MICHAEL BASSETT: MAKE YOUR LOCAL ELECTIONS MEANINGFUL

Now that candidates are gearing up to contest the coming local elections on 11 October, it’s time to ask them serious questions before you vote. The cost of local government has been rising steeply; ratepayers are being treated like milch cows. What are the candidates prepared to do to control costs? In particular, are they prepared to run a slide rule over staff numbers at the council they are standing for? Are they sure that they couldn’t make the council work with fewer employees who, collectively, are the greatest cost every council has to carry? If they aren’t prepared to do that, then threaten not to vote for them.

For a century now, elected officials have run up the numbers of central and local employees, thinking they are doing the Lord’s work by doing so. In the 1920s central government was quite open about mopping up the rising numbers of unemployed, putting them on to non-jobs and paying for them from general taxation. Robert Muldoon did the same in the 1970s and early 1980s. Mayors especially, love large numbers of council employees who make them feel important.

Starting in the 1930s, the Labour Party began advocating for an amalgamation of small local authorities, pointing out that there were too many town clerks, planning officers and rat catchers, and that ratepayers would benefit if there were fewer. When the huge amalgamation of local authorities took place in October 1989, 817 local authorities throughout the country were reduced to 86. An opportunity presented itself to govern with many fewer council employees. Some new councils acted swiftly. Bruce Anderson, CEO of the amalgamated eleven local boroughs that formed the new Auckland City Council, reduced the total number of employees for the hugely expanded council to almost the same number that he’d previously needed to run the much smaller Auckland City Council. Ratepayers benefited from a more efficient council. Some staff retired, others took redundancy.

By the time the next round of amalgamations took place in 2010 with the formation of Auckland’s Super City, Bruce Anderson had retired. The first two Super City mayors, Len Brown and Phil Goff, were Labour. They forgot – if they had ever known – why Labour historically had favoured amalgamations. No serious effort was made to fine down the size of the new bureaucracy. To a large extent the new council simply amalgamated all the employees of the eight contributing local authorities that came into the new city. That failure in itself has been a large contributor to the high rates that we endure. Lots of staff in make-work positions. And, haven’t they learned how to make work! And to charge for it! More and more permits are required of citizens wanting to renovate their homes. Fees for these consents keep rising steeply too. In many cases the permits and big fees have no more rational explanation than the need to pay the salaries of the surplus council employees. And this is all on top of the wasteful excesses of Auckland Transport. That is an organisation desperately in need of effective council oversight.

I’m convinced that Auckland City today is carrying at least 1,000, possibly 1,500 more employees than it needs to run an efficient operation. I’d be surprised if the problem doesn’t exist in other parts of the country too. Auckland has no patent on stupidity. Of course, the unions will argue against efficiency. They always do. Look at the phoney fuss the Public Service Association is making over the paring back of central government numbers. Jacinda Ardern’s ever-so- “kind” administration put an extra 18,000 people on the state’s payroll, and scarcely a soul noticed any significant improvement in government services. The PSA, of course, loses out on its union fees and will always resist redundancies. They are entitled to grizzle, but their alarms and sob stories should seldom be taken seriously.

Mayors and councillors are required to deliver quality services. Local and central government bureaucrats aren’t cheap. But, money wasted on surplus personnel is money not available for additional roads or footpaths, park maintenance, or new books for the library. As they go amongst the people, talking tough, massaging pressure groups and making promises, candidates need to be reminded that council staff numbers are the biggest single item on council budgets. They need to be regularly subject to scrutiny so that voters can keep as much money as possible in their own pockets.

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