Ian McLean Spokesperson for the Green Party

The Tauranga conference on local government is a fading memory, although it was celebrated with justifiable enthusiasm by several columnists in this newspaper last week.

It appears that reform, otherwise called amalgamation, is flavour of the month.

We had reform in the 1990s. It established the very sensible principles that local government should be small enough to know and understand local issues, and be organised along social and geographic boundaries. The web of councils that arose may be floundering in a mire of delegated responsibility and debt, but those problems just might not be due to size and scale.

Change may be good, but we need assurances that the proposed alternative really is better. The Auckland reform is playing out, Northland is going the same way, and several unitary authorities already exist. The experiments are running, and we should attempt to learn from them before making our own leap into the void.

Ian McLean is a spokesperson for the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand. Ph 021 547556, 07 579 4670, ian.mclean@greens.org.nz