Rodney Hide still defending the indefensible

He’s back: The man who sold out a city's ratepayers for the sake of ministerial power, and all-but destroyed a political party in the process.

Rodney Hide took all of ACT’s declining credibility and bet it on the losing horse of super-sizing Auckland council amalgamation—so bad a bet he had to leave the city, ashamed to show his face in front around the ratepayers he shat on. Yet he’s back this week, flogging that same dead horse, telling punters in the face of the abundant evidence to the contrary appearing in every spiralling rates demand they receive that “nothing has changed,” and at the same time that all the changes are “under the hood.”

Apparently service is better, infrastructure is better, bylaws are better, and now every new home has a pony. Sadly, there are nowhere near enough new homes. Partly because of the planners’ plans being written by Rodney’s super-sized and wholly unaccountable council planners…

Housing affordability measures are an excellent ‘test’ of how well local government is performing and coping with growth [points out Hugh Pavletich] …
    Around the time of the Auckland Councils amalgamation, 3rd Qtr 2010 data ( 2011 7th Annual Demographia Housing Survey) shows that Auckland housing was then 6.4 times household earnings …
    http://www.demographia.com/dhi2011.pdf
    … and by the 3rd Qtr last year, as this year’s 11th Annual Demographia Housing Survey illustrates, Auckland housing had hit 8.2 times household earnings …
    http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf
    … with Auckland’s housing inflation exploding these past 12 months by 25.4% from a median price of $615,000 through to $771,000 … near 10 times annual household earnings.
    What this means is that the young couple on say $100,000 a year could expect at the time of amalgamation to pay $640,000 to house themselves … but now it is close to a million dollars.

As commenters say in replies to the odious prick’s self-serving Herald puff-piece …

Rodney Hide sold the idea of super-sizing council as delivering smaller council, greater efficiencies and lower rates. Every promise has proved disastrously wrong. The myth-making continues: “We didn't just push eight councils together,” says Hide. “We disestablished eight councils and built a new one. Nothing like it has ever been attempted in Australia or New Zealand.”

Well, yes it had been tried before: in Brisbane. And in Adelaide. And just like Auckland’s council amalgamation, they were disasters.

And it had been tried before in New Zealand, by Michael Bassett, delivering the same result as this amalgamation: not disestablishing eight sets of councils and their staff, but building a whole new set of council parasites on top – with egos, power-trips and huge rates bills to match.

Hide has learned nothing and forgotten everything.

If he had simply remained as the perk-buster who turned poacher he could have simply remained just another political joke. That he instead had the power-trip that saddled us with Len Brown’s super-shitty super-sized council bills means he deserves only contempt.

I suggest you punch him next time you see him. Punch him hard.

RELATED POSTS:

• Making Auckland safe for Len Brown
• Rodney’s ‘My Fair Lady’ clause
• Questions on Auckland not answered
• Owen McShane on the ‘Super’ City
• “Auckland Council execs work with stunning views”
• Let them eat monuments
• One city, one neck, one noose
• And the country's most indebted council is …
• Planning” to stop Aucklanders plan
• When will they withdraw council's “powers of general competence
• Job losses predicted at Auckland Council
• Auckland grandomania ever-more costly
• So why would you want to amalgamate councils ...
• The Taniwha Tax: coming to a home near you
• Monumental council debts
• Hugh Pavletich blames the incompetent council. But who’s really to blame?
• Super? Shitty!
• An affordable Auckland even further away
• 'Super' city, uber state: "Just say NO!"
• Effects of Auckland uber-city already being felt
• Who pays for Len Brown?
• Emancipating govt, enslaving free men
• The Rodney that super-sized your rates

Len’s “living wage” has a ripple the size of a tsunami

Alan: Hey, great news.
Bruce: What’s that?
Alan: Larry’s getting a raise—up from $600 to $730 a week!
Bruce: Larry? You mean Larry Larry? For what he does?
Alan: Yeah. Living wage mate.
Bruce: But … but … that means he’s pulling down more than I am! And I’m supposed to be above his pay grade.
Alan: Yeah, shitty news, eh.
Bruce: I’m off to see HR.

If Len Brown is successful in his proposal to pay low-paid council workers a “living wage” of $18.40 per hour, that conversation above will he happening around every water cooler in all the many council buildings around the super-sized city.

