Governance Matters with Peter McKinlay

Largely out of the public eye, there's been a lot of ongoing discussion about local government reform for the Bay of Plenty. Ideas about ‘efficiency' and ‘economies of scale' are colliding with values of local democracy.

There is a real sense of ‘been there before' with the same old options being trotted out. Bigger is better, we have got too many councils and we're over-governed. It's real 1990s thinking when we need to prepare for the world of the 2030s.

And it misses much of what really needs to be sorted. There is growing evidence New Zealand has serious problems with local government legislation, with the imbalance between the powers of elected members and the powers of management, with the compliance costs imposed on local government and much more.

If we want more affordable housing, if we want as citizens to have more influence over councils, if we want better quality decisions on planning, then those are the problems we need to deal with.

Why hasn't this been done? First, because of a deep-seated distrust of local government. Successive governments have preferred to write more rules to restrict local government rather than work out how to create strong, innovative councils. Next, like it or not, local government is very complex. There are no easy answers and most people don't have either the time or patience to put in the hard yards needed to understand how to enable genuinely effective local government.

Recently, Stephen Selwood, who is chief executive of the New Zealand Council for infrastructure development, and I gave New Zealand's Treasury a presentation on local government as part of an initiative to raise the quality of public debate.

We argued current understandings and practices are seriously out of line with what is needed to deal with the challenges New Zealand's economy and society face now and for the foreseeable future. The paper is a very good coverage of what really should be our priorities for local government reform.

The paper's title is Local Government, Local Governance and Raising the Quality of Public debate. Check it out on the Treasury website, at www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/media-speeches/guestlectures/mckinlay-selwood