the Auckland amalgamation exercise. Most heard this as political spin but my conversations with local board members in Howick reinforced Bob's claim. I was told that the Board had made more progress for the people in the last year that had been made in the previous ten years.

Unfortunately Bob included some personal advice for the Tauranga port authority on a possible cooperation between Auckland and Tauranga. This seemed so out of left field but it remains so far the only reference to the conference in the media. We were told that our upheaval will have to happen within the next three years. I wonder who will be laughing then.