Red Len reckons paying low-paid council workers a “living wage” of $18.40 per hour will cost nothing, just $3.75 million reckons Len—chickenfeed for a mayor who overspends hundreds of millions and borrows in the billions to pay for it.

But worry not, says Len, the $3.75 million cost will “be paid for through savings in other parts of the council.” 

Yeah right.  Tell me the last time Len saved you money.

But Len’s figure, that $3.75 million number, based only on what it will cost to pay 550 employees a bit more, ignores completely the very real knock-on results of paying those 550 more.

First of all, it ignores what happens to Bruce if Larry is paid more. If Larry Low-Paid is paid more, then Bruce wants to be paid more to keep rank. And there are a lot more Bruces than there are Larrys, who are being paid already just that much more. And a whole lot more just above Bruce who will want to  keep their pay rank as well. And so on, and so on, all the way up, as the effects of the first “living wage” raise ripple through the system.

Add on several million more to ratepayers’ bills to pay for those pay rises too, not to mention all the disruptions of all those heated HR meetings by council “workers” keen to keep their place in the pay scale.

Second, every new employee is going to want more too. And this is a council determined to expand.  So add on a whole lot more millions to Len’s fictional 3.75. Not to mention how every employee for every one of the council’s many contractors is going to feel about this. (Expect the cost of every council contract to go up to pay for those wage rises too.)

And what about its effect around the rest of the city? The council is already becoming one of the biggest employers around this super-sized city, so if council is paying more for all its “workers” (which will be the nett result of starting to pay lower-paid workers more) then everyone else will have to as well, or else the over-paying council will be bidding employees away from every other employer in the city. And if those other employers do want to hire employees, or keep the ones they’ve got, as a result of Len’s “this-will-cost-nothing” largesse they’ll need to pay them more as well.

So the nett effect of paying low-paid council workers more will ripple through all of council first, raising wages as it goes, and thence will ripple through the rest of the super-sized city, all the way through until it eventually affects all employers everywhere. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, by the time that small increase in a few  council pay-packets ripples through everywhere, it has turned from a ripple to a tsunami.

Which eithers raise prices everywhere to pay for all those higher wages, or it reduces employment everywhere to allow employers to afford the higher wage bill. Or both.

In both cases, it will raise prices.

And you know the funny thing. When prices do go up to a level sufficient to cover the costs of all these nominal wage rises, and all those price increases ripple through, it will be found that the real wage that employees now get will be the same (or less) than it was before the “living wage” increase.

In other words, no-one will be better off than before.

And those who are now priced out of a job, being unable to produce more than $18.40 an hour for an employer, will all be very much worse off. (As will the taxpayers, who will have to carry them too.)

Frankly, none of this should surprise anyone. Because unlike every other wage, this so-called “living wage” is based not on how much an employee can produce, but on how much that employee can spend.

Which is to get your causality backwards.

Not that any of this will bother advocates of this so-called “living wage,” because those instigating the “living wage” campaign are not primarily motivated by making the lives of low-paid workers better. It is to enlist them in a campaign of class warfare.

In other words, it’s about politics, not economics.

Which, oddly enough, is where lies one of the solutions to the problem of low wages. In government. Because the best way government can help poorer workers is to cut their tax bill.

If Len is genuine about helping low-paid workers, then let Len go and talk to John about that.

Auckland: The mongrel now has momentum.

It won’t matter which mayor you vote in next year, the super-sized council is now off and running, and it will take a bigger man than Phil Goff or any of those other muppets mentioned to rein it in. The mongrel now has momentum.

Writing last week about Rodney Hide’s defence of his indefensible Auckland city mash-up, I suggested that rather than disestablishing eight sets of councils and their staff, his amalgamation instead built a whole new set of council parasites on top – with egos, power-trips and huge rates bills to match. It’s not a small, efficient organisation that he delivered, but a Frankenstein with an extra, larger head tuned solely towards absorbing more power.

There’s a few ways to think about the extra head.

A commenter at TradeMe picked up the theme, linking to a report last year:

Meanwhile, we hear Auckland City has more than 1500 people who are paid more than $100,000 per annum. In recent years I have lost a couple of corporate people to “jobs at the council.” I couldn’t believe what they were getting paid then and I can’t now. And these are not the top-drawer people; they are actually pretty average. 
    A quick glance at the annual reports of five of the companies listed on the NZX top 10 (Contact Energy, F&P Healthcare, Ryman, SkyCity and Sky TV) reveals they have just 1387 people who are paid more than $100,000 per annum between them – in total!

