More mis-management, insist ministers

"More mismanagement please," insists Minister

In 2002 Sandra Lee's Local Government Act took the shackles off local government, and gave them written permission to build monuments and to blow out budgets. Her Act reversed the legal principle that governments may only do what they are legally empowered to do, and instead said they could do what the hell they like unless there was a law to stop them. And so budgets were blown out, monuments were built, and everyone forgot what councils had been originally constituted to do: i.e, that boring stuff like looking after pipes in the ground.

Then in 2010 Rodney Hide super-sized Auckland's Council, and debt ballooned from around $1 billion in total for the 8 councils smashed together (mainly from Manukau and Auckland) to a figure of nearly $15 billion now. And the mandarins now heading the super-sized council added a whole new layer of super-sized egos to run it, or try to, literally hundreds of new six-figure staff there to attend bigger meetings and build bigger monuments. 

So what lesson do you think the Ministers for Resource Management Reform and Local Government, Chris Bishop and Simon Watts, draw from this? 

Are they to insist, in their last few months of government, that Sandra Lee's Local Government Act be reversed, and councils required to go back to their knitting? Back to a better focus, to those pipes in the ground and on rubbish on the streets?

Not a bit of it. Instead these idiots are insisting that all councils take lessons from Auckland's monumental disaster. In what appears to be a last-minute lurch to a headline, they have given councils three months (just this side of the election) to come up with proposals to merge themselves out of existence, and those that do not will have mergers chosen for them by Messrs Watt and Bishop.

And all this while Bishop is making a bollocks of his RMA replacement.

We are led by donkeys. In politics, anyway.

UPDATE: And to reinforce the issue, here's the most recent headline on Auckland's local governance: 

'Nerves on edge as Auckland Council finalises record rate rise in cost of living crisis.' What sane person would look at that and say: "Let's have more of that around the country?"