“The government will take back power from local councils if their decisions are going to negatively impact economic growth, development, or employment”. This according to RNZ is what Chris Bishop has recently proclaimed at a business event in Wellington.
Chris Bishop is showing himself to be a bit of a thug with a short attention span for anything that does not reflect his own clearly questionable values. Last month he was writing off an exuberant display of support by Maori for one of their own at the New Zealand Music Awards as “a load of crap” and this month he’s inferring that local councils are actively blocking economic growth, development, or employment.
Despite the length of the RNZ article, (and obviously Chris Bishop’s speech) it does not articulate any specific instances of where such heinous crimes are occurring and is also silent on how the logistics of the government shouldering its way into the affairs of recalcitrant councils might pan out. Clearly, the article is reporting what Chris Bishop was saying and despite Chris Bishop saying quite a lot, he actually tells us bugger all.
He leaves us no choice but to work it out for ourselves.
He says “the reality is, central government has an intense interest in the way councils plan and allow their cities to function”. I think we all do, and the value of councils doing this work is that they are so much closer to their communities. Perhaps Chris Bishop has overlooked the fact that the majority of councils in Aotearoa serve rural communities rather than cities.
From where I sit – the most dysfunctional councils have generally been those populated by political factions and generally those are city – based. The dysfunction occurs when councillors toe the party line rather than the pragmatic or practical line during the decision-making process. This is not just the petulant behaviour of the minor parties. All political factions are guilty of it.
Further, in the area of building; it has become quite difficult to truly identify how much of council reticence is due to their own lack of action and how much of it is due to the tsunami of central government prescription that has been bearing down upon the sector since the leaky building debacle of three decades ago.
It is disingenuous to claim that central government shelling out $5b each year in housing subsidies is the direct result of a failed planning system within local government. It is not so long ago Chris Bishop’s colleagues were scoring cheap tricks with the ill-informed and arrogant proclamation that councils should stick to their knitting. Where does housing sit alongside the purl and plain of roading, rates and rubbish?
Given the inexorable (or execrable) growth in a pattern of central government blaming someone else for its own shortcomings I think that local councils are copping an unfair share of the blame. Central government should look towards its own bloated bureaucratic system and consider how adequately that has been held to account over the course of successive regimes.
Shifting the deck chairs is not going to provide a solution to the problem and playing the blame game is beginning to wear a bit thin. Swapping out the hubris for a bit more regard for the views of those in the thick of it (rather than Wellington based bureaucrats) would go a long way towards rebuilding trust and confidence and actually identifying solutions with some chance of working.