These people are there for life. They can’t afford to leave.

Here’s another way to think about it.

Meanwhile, the new building the super-sized council head now occupies –the former ASB building at 135 Albert St—is largely in addition to its portfolio before amalgamation. The building cost you and I over $100m to buy, and where before the building hosted investment companies managing hundreds of billions of dollars of assets out of, perhaps, half a floor, we now have council bigwigs occupying all 29 floors -- 2400 bigger-council staff in total eating their lunch there, with many of those 1500 highly-paid but pretty average people among them.

Here’s yet another way to think about the extra head.

Before amalgamation of Auckland’s borough councils in 1989, if you wanted a decision about your bins or your water or your house, you strolled along to your local borough council and chatted to someone at the counter who knew your house, knew your street, and could probably make a decision there and then,

After amalgamation of those borough councils, if you wanted a decision then you could certainly chat to someone, but the person making the decisions was upstairs, and very important, and you could only get to speak to them by appointment.

It’s even worse after Rodney Hide’s amalgamation of the city councils. If you want a decision now, you’re chatting to someone who’s several layers down the hierarchy, who’s never even seen your part of the city on a map, and the person making the decision is several floors up in a flash new building, and so, so important you’re only ever going to see the tailpipe of their council car taking them off to another important lunch.

Because this extra new layer has an ego the size of Len Brown’s rates demands.

And the problem will still exist whichever muppet Auckland voters make mayor next year.

Racism doesn’t come cheap

The Auckland Council's new race-based Independent Maori Statutory Board, set up under Rodney Hide's super-sized city council legislation to "advise" the new Council, is instead going to take it to court—demonstrating concisely the role it plans for itself in the new structure: as an expensive race-based thorn in the side of Auckland’s new body politic.

Board chairman David Taipari—who had clearly been looking forward to disposing of of $5.4 million over twenty months will instead have to manage on only $3 million—insists that Rodney Hide’s law requires that ratepayers “meet the board's reasonable costs.” The first cost ratepayers will begin meeting is the cost of the board’s lawyers.

Marvellous, don’t you think?

But it gets better.

An outraged John Tamihere, who’s scored himself the lucrative role of Funding and Planning Committee Chairman for the new super-sized Council, told Morning Report this morning this was “the first time Maori had the right to participate in a council,” and it would brook no dissent—saying the Maori Board was determined if necessary to “relitigate” the legislation setting it up.

Tamihere is a self-serving fuckwit.

This is not the first time Maori have been given racial preference in law to interfere with a council’s business. The Hamilton and Porirua City Councils and the Marlborough District Council all have set up mechanisms by which racial interference can be effected, and the Bay of Plenty Regional Council has since 2001 reserved three race-based council seats for Maori.

And the sorts of threats Tamihere and Taipari are throwing around make it clear the sort of role they see for the un-elected Board.

And that’s not simply to issue “advice,” is it. No, this is, for them, a real race-based power grab. One for which money (yours) is no object. Mike Lee explains the issue, in case you’ve missed it:

Mike Lee … said what happened would influence the constitutional development of the country.

This issue is that important.

Yes it is.

He does mean it.

So let us pause for a moment to thank the legislators, politicians and intellectuals over many years who have so naively made it all possible.

And thank especially those braindead morons who wrote this recent legislation.

An affordable Auckland even further away

Aucklanders were sold the Super-Sized City on the basis of promised "efficiencies" and putative cost savings. With the arrival in their letter boxes this week of their rates bills, Aucklanders will for the first time see for themselves how effective these "cost savings" have been.

Fact is, there have been no savings. The costs have all been the other way.

For some Aucklanders, their rates increase will be more than ten percent—and with the promises doled out in the Super-Sized Council's super-sized Ten Year Plan, it's clear this will be a year-on-year increase.

Ten percent this year.

Ten percent next year.

Ten percent the year after, and every year thereafter for the foreseeable future...

For this disaster, there are several people to thank:

• Mayor Brown for having an ego the size of the super-sized city, with plans to match.
• Rodney Hide, for pushing through the farce.
• John Key, for making him.

Aucklanders should vent their rage in whatever way they can.

