The plans for an Auckland supercity were never to be just parochial plans for JAFAs to worry about. The whole New Zealand economy is driven from Auckland and there will be strong pressure for the organisational structures and the delivery models for local body services here to be replicated around the country. Auckland is already well ahead in local body neo-liberalism and once the plans are developed they will become blueprints for other councils already being railroaded to privatise by ACT’s Rodney Hide. Many of the nastier pieces of neo-liberalism have been successfully resisted elsewhere in New Zealand but to a much lesser extent in Auckland. Whereas other cities have a sense of collective identity and community links which can be mobilised in defence of political attacks, Auckland is a splatter of disjointed and disengaged local groups with no collective heart and no soul.

The Royal Commission which recommended the Supercity structure was established by Labour in the wake of Trevor Mallard’s failure to get Auckland local bodies to agree on his “visionary” waterfront stadium proposal (to replace Eden Parkfor the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Mallard wasLabour’s Minister responsible for planning that event. Instead of Mallard’s “visionary” dream, Eden Park is being renovated for the World Cup. Ed.). Mallard set out to stick it to the existing Auckland local bodies and this coincided with proposals pushed over many years by Auckland business lobbies for a streamlined local body structure which they could control.

So there’s been lively debate going on. However for the most part it’s been a kilometre wide but just a centimetre deep. US commentator Noam Chomsky describes such democratic debate like this: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate”. If Chomsky were viewing the energetic supercity debate he’d recognise his words in action. There has been a lot of heated argument but it has been around the periphery of the issue rather than the substance of what the change actually represents for Auckland.

Rogernomics Part Two

Green MP Sue Kedgely got closest to the truth in May 2009 when she accused Act Party Leader and Minister of Local Government Rodney Hide of staging "Rogernomics part two" by passing a law under urgency to strip Auckland’s local councils of their powers and transferring control to the Auckland Transition Agency (ATA) peopled with Rodney Hide’s cronies. She was right, but Rogernomics part two extends well beyond the transitional agency. The entire concept of the supercity is based around business running the city for the benefit of business. It represents the culmination of a well-orchestrated campaign over several years by the likes of the Employers and Manufacturers Association and the Auckland Chamber of Commerce for control of the region’s local government policy and community assets to the value of some $28 billion. The second round of Rogernomics will really wind up once business interests dominate the region-wide council.

The initial proposal from Labour’s Royal Commission was for six local bodies to be dissolved in favour of a single city which would have 23 seats. Twelve were to be elected locally to reflect the makeup of the local areas they represent (each one about twice the size of a Parliamentary electorate) while eight would be elected at large and would be dominated by the grouping with the resources to run a region-wide campaign. This would be the Citizens and Ratepayers (C&R) grouping backed by big business with John Banks as their candidate for the all-powerful position of Mayor. The last three seats would be for Maori representation.

There has been enough concerted opposition to this corporate power grab that this proposal has been knocked back and the city will instead now have 20 ward-based seats. Maori representation has been ditched despite a valiant fight by the Maori Party. National would have gone along with a compromise and included Maori representation but Rodney Hide was having none of it. As Minister of Local Government he refused to back legislation with Maori representation and John Key backed off. Even so the abandoning of the eight “at large” seats was a significant victory against the New Right juggernaught. The voting system with be FPP (First Past the Post) because the transition agency didn’t want Aucklanders to have to cope with additional changes (we’re easily confused up here apparently – many readers might agree).

STV (Single Transferable Vote) would have been a better system to bring together the kind of consensus leadership this disparate city needs, but. At the head will be the new Mayor with some executive powers and the power to appoint Council committee chairs. ATA has recently announced that services will be controlled by eight CCOs (Council Controlled Organisations). CCOs are the equivalent of State-Owned Enterprises which are owned by the Council but run as profit making entities. If the neo-liberals have their way they will be run under private management contracts. With the CCOs run at arm’s length from the Council there will be a tightly truncated democracy at work. Already Auckland City spends over $800 million each year in contracted out services which are kept hidden from ratepayers because they are “commercially sensitive”. More importantly it seems that it’s the political sensitivity around the fact many Councillors and senior Council staff have close links with the tendering companies which they would not like to be too closely scrutinised.

Stealing From The Poor To Help The Rich

The biggest losers from the CCO provision of services in the supercity will be the low income areas of South Auckland which is currently the biggest portion of the Manukau City Council. Take water supply for example. For many years Manukau City residents have steadfastly refused to adopt so-called user pays charges for water supplies despite two determined attempts by former Mayor Barry Curtis to foist this on the city’s inhabitants. However we have been told already the supercity will have one single supplier of water and wastewater services and this will no doubt be provided on a user pays basis as it is currently in Auckland City via the Metrowater CCO.

Local Manukau residents will now be overruled and user pays charges will be forced on this community where so many are least able to pay. User pays always transfer costs from the rich to the poor. When water and wastewater were separated from rates in the 1990s and the CCO Metrowater was established the total cost of rates and water charges for the most expensive real estate in the city decreased dramatically while the total cost of the same for housing in low income areas increased dramatically. Even in 2009 under the business-run C&R ticket rates on low value property have increased by much higher amounts than rates on high value properties. It’s the Robin Hood principle in reverse wherever you look.

To help prepare the way for privatised water Act Leader Rodney Hide appointed Chief Executive of Watercare Services Limited, Mark Ford, to head the Auckland Transition Agency. Ford is a strong supporter of user pays and the privatised provision of water as in Papakura whose local council contracted out its water services to transnational United Water several years back on a 30 year private contract (United Water was a finalistin the 2001 Roger Award and won a special Egg On Face Award, along with the Papakura District Council. The Judges’ Report is in Watchdog 99, April 2002, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/99/03.htm Ed.). Swimming pools run by Manukau City Council are free to attend. This is unlikely to survive a supercity vote.

