Cunliffe David: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
Cunliffe David: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:657;Page:6496] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 I think we have heard a number of good speeches recently. I commend my colleague and friend Rajen Prasad who has just resumed his seat and of course the recent contribution from the Hon Shane Jones was excellent as well. I also think the previous comments of the Minister in the chair the Hon John Carter were useful in their challenge to us to provide a reasoned statement as my two colleagues have just done about the nature of our position on the local boards. 
Let us go back to basics. In the first draft of the Government’s proposals the idea of having a large number of very very small local boards representing a minimalist view of the State—the Rodney Hide Cabinet paper writ large through the Auckland bill core services only no say in their own destiny could not buy a pencil sharpener could not hire a staff member and could hardly make a decision at all—went down like a bucket of sick with Aucklanders and rightly so. There is nothing like the Rodney Hide vision of the world that has peeled away public support in my part of the world from this Government other than perhaps the funding cuts to adult and community education—the most expensive $10 million this Government is ever going to save in its 3 years in power. 
But that was the starting problem. The Government threw the baby out with the bathwater. It was a deliberate policy of divide and rule. The Government wanted a super powerful unitary Auckland Council gerrymandered to be dominated by the right with at-large councillors for generations to come—a gravy train for John Banks; that was the idea—and it wanted to brook no disagreement from below. It would face no threat from a large number of disempowered local boards that were entirely captive to it in terms of fund-raising rating policy making employment and definition setting. That was the case reasoned in the submissions and I can go through the list but I will need more calls to do so. I have pages and pages of submissions from groups—everything from starting at A Andrew Body Ltd Auckland City Council Cheryl Backstrom from Parnell Trust Waitakere Enterprise Peter Buchanan—the list goes on and on. People rose up and said that this model was excessively minimalist and they did not want it so change it! 
Here is where we have to give the Government some reasonable degree of credit. The Government did pare back some of the worst excesses of the Rodney Hide model. It has given the local boards some say in the definition of their local role and in place-shaping; let us say that. But as my colleagues have said there are two enduring problems. The first is that there are too many boards. Thirty local boards is way too many. It is divide and rule still. In my part of Auckland in Waitakere City that means going back to the bad old days of the boroughs. It means New Lynn borough competing with Henderson borough or the Waitakere ward or the Massey ward. It means internecine feuding frankly of the worst possible kind. Waitakere City residents were pleased to get away from that; they identify as west Aucklanders with Waitakere as an entity and not so much with New Lynn Henderson or Massey. We do not want to get the worst features of the old system back again and there is further work needed to make sure that the numbers are contained so that we have genuine communities of interest with enough cohesion and power to have an upwards say to the Auckland Council. That is the scale issue. 
The second issue is empowerment. It is one thing to draw a diagram and say that this is how we will make policy and that is as simple as we have it. It has a few spider legs on it. It is another thing to give local boards the resources and the critical mass to carry it out. It remains the case that even after the moderation of this ghastly provision local boards are still completely captive because they cannot raise a rate. They cannot even put a differential rate on without the Auckland City Council’s approval. An activist local board such as New Lynn my own dear town would not have the scale nor would it have the resources nor the political clout to mount a project of the nature of the New Lynn rail undergrounding and civic transformation. That is costing $300 million and it could not be done under this model. That is the key example.