Hon Jim Anderton

Progressive Party leader
MP for Wigram

14 May 2009
Speech in the House

Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill

This Bill should be renamed the ‘removal of democracy in Auckland” Bill.

What this Bill does is remove the opportunity for Aucklanders to say whether they want their councils replaced or not.

The Local Government Act provides a chance for them to have their say in a referendum.

That’s how it works. You put up a proposal and people can vote it up or down.

If this Super-City structure for Auckland is such a good idea then Aucklanders will vote for it

If it isn’t going to get majority approval, then pass, the government would have to fix it and keep fixing it until it believed Aucklanders would or could vote for it.

But Aucklanders will never get that chance.

We know that the next Bill coming is going to put a fix in to the way the Auckland Super-City Council is to be elected.

The Super-City Council will be effectively stacked.

It will be back to the days when 21 out of 22 councillors were from east of Queen Street.

I remember what that’s like because I was on the council then.

Auckland ran into huge problems because it was stacked with conservative, right wing councilors for generations.

That is why a Ward System was introduced.

Yet this National Government is going back to the failed structures of the past.

Only its worse because they are making it an even bigger potential disaster.

So you would think that most Aucklanders would want to have a say in that.

You would think that voters who live west of Queen Street - the ones who are less likely to vote for the National Party in local government drag - would want a say before their representation was dramatically reduced or even eliminated.

You would think that the voters of South Auckland would want a say before they lose their free swimming pools or the North Shore its rights to have a say in its own future.

But that’s what this Bill does - it removes free swimming pools from South Auckland and any effective say in the future of local communities and the way they are run.

How does it do that? At the moment, entry to the public swimming pools in Manukau City there is free - that’s a good thing, because a lot of kids in South Auckland, unlike a lot of kids in Remuera and Herne Bay - don’t have pools in their backyard.

It’s how they get a chance to learn to swim.

It’s how they get a fair chance to have the childhood a New Zealand kid should get.

But across the rest of Auckland, the pools charge an entry fee.

In Auckland city, out West and on the North shore.

So what do you think is going to happen to free entry to pools in South Auckland?

I can already hear the presumptuous Super-City mayor John Banks giving speeches about why the ratepayers of Auckland City shouldn’t be subsidising the swimming pools of South Auckland.

And there is a point about that - they don’t now. The rate payers of South Auckland subsidise their own pools.

The government is bulldozing through this Bill without beginning to consult Auckland on how issues like this will ever be resolved.

There are hundreds of issues like this - the number of parks per head. You notice there are a lot more parks in the leafy suburbs east of Queen St than there are West of Queen St where most of the children live?

That’s one result of having Auckland’s councils historically elected the way the government wants them elected.

And it’s only going to get worse, because we will hear complaints from the voters of Parnell about paying for parks used by kids in Henderson.

I support strong regional government for Auckland.

I was on the ARA when we bought the regional parks.

I was there when we replaced the entire bus fleet.

Those were great decisions. The problem was the rabbit warrens of rotten boroughs underneath it.

When that was sorted out, the Labour Government in 1989 changed the ARA into the ARC and then in 1992 the National Government split off all the jewels into the ARST with a master plan for selling them all.

It took my party at the time to stop them selling every last asset. They wanted to sell the Port and the Water. What a disaster for Auckland ratepayers that would have been.

We stopped them, and Auckland is reaping the benefit.

What this framework for the super city is about is the privatisers’ secret agenda - take two.

It is like Nightmare on Queen St Part Two. Rodney Rides again.

Does anyone think Rodney Hide and the Act party have set up this Auckland Council to be genuine representatives of greater Auckland’s communities?

Or is it more likely he has set up the best scheme he can think of to privatise the entire public assets of Auckland to which his ACT Party is ideologically committed?

The people of Auckland will cast the final judgment on both the National and ACT Parties for this outrageous piece of community destruction.

ENDS

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