Governance Matters with Peter McKinlay

During the next few weeks, this column will talk about local government – why should it matter? What should we want from it? And how should we get it?

At the moment, it's almost open season on local government. Talk around the Bay of Plenty is about amalgamation. Not whether it will happen, but when and how. Most people think rates are too high, and councils aren't delivering – think Tauranga's stormwater.

Government tells us bigger councils will be more efficient, and result in better services. Recent changes to Local Government Law are supposed to make amalgamation easier. But who should decide? What do we want from local government? Would change make it easier to get?

What does the evidence tell us? There's been a huge amount of work looking at whether merging councils means better services and lower cost. What it hasn't produced is clear evidence that bigger is better. Most people who have looked closely at the evidence are very sceptical.

Why? Partly because local government does so many different things. Developing and managing major infrastructure does require scale – but this suggests merging water and wastewater services, not necessarily merging councils.

Looking after local communities, and responding to people's different ideas about how their own place should develop, is often very small scale. Large councils risk losing, or may never have, the connections with their communities needed to understand what they want.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is the way the world is changing. Today's local government was designed before the internet, before the kind of population change seeing Tauranga and Western Bay growing, while the rest of the Bay of Plenty is shrinking; it also came about before globalisation and much more.

Responding to these changes needs much more than just saying; 'Let's amalgamate councils using the tools we developed 30 years ago”.

Future columns will look at possible options; and why local government for all its problems is going to be more important, not less.