If Auckland is ever to be an affordable city, one place to start is with the size of their rates bill. A simple fact of which those responsible for this super-sized debacle are still wholly ignorant.

More mismanagement, please, ministers demand

"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 heading the new super-sized council immediately 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 the 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?"

It takes a minister ...

It’s clear: “Super” city will mean super-sized spending

Bridge or tunnel? Tunnel or bridge?  The debate over which, and how many, reveals just how Auckland city’s politicians think about the “super” council they’d all like to lead.

North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams was the most effusive. offers the very worst reason: he favours a tunnel over a bridge even with the extra $2 billion or so price tag, saying “the extra expense involved in building a tunnel would be worth it” for New Zealand’s first ‘super” city.

Which tells you as much about the spending rectitude of Auckland’s “super” city politicians as you need to know – that spending decisions for the “super” city are going to be based on grandomania rather than prudence – that satisfying politicians’ super-sized egos will take precedence over satisfying ratepayers’ cries for their pockets not to be picked – that, in short, a “super” city is going to mean nothing for Auckland’s ratepayers so much as a super-sized spending bill.

Which is just what the ratepayers of Auckland, Manukau, Papakura, Franklin, North Shore, Waitakere and Rodney are crying out for, right?

Think your rates bill is big now? Just wait until it’s super-sized!

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure

RUSHED LEGISLATION HAS CAUSED much damage over many years. Rodney Hide’s rushed super-sized council legislation—whose lack of clarity is now giving cockroaches space in which to feed—is only the latest, and a particularly egregious, example.

As an eager new local government minister, Rodney Hide wanted to get things done. What he was told to do was to super-size Auckland’s councils—and he took to the job like a new puppy with his first bone. A puppy whose eyes had yet to form.

Dear Rodney was so violently opposed to any idea of an elected race-based Board on his new super-sized Auckland Council that he threatened to resign on the issue.   But since he so desperately wanted to get things done, the excited minister rushed through his first piece of legislation in all of his fifteen years in parliament … which called for his new council to set up an appointed race-based Board.

What a dickhead.

That’s a change from bad to f’ing awful.

Nearly half-a-million ratepayer dollars to be paid to a Browntable full of racially-appointed troughers, simply to give effect to an idea of race-based political “partnership” that is both disgusting and historically indefensible.

And it was this local government minister and ACT Party leader that made it possible.

Yes, Virginia, I did say historically indefensible.

No, Virginia, there is nothing in the Treaty mandating any kind of political “partnership” or racial power-sharing.

Yes, Virginia, as both local government minister and ACT Party leader Rodney is responsible.

AUCKLAND’S STATUTORY MAORI BOARD would not even exist were it not for Rodney’s legislation and the destructive ideas of “biculturalism” and race-based political “partnership”—and where these notions came from was the result of rushed legislation several years ago by yet another ACT Party luminary.

Take a bow Richard Prebble.

Like Hide, Prebble was excited to get his feet around the cabinet table.  And so excited was he to “get things done” that when he wrote his legislation allowing the streamlining and easy sale of state assets (i.e., the State-Owned Enterprises Act), to quieten down the race-based dissent the sales caused he and his colleague Geoffrey Palmer simply inserted into their legislation the phrase “principles of Treaty of Waitangi,” insisting that “decision-makers” must have regard to these without ever defining what these principles were.

So much for the political acumen of these two. (“In the course of a relatively few years,” said a woefully misguided Palmer for example, “most of the outstanding issues in this area will be settled. Most of the claims now are known…” )

Because problem was, to this day no-one knows with any kind of clarity what these “principles” are supposed to be.  They were a legal fiction waiting for litigants to quarry in an attempt to make their fortune—which they did, in their droves—and a poison that soon infected every piece of legislation written since.

What that poison did—as subsequent court cases quietly morphed these “principles” into something even more lucrative for the lawyers—was to transfer the Treaty’s clear promise of protection of ownership into the sort of vague, indefinable stuff that lawyers love and other cockroaches can feed off.

In evoking “principles” that didn’t exist, it created a Treaty that never did.

It set the platform for a whole generation of young people to join the Grievance Industry and become, as virtually their sole occupation, professional Maoris. (Which is the the only “profession” the new occupants of Rodney’s race-based Board actually have.)

