17 September 2009

'Frankenstein' super city let loose on Aucklanders

A super city 'Frankenstein' has been let loose on the people of greater Auckland with the passage today of the Local Government Auckland Council Bill, North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams said.

"The government had a once in a lifetime opportunity to get Auckland local governance right by sorting out what was not working at regional level and beefing up what was working well at local level, but they gave in to vested interests, and the government blew that chance," Mayor Andrew Williams said.

"The great issue at stake is whether we run our region under an inclusive, consensus decision making model where the power is shared with the people, or whether we run our region under a centralised, elitist model where the power is concentrated at the top and decisions are handed down to the masses."

"The government has chosen to ignore the people and impose their own twisted version of the power elite model on us."

"The reality is that all roads lead to Rome under the government's 'Frankenstein' super city, with all the power and the resources either in the hands of elite super councillors and an omnipotent super mayor or in the hands of unelected and unaccountable Council-owned monopoly companies."

"Rodney Hide's dream of turning our communities into corporations is complete."

"Only the most optimistic of the government's fan base believe that the token gesture local boards will serve the needs of local democracy and empower local people to make local decisions about their local communities.

The truth is that they have no power in their own right, they are not even units of local government but unincorporated societies, and the new Council has an absolute veto over every decision the local boards make. Perhaps in Rodney Hide's parallel universe this passes for local democracy, but not in the real world."

"It is more than ironic that the people who constructed this 'Frankenstein'

super city have no genuine, day-to-day experience of local government, how it works on the ground, and how it moves in tandem with its communities to deliver progressive outcomes for the people."

"The partisan nature of the voting in Parliament on the Auckland Council Bill, with ACT and National on one side and Labour, the Greens, and the Maori Party on the other, has created a political rift that destabilises the super city from day one, and combined with the local boards being set up to compete with each other for resources, signals a vast escalation of parochialism and patch protection, something the super city was supposed to eliminate," Mayor Andrew Williams said.

Mayor Andrew Williams said he appreciates the work of select committee chairman John Carter who he believes made an honest attempt to include the views of ordinary ratepayers in the changes made to the bill, only to be overruled by Rodney Hide and his inner cabal.

"When you boil it all down, the governance of this great city will be in the hands of a simple majority on a 20 member council, that's eleven people. So the fate of our city, the services and amenities we all enjoy, the rules that govern the place where we all live, work and play - all one and a half million Aucklanders - rests in the hands of eleven people. By no definition can that be called representative democracy," Mayor Andrew Williams said.

"It will eventually fall to people of good faith who value inclusive democratic local government to fix this 'Frankenstein' of a super city and return the power to where it belongs, back into the hands of the people. Already behind the scenes those close to building Rodney Hide's monster are questioning whether it is possible to even make it work, regardless of the enormous cost."

Mayor Andrew Williams said the deafening silence from North Shore Members of Parliament and Ministers on the super city legislation has not gone unnoticed by North Shore people, many of whom have contacted him to express their concerns.

"People are telling me they feel betrayed and let down by their local Members of Parliament, after having invested so much time and energy to make submissions and attend community meetings in an effort to have their voices heard and listened to. They feel they have been sold down the river by those who are supposed to be representing their interests in Parliament," Mayor Andrew Williams said.

ENDS

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