Roche Denise: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill(No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill(No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13658. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): Kia ora. The Greens will be supporting this bill the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) but I am going to take a short call to talk about local boards and their delegations. Like previous speakers we actually think that this legislation should have come to the House a lot sooner not on the eve of the elections. However it is a good time to reflect on how the super-city structure has been operating and how local boards have been operating as well.In preparation for the Committee stage of this bill I have been looking at the functions of the local boards and refamiliarising myself with the delegations. The role of the local boards is to enable democratic local decision-making in the super-city area the Auckland Council area. That is an area that encompasses about 1.4 million peopleand there are 21 local boards that are tasked with the job of protecting and enabling local decision-making. That is a total of 149 local board members.When the super-city was created in 2009 through the legislation that came from the National Government there was a lot of panic I would have to say in my community. There was a lot of fear that we would lose our decision making and that we would be unable to make any progress with what is a very large bureaucratic machine that runs our city. I have to say that the local boards have protected some of that decision making. They have not been able to protect as much of the decision making as previous community boards and previous councils did and that I guess was the whole point of the amalgamation.But the biggest area where local boards have had trouble and where general citizens residents and ratepayers of Auckland have had difficulty is in trying to find out what happens with the council-controlled organisations. I am not the only person who has issues with the council-controlled organisations and in particular the seven big ones that were set up through the legislation that set up the amalgamated city. Those council-controlled organisations are not democratically elected and frequently are not accountable. I guess that what happened with Ports of Auckland and the dispute there over the last year is an example of the worst sort of lack of accountability. Ports of Auckland is owned by the citizens of Auckland and governed by a board of directors. That board of directors is accountable to a council-controlled organisation that was set up through the amalgamation of the super-city and that council-controlled organisation is Auckland Council Investments Ltd. None of the councillors no local board members and no elected official was able to get a straight answer about the cost of the industrial action that occurred during the dispute at the Auckland ports. My point is that democracy was on the line and democracy has been on the line as a result of the amalgamation. The people who are holding the line are the local boards and the local board members.There has recently been an analysis of how the super-city is working. In fact the Auckland University of Technology School of Social Sciences and Public Policy recently has released its research on what it calls the super-city project. It released it in August. The mark that it gave to the super-city or Auckland Council was a B. One of the comments it made was that the structure of local boards and the council—the council if you will remember is the governing body on one side and local boards on another—is not particularly well understood. I guess that is something we have to continue to work on.It will be interesting to see what the voting return will be for the elections coming up because even in the last elections for the council which were the first elections for local board members the return rate was about 51 percent. Only 51 percent of Auckland ratepayers actually voted for their councillors their local board members so only 51 percent voted for their elected representatives.In smaller areas—and I think it is true with the Rodney local board area as well; it is certainly true with Waiheke—the voter turnout was a lot higher. On Waiheke Island where we managed to keep our own local board there was about a 64 percent voter turnout but we still have about a third of the people not participating in the democratic process. When people do not participate in the democratic process they leave the decision making up to decision makers who have not been elected by a true majority. In these coming elections we are seeing more of an interest and certainly on Waiheke the election of the local board members is almost a blood sport—that was my experience.Carol Beaumont: What happened to peace and love on Waiheke?DENISE ROCHE: We take our local democracy incredibly seriously. Some of the delegations that the local boards have been able to exercise over the last 3 years havenot just included developing local board plans negotiating local board agreements and negotiating service levels but been around advocacy on regulatory matters as well. I have to say that the majority of members on our local board on Waiheke have been absolutely appalling and have not been advocating for our community and yet it says specifically in the delegations and in the purpose of local boards in the governance statement for Auckland Council that that is a role for local boards—that they advocate. That is what they are supposed to be doing.So these elections on Waiheke are seeing quite a lot of discussion about that role. We have had people saying that local boards are powerless that local boards cannot make decisions and that they are unable to properly represent their communities to the council because they are limited in what the delegations say and that is simply not the case. I know for a fact that the only local board member in this House Tracey Martin has worked very hard and that her local board has worked very hard to advocate to Auckland Council on behalf of the people of Rodney because it is a co-governance arrangement. We will be supporting this bill through to its final reading. Thank you.