Even more damaging, it quietly transformed the idea of self-ownership of one’s own resources (as promised by the Treaty) into the idea of shared political management, by race, of everyone’s resources (which was never countenanced in the Treaty at all).  This was the notion of race-based “partnership” that over the last few decades has become the fuel of fully-fledged legal separatism—and the legal fuel on which Auckland’s new Statutory Board will rely when they get to the High Court.

Just a few years after the gravy train was well and truly rolling, then Minister of Injustice Doug Graham mellifluously opined that  “The sooner we realise there are laws for one and laws for another, the better.”

Richard Prebble certainly got things done. What he should have done however is get things right.

How ironic that it will be his blunder as minister that will hasten the demise of his successor as party leader.

ACT leader whimpers about ACT leader

ACT LEADER DAVID SEYMOUR IS outraged that Auckland Council plans to set up a co-governed committee to manage the Waitākere Ranges. "Auckland Council’s plan to set up a co-governed committee to manage the Waitākere Ranges shows why Kiwis need councillors who believe in democracy," says ACT Leader David Seymour.

Democracy.

“The Waitākere Ranges belong to all Aucklanders [says the ACT leader] and should be managed democratically. But Auckland Council’s plan would see unelected decision-makers closing tracks and dictating land use in the surrounding rural areas."

Dictating.

“The ranges are governed under the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area Act," notes the ACT leader. And the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area Act calls for a "Deed of Acknowledgement" recognising and giving power to tangata whenua. If the ACT leader has a problem with the Deed of Acknowledgement and the giving of power then — since it's the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area Act that requires the acknowledgement and gives such power — then it's the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area Act that he has a problem with.

One can only imagine that the ACT leader then was just as outraged.

Minister for Local Government, 2008-11

Except ... it should be further noted that the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area Act was introduced by the Minister for Local Government in 2008, and brought into law in April 2008. And that ACT leader was himself Minister of Local Government for three years from 2008 to 2011, in which he had ample opportunity to amend the Act.

He didn't.

Ample opportunity to restrict the powers of  local government to those in which it enjoyed a "general competence."

He didn't.

What did he do instead?

Oh, that's right. He spent his time, ego, and rapidly dwindling political capital on super-sizing Auckland's already tumescent council, all but ensuring citizens' rates bills would be equally super-swollen.

Dictating to Aucklanders how their "democracy" would work.

Local government in New Zealand exists because central government created it, and grants it powers. Instead of drastically shrinking the power of local government, as an ACT leader should have done, that ACT leader instead awarded this super-sized council many more. Including the power — nay, the necessity — to set up a co-governed committee to manage the Waitākere Ranges. 

It's a bit late now to watch this ACT leader whimpering about it.

So why would you want to amalgamate councils anyway?

There are many lessons that could be drawn from super-sizing Auckland’s council. I’m astonished that one of them from different parts of the country is still “let’s do that too.”

What? Are they blind?

Sure the bureaucrats’ bureaucrats at the Local Government Commission are always going to want more power for bureaucrats. Why wouldn’t they?

But why would a ratepayer, a home-owner, a would-be builder (to take just a few) want to replicate in their own places the disaster Rodney Hide and John Key bequeathed to Auckland?

So thank goodness that the push to amalgamate councils around Northland and Wellington are off the table. For now.

So it’s just Hawkes Bay that’s currently under threat – where plans will proceed “unless 10% of a current Council’s population call for a referendum.” (Get onto that people. Now.)

Aucklanders were sold the Super-Sized City on the basis of promised "efficiencies" and putative cost savings. That canard should be shoved back up Rodney Hide’s arse along with Aucklanders’ pole-vaulting rates bills.

Auckland’s cost blow-outs are only a symptom of the big problems with amalgamation. Here’s one problem that’s compounded by amalgamation: The oxymoronic “power of general competence” granted all councils by the 2002 amendments to the Local Government Act, enabling already over-extended bureaucrats and planners to expand into new areas totally outside their limited areas of competence.a big cause of all the rest.

And that, with amalgamation, unleashed a major power: the Power of Big Egos.

Let me tell you a story about that. Let’s go back to 1985, before Michael Bassett amalgamated borough councils, and you want to add a carport to your house.You go to your local borough council office, talk to a chap or chappess who knows your street and can virtually tell you then and there what you need to do, and what council’s decision will be.  If you’re not already talking to the chap who will be making that decision, that person is probably only one office away – and you can talk to them if you want.

