New councillors’ assurances ring hollow

The idea, we are told, is to empower the ratepayers by delegating to them decisions that affect them. Yet many councilors have been elected on the basis of actions they have said they will undertake for the community; delegation will disempower them….

The problem for rural people is that, having selected councilors they think will be able to represent their needs and views, the delegation process could end up in the hands of a completely different group – one with plenty of good intent and passion, but without the knowledge to make the required decisions.

This is already being seen in Waikato with the Healthy Rivers Plan. Moving inexorably ahead, the plan was passed by Waikato Regional Council only by the casting vote of the chair. Concerns about the employment and economic impact of the plan, and the robustness of the models used to predict outcomes and drive change, are still being voiced. People who feel their businesses are likely to be affected adversely by the plan are now grouping to make submissions to the ‘independent commissioners’ now being appointed for the next step in the process.

At the heart of the debate is that though nobody is voting for an unhealthy river, they do not want to lose about 5000 jobs and $500,000 a year from the Waikato region.

As the science behind some of the projections driving the change is still uncertain, half the council behind the plan did not back it. More time was required, but the council was making its last decision for the term.

The decision to enable community involvement in the next three years is a form of collaborative governance increasingly common where decisions affecting the environment are concerned. A senior lecturer in the department of environmental management at Lincoln University, Dr Ann Brower, has studied the research on whether collaborative environmental governance is good for the environment.

In a paper published in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology earlier this year, she concluded that the process “risks being less than democratic, less than fair, and less than good for the environment”. She observed that the collaborative process has more chance of working when addressing a closed system such as a lake, than an open system such as a river, and indicated that “decisions should be shackled to strong and unambiguous national regulation”.

NZ has the National Policy Statement on Fresh Water Management, with strong and unambiguous ‘national bottom lines’, but the Healthy Rivers Plan is imposing higher standards than those required nationally. And though Dr Brower concluded that without national standards, resource development interests will be favoured over conservation, in the Waikato region the opposite appears to be true.

Another three year term for all councils is ahead and though in most cases the initial settle-down phase is less time-consuming in local bodies than for a national government (since the advent of MMP the politicians have had to sort out which minor parties will be ‘partners’), the term is still only three years. If empowerment through delegation is the new norm, the time for actually doing something action will be much reduced.

Instead of lengthy consultation, where nobody is happy, councilors -- elected because they have the trust of their electorate, based on their knowledge and experience -- should be empowered to make decisions based on facts, evidence and data.

At the same time, perhaps a reconsideration of election term, regionally and nationally, is warranted to allow councils and governments to achieve improvements on behalf of their rate-payers. Other countries have longer terms for a reason: with achievements, track record becomes more important than assurances.

• Jacqueline Rowarth is professor of agribusiness, The University of Waikato.