Courtesy of Rodney Hide, Mark Ford and the new supercity Mayor, the better off citizens of Auckland’s northern and eastern suburbs will see decreases in their overall rates and water charges while New Zealand’s lowest income families in Manukau will face stiff increases. When the opportunity came to make a submission to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance I proposed voters be given the ability to recall their local candidate if they felt he or she was going against their wishes. If, say, 10% of local voters signed a petition to recall their representative then a referendum would be held to decide if recall was warranted and if so a replacement would be elected. Such a provision would give much greater power to voters and help avoid corporate capture.

Needless to say this proposal was absent from the Commission’s proposals. More importantly the whole concept of democracy has taken a beating in the Commission’s proposal. It has proposed authoritarian powers to an all-powerful Mayor over a single Council and centralised bureaucracy. The two leading mayoral contenders are John Banks, incumbent Auckland City Mayor, and Len Brown, incumbent Manukau City Mayor. Banks will be backed by business and its Citizens and Ratepayers ticket while Brown will be backed by Labour and its City Vision ticket.

Banks is a boorish Rightwinger from way back. He has a deserved reputation for the sale of Auckland community assets and managed to sell half the city’s stake in Auckland Airport and the Council’s housing stock in a previous stint as Mayor. He gives lip service to public transport while driving a business first agenda of roads, roads and more roads. It will be no surprise to readers that Auckland spends more money per head on roads than any other Australasian city and yet becomes more gridlocked by the day.

Banks’ latest effort in 2009 was a deeply earnest television performance where he declared the Council would keep its rate increases to just 5% because “the people out there are hurting”. Two hours later the Council voted to keep the citywide increase to 5% but in the process voted to increase rates on low and middle incomes families by over 10% while Auckland’s millionaires received a rates cut. Brown on the other hand is as close to a “man of the people” as Auckland is likely to see in a generation. He exudes a genuine warmth and is fondly regarded by the poorer citizens of “ South Auckland”. He will be less likely to privatise city assets but has not spoken out

Laila Harre Joins The Team

Earlier in 2009 while the Auckland Transition Agency was struggling to be seen as anything other than a group of Hide’s Rightwing cronies the Agency had a big win in Laila Harre agreeing to take on a human resources role in the transition to the supercity. It was a significant coup for the big business agenda. ATA Executive Chairman Mark Weldon announced her appointment to his “team” and said she would be “ engaged on project work involving human resources and change management”.

Harre comes with Leftwing credentials as a former Alliance MP and Cabinet minister in the 1999–2002 Labour/Alliance coalition Government. After the Alliance imploded she worked for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and more recently as National Secretary of the National Distribution Union (she was a Roger Award judge, including being Chief Judge, for several years recently. Ed.). So why would the Rightwing ATA, dominated by ACT/National appointees want her on board? National was becoming increasingly worried about Aucklanders’ reactions to the local body reforms. Opinion polls were showing all areas of Auckland were either against the proposal itself, the process being used to ram it through, or both. The greatest support came from the current Auckland City area but even there it had just 45% in favour. National rightly worried that if Aucklanders failed to support this major reform then National’s chances of winning the 2011 election would be heavily discounted.

The reform process used initially was a reminder of 1980s’ Labour Finance Minister Roger Douglas whose strategy when pushing through big unpopular reforms was to keep pushing hard and keep moving (because a moving target is harder to hit). Douglas, of course, returned to Parliament at the 2008 election, as an Act MP. John Key refused to make him a Minister, so he remains a Government backbencher. Ed. Act Leader and Minister of Local Government Rodney Hide initially followed the same strategy. Within days of the Royal Commission report being released, major decisions were being made about what would and wouldn’t be acceptable from the Commission’s recommendations, legislation was drafted and passed and a business-friendly ATA established. Within a couple of months we were at the Parliamentary Select Committee stage for the reforms themselves.

All this has produced alarm among Aucklanders. They were deeply suspicious and there is still an intangible underlying feeling that people across the region are being shafted and that big business interests are driving the process. National’s response was to temporarily take Rodney Hide from the spotlight. The last thing they want is what looks like an Epsom-friendly* supercity forced on the whole region by the ACT Leader whose party polled just 3.65% of the popular vote at the last election. National Minister John Carter then fronted the process along with ATA Executive Chairman Mark Ford. *Hide is the MP for the Auckland electorate of Epsom. By dint of winning that one and only seat, Act got five MPs, and did not have to worry about reaching the threshold of 5% of the total vote.This is the most glaring anomaly of the MMP electoral system. Ed.

With this background Laila Harre’s appointment provided ideal political cover – just as the Maori Party does for National on issues such as private prisons (see John’s article “Profiting From Imprisonment: Maori Party Smoothes The Way For Private Prisons” in Watchdog 121, August 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/21/06.htm Ed.). Labour’s appointment of Jim Bolger to head Kiwibank is another good example. It’s more difficult to attack a reform process when well respected figures from “the other side” are involved. Her decision to join the process will have helped ease Aucklanders’ fears.

It was an inspired move to approach her and those involved will be overjoyed she accepted. She will provide political cover which money can’t buy. The agency got the added bonus that she will be the public face of the mass redundancies which will follow. It was a win-win-win for Act/National/business. Harre says she sees it as “an opportunity to make the Auckland Council an excellent workplace”. For those who appointed her it has much greater significance. It’s a sobering thought that a full 25 years after Rogernomics the Right are still on the front foot and local communities are still going backwards. Rogernomics part two is underway.