Fast forward to 2005, and the chap or chappess you’re talking to barely knows your street, and the person making the decision is on the next floor – and you can talk to them, maybe if you make an appointment. See, that person is suddenly “important.” And they do a lot of meetings.

And now, in 2015, and you want to add a carport to your house … you talk to someone with no knowledge of your area, little knowledge of your issue, no ability to make a decision – and the person actually making the decision is on the top floor. They’re “very important.” They write policy. They have meetings. They attend conferences – many of them. And they’re a whole new layer of parasites on top 0f the layer that began emerging after Bassett’s blunder.

These are people with egos. Real egos, with salaries and well-appointed corner offices to match.

And egos don’t build or restore multi-million-dollar infrastructure; they build multi-billion dollar monuments – and then have the arrogance to send you the bill.

Instead of “rolling out” more super-sized councils, we should instead be dismantling the one we have.

RELATED POSTS:

• ‘Auckland effect’ scuppers more amalgamations – JO HOLMES

A mayoralty, if you’re interested.

On Monday, Victoria Crone announced she would be standing for the Auckland mayoralty and, as the former NZ CEO of high-flyer Xero, was immediately installed by the media as the "business" candidate.

Mind you, being the business candidate doesn't mean you really mean business—nor that running a successful business is  the same as being top dog at a super-sized council spending the proceeds of everyone else's super-sized rates bill.

Even Labour-ite adviser Josie Pagani understands that, pointing out that

If you’re going to stand for political office the minimum requirements must surely include some rationale for your candidacy. You want to do the job because you see a job needing doing. You need to have something sensible to say about topical issues and some guide to what you expect to do in office.
     If you don’t have these minimum contributions to debate, then your candidacy is pointless.

Victoria Crone does not have these minimum contributions to debate. At her launch, she was wholly unable to articulate an actual concrete position on anything, saying in answer to questions on specifics she had "just announced yesterday" so "I'm not getting into policy." That would all come “later.” Translation: “I’ve given it no thought. But I am sort of interested.” [Listen here to her being interviewed, if you're at all interested.]

And on her website, where you might expect at least some answers to some of the big issues? Pagani visited Victoria Crone’s website  to see what she plans for Auckland, "only to find my low expectations wildly overestimated."

There’s about as much substance here as Kanye West’s run for president. She wants to ‘Create Win-Win Situations’, ‘Empower People’ and ‘Lead From A Place of strength’; as if she’s running against a candidate who wants to lose, take power away from you, and be a weak leader.
    Beneath the blandly moronic motivational platitudes  - “I believe anything is possible! (insert emoji) - she lists ‘Issues’: B is for ‘Housing', C is for ‘Transport’. Maybe they’ve changed Sesame Street since I was young.
    These summaries reveal a candidate unprepared for office, lacking vision, and free from any meaningful communication of useful ideas…
    Take ‘A' for 'Fiscal Management’. Correctly observing that many billions of dollars are needed to meet Auckland’s infrastructure needs, while funding sources like rates and debt are constrained, she offers: "few alternative sources of funding have been secured. This is a major problem for our city to solve, amidst perceptions of wastage in council spending.” Yes it’s a problem, so, what would you do, candidate? Reject new spending plans? Borrow more? Are you ruling out rate increases? Will you raise rates just a teeny bit? New taxes? Tolls? Privatising infrastructure?
    Not even a hint of an idea, let alone a fresh one. That’s what makes the platitudes a problem. If you can't answer these most basic of questions about your political principles, you have no place pretending you could lead a major city

It’s a fair point—except to say that every Mayor in Auckland in Auckland in the modern era has achieved the mayoral chains not because they’ve articulated anything at all about their political principles. They’ve simply said they won’t be the last blowhard who held office.

• Christine Fletcher took office promising not be Les Mills, and she succeeded.
• John Banks then took office promising not be Christine Fletcher—but was found to be far too much like John Banks, and so was turfed out.
• So Dick Hubbard campaigned on the basis of not being John Banks, only for the public to realise that he really was a real Dick Hubbard.
• At which point John Banks won by promising to be neither Dick Hubbard nor the previous John Banks (this was now the new-improved “transmogrified” John Banks), which turned our much as anyone could have predicted.
• Swