Sage Eugenie: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill(No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill(No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13904. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): The Green Party will be supporting the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) and it joins with others in congratulating everybody who stood for election this month whether they got elected or not. It is a lot putting yourself out there to be decided on by voters so congratulations to everybody who stood and congratulations to those who were elected and will do their best to represent their communities over the next 3 years.Auckland’s local boards were set up with the express purpose of enabling democratic decision-making by and on behalf of communities within their local board area but they cannot do that very well unless they have a strong mandate from voters. The range of concern that has been expressed about the very low voter turnout in these local body elections is obvious because that does undermine democratic decision-making and the mandate that the boards have and that councils generally have. In Auckland we saw the turnout drop from 55 percent to 33 percent one of the lowest on record.Just as smaller rural councils tend to have a higher voter turnout than larger urban ones so it was with the smaller local boards in Auckland. They had a much higher turnout than some of their more populous neighbours. Two of the standout performers here were the Great Barrier Local Board and the Waiheke Local Board—67 percent of the electors on Great Barrier Island voted for their local board and 55 percent of the more than 6500 electors on Waiheke Island voted for their board. Yet when you compare that with some of the larger boards such as Manurewa where you have an electoral population of over 53000 the turnout there as Louisa Wall noted was quite low—around 29 percent.So it is for this reason that the Green Party will likely oppose the proposals to amend the Local Government Act to enable local boards to be rolled out in other parts of the country where there is currently a cap on using local boards—that they can be used only in communities of over 400000 people if a unitary authority is established. The local boards as Phil Twyford noted have substantially lower powers—smaller powers—than the councils that they replace. They can certainly recommend by-laws but they cannot sign those off. They have an oversight and a recommendatory power in relation to budgets but they are not the main decision maker.So the approach that the National Government seems to have is that bigger is better when it comes to local councils. We do not agree with that because bigger organisations tend to be more remote from electors there is less ability for electors to see that they can influence decision making and influence change and people tend to feel morealienated from big centralised agencies. That is why this move to have local boards replace councils and have a big unitary authority in the proposed changes to the Local Government Act to be rolled out later this year is of major concern because that will not necessarily improve democracy or lead to more voter engagement.There have been a range of commentators on the low turnout. Associate Professor ChristineCheyne from Massey University was calling in this morning’sDominion Post for an independent inquiry to address this deepening malaise affecting local elections. Certainly the Justice and Electoral Committee looks at turnout after each election but I think we have got to do much more because we have a very casual attitude to democracy in New Zealand. Although electronic voting is going to be trialled in 2016 that is not a silver bullet. We need civics education in schools so that students understand the institutions of democracy and so that they get into the habit of voting when they turn 18. We need a much more proactive effort by councils to publicise the fact that there is an election. I commend the Hamilton City Council. Its local electoral officers were out on the street with ballot boxes encouraging motorists to drop their ballots in. It estimated it got an extra 1000 votes by doing that. But on some councils’ websites it was not even obvious that there was an election. We need to do much more to improve the turnout. Local councils are a way of doing that not just changing councils to boards.