MEDIA STATEMENT

The current chairman, Chris Laidlaw, will be running again for the Greater Wellington Regional Council this year.

“I have several key objectives that I want to pursue in the next term. The first and arguably the most important of these is to continue rebuilding the relationships among councils in the region which were damaged during the abortive and very wasteful amalgamation debate. There were some hard lessons learned from all of that and most of us now realise that inter-council collaboration is what we need rather than forced amalgamations. There’s no question that we are very interdependent in this region and that if we don’t work together the region’s prosperity and long term sustainability is at risk. I am a collaborationist by instinct and we have made some very promising progress over the last year in developing greater trust and building the foundations for more shared services. We’re about halfway there when it comes to water supply, stormwater and waste water and our combined facility – Wellington Water is progressing well. There are still challenges when it comes to a joined up economic strategy but here too there is real progress. The secret is to clearly agree on what works best at the local level and what we can do better collectively at the regional level. If any amalgamations follow from that then fine – so long as they have the informed consent of the ratepayers concerned.

Second, I want to help build a regional transport plan that tilts the playing field decisively in favour of public transport, walking and cycling, something we simply don’t have at the moment. We’ve transformed the train service and begun to open the way for a full electric bus fleet. We’ve frozen fares and are looking to reduce them further. We need, as a region, to plan more effectively together to create a genuinely 21st century transport network that doesn’t compromise the liveability of Wellington. But all this can’t be done by the regional council alone. We need to engage with the government with a single regional voice, from a position of strength rather than discordant disunity. There are some good signs here. It has been a breath of fresh air to work together with Wellington City and NZTA on a blueprint for the Ngauranga to airport corridor that isn’t simply designed by traffic engineers. Kneejerk, over-engineered, one-off responses are the product of yesterday’s thinking and I want to see that corridor refashioned, fully respecting local urban design principles, and to prepare the way for the next generation of inner city mass transit, preferably light rail.

Third, I want to ensure that the regional council’s natural resources plan is completed in a way that ensures that the region’s natural capital is protected in perpetuity. People sometimes forget that the regional council’s core responsibility is as the guardian of the environment and I take that responsibility seriously. The natural resources plan is a huge undertaking - the product of community inputs and community aspirations when it comes to the big, challenging issues like water quality and availability and it will be the first of its kind in the country, building on both Maori and non-Maori perspectives. I want to continue leading the process of bedding that in.

There are other vital needs that are crying out for regional action. One is a meaningful climate change response. Another is a regional natural hazards strategy. We also need to press ahead with the reinforcement of the resilience of our infrastructure, particularly our water supply, and that is something that is best done regionally with all of the councils in the tent. We need a regional spatial plan as a fundamental building block for rational development. We need to reform the role of the Wellington Regional Strategy Committee into a genuine future-proofing body drawing on the best talent we have in the region. At the moment that body is going nowhere, another casualty of the amalgamation fallout.

Over the last year I have been in constant dialogue with the mayors and councils in the Wairarapa with a view to creating a better functional relationship between the regional council and the three Wairarapa councils and the Local Government Commission has taken its cue from that work. We’ve entered a new era in relations between the Wairarapa and the rest of the region and we all stand to gain from that. The new agreement to market our wines from around the region under a regional Wellington banner is testament to that.

Many people are unsure exactly what the regional council is there for and what it does that local councils can’t. The answer to that is pretty simple. We are in the business of future-proofing our physical and human environment on a wider scale and with a longer term view. Harmonising the local with the regional can’t be done if the relationships between councils – and personalities -aren’t working well.

Without that new harmony, we remain in shallow, point-scoring, conflict mode and Wellingtonians have had more than enough of that. They want to see us working together. Building a broader consensus around the division of effort between local and regional activity is where all my energy in the next term will be focussed.”

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