Twyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
Twyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:657;Page:6493] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 I will talk about the issue of the local boards which is a very important issue. I think it is important to break up the Northlanders who are participating in this debate because quite frankly we need more Aucklanders and fewer Northlanders participating. The issue of the local boards is one that has— 
Simon Bridges 
: Finish your mouthful! What is this? 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: Sorry I have a lozenge because I have a sore throat. The question of the local boards is one of the issues that have been intensively debated over the last few months. I will outline the process that we have gone through and some of the thinking that has gone into the whole question of the local boards. 
The issue of the powers of the local boards was one of the most important that we dealt with and people will know that Labour members criticised heavily the Government’s proposal for toothless “talk shops” which were announced in April. We took the view in line with the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance that fewer stronger and larger boards were preferable to having myriad small relatively powerless local boards. We said publicly back in April and May that we favoured a number between the six local boards that the royal commission had recommended and a dozen. We shared the royal commission’s view that if the boards were too small they would not have the capability to do the important local government place-shaping work which everyone agrees is essential in this whole area and we agreed with the royal commission’s view that any kind of cost-benefit analysis could not justify the destruction of six functioning units of local government and their replacement with 20 to 30 small ones and that such a change would be disruptive and expensive. 
Much of the debate over the weeks that followed focused on the powers of the local boards. I am glad to acknowledge that the Government saw sense and listened to people around Auckland who were appalled at the prospect that all the power would basically be centralised in the super-city council and there would be none at the second-tier level. The Government saw sense and the Associate Minister of Local Government who is in the chair deserves some credit for that. I will come back to the question of whether the powers provided for the local boards in the bill are satisfactory and sufficient but there is no doubt that once we agree in principle to the idea of empowering local boards the size and number of them becomes less critical. From then on our view was that a greater number of boards would be quite acceptable because once we take the question of powers out of the equation community of interest rather than capability becomes the most important criterion. When we look across Auckland we see that many smaller communities like Waiheke and Great Barrier Island which are island communities obviously have a clearly established community of interest. We felt that rather than the six to 12 local boards that we were initially advocating something like 14 to 20 would be a more appropriate range. 
We took that view because we believed that there are a range of large and small communities in Auckland that have an established community of interest. To go with the number of local boards that the Government has put forward in the bill which is 20 to 30—if we contemplate the idea of 30 local boards across Auckland—would mean that many of the larger established communities of interest like Waitakere and Manukau would be dismembered and chopped up into small pieces. When the select committee toured around Auckland hearing submissions it was very clear that people in various parts of Auckland felt they had been well served by their councils. They felt those councils represented communities of interest. 
I will also say that one of the main concerns for Labour in taking a more conservative approach to the number and the size of local boards was that we felt that the boards need to have a certain critical mass a certain size in order to be able to do the place-shaping work. I will use a couple of examples from Waitakere City that are relevant. One of the most impressive things about Waitakere is the economic development work that the council has done developing quite large areas— 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: Does Rodney Hide believe in that? 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: It is an active state; it is active local government. It is one of the four well-beings. It certainly does not fit within his definition of core services.