Jones Shane: Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill — First Reading 
Jones Shane: Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:659;Page:8549] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Kia ora ano tatou. We are arriving at the tail end of the year and may I offer you Mr Deputy Speaker merry Christmas wishes and good cheer to all of us in the House although we have come to the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill with some very significant differences between Labour members and my fellow Northlander the Hon John Carter and the Minister of Local Government Mr Hide. This legislation is on local government but as an unfortunate consequence of the way in which the governance machinery has been put together the last people who will be empowered are local communities. The most powerful person as a result of this bill will be the chief executive officer of the new super-city council. We realise this restructuring is in the pursuit of efficiency and effective governance and many of us on this side of the House actually supported the establishment of the royal commission to achieve those outcomes. Let us not hide that. But where we have parted company is that as the machinery has turned into law we have ended up empowering a new level of uber-bureaucrat. That uber-bureaucrat will be the super-city chief executive officer along with his or her divisional managers and there will be no accountability from them to local communities. 
It might be said that if one empowers local communities one undermines the philosophical foundation stone of this reform; but do not call it “local government” if one will not leave meaningful power and authority with local people. When local people are disempowered from shaping the character and the personality of the various areas of Auckland within which they live we have created a megalopolis. It will be like the metropolitan city state akin to the ancient regime of Italy. Just as people were disempowered there they will be disempowered as a consequence of this Parliament dominated by National refusing to lay out in law what the duties rights and obligations of local communities are. I think that is a very sad development. 
The cheerleaders of the development of the super-city at the moment are focused on the fact that we are at the end of a marathon. Let us acknowledge the work that the parliamentary legal draftspeople have achieved and the sales job carried out by Mr Hide and Mr Carter but they have not honoured what they said they would deliver. We were told that in the third piece of legislation the unanswered questions of Auckland communities would be laid out and answered through the sovereignty of this House. That has not come to pass. Instead we have ended up with—and in a moment I come to matters pertaining to mana whenua and Maori—a powerful chief executive officer who will unilaterally determine the rights and duties of all the employees and in section 35C of this bill he or she is given the unfettered authority to make a call on the terms of employment and entitlements associated with employees whose employment may be moved to other places. 
I will harp on about this because when we do not posit in the elected representatives enough power or statutory authority to rein in the bureaucracy we are disempowering voters. As I have said during this entire debate if we disempower local representatives and if we put a barrier of a financial nature so high that genuine representatives of diversity in the community do not sit at the governance table we get a groupthink where we have a calibre of representative based on who can get there by dint of a deep pocket. Their objectives and their style of operation will not be different from those of the chief executive officer whose earnings will be between $850000 and $1 million. Their earnings will be vastly more than the Prime Minister of the country or any of the other elected representatives. 
Let me come back to how the Government has sought to deal with the Maori issues in Tamaki-makau-rau. I say one thing for Mr Hide: his bigotry has been overt from day one. He has not concealed that. For those of us who have known Mr Hide for over 10 to 15 years it is probably a mark of distinction in terms of the man’s record. He does not believe in Maori enjoying distinctive rights of representation and he has said so. He does not believe in the existence of any Maori rights associated with local government that cannot be enjoyed by other Aucklanders so to that extent we know what we are dealing with. However it is unfortunate that his guile was not replicated in the form of the Maori representatives. Very briefly let me record what they did. The first thing that Dr Sharples did was to attack unwisely one of the more redeeming features of the royal commission’s report which was to have Maori representation on the council. He said it was too timid. He carried on to say it was completely unworkable. Then he decided to set up a council where given that there are about 15 tangata whenua groups vying for representation he would give them all representation. Without realising it he was playing into the well-honed politics of bigotry offered by the current Minister of Local Government and into the innate conservatism of National. Those of us watching this train wreck could see it was no wonder that Maori members were clapping and cheering because they have a flag because that is what they were only ever going to get. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Who’s “Wanda”? 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: I hear my whanaunga from the north raising his voice on this vexed issue of Maori representation. Other than his description of Mr Hide’s anatomy he had no other useful comments to make during the entire debate. However I say that although he might share certain similarities in terms of anatomy with Mr Hide his heart was in a different place. His heart was with his Maori people who favoured direct Maori representation. With this bill after squandering the opportunity of using the royal commission and after wrecking any prospect of a workable model based on the poor stewardship offered by Dr Sharples we have ended up with the very thing that Te Ururoa Flavell Hone Harawira who is currently missing in action Rahui Katene Dr Sharples and Tariana Turia said they would never tolerate—that is a tekoteko board i.e. a tokenistic symbolic board of advisers. Bizarrely enough the provisions establishing that board state that its first role is to choose its name. The second thing it can do is change its name. In the event that it changes its name it has to tell the myriad of forces that presumably want to get on this board that it has a new name and it has to tell the council its name. What is in a name? Symbolism. That is why this board will not be embraced as a meaningful route for Maori into local government. It would have been so much better to replicate the model introduced by the Labour Government of the late 1980s and destroyed by Warren Cooper which emulated what we have in this House which is direct Maori representation. I tell members to keep away from mana whenua representation; that belongs on the marae. It does not have a place in a democratic franchise of one person one vote. 
So it is very sad that we have a local government reorganisation where we have no knowledge of whether these local powers are vacuous or hefty. We know that we have a Maori board with no power. It is meaningless. It will be tokenistic and it is not even supported by the Maori Party. It is rather bizarre that the day the Maori Party celebrates the arrival of the flag is the day it sees how empty is the whole vessel of its entire year’s efforts. It shows not only political naivety on its part but also how powerless it is. So naturally we will be vigorous participants as this bill goes forward. But it is a very disappointing day for people genuinely interested in diverse communities having meaningful representation in our largest city. Kia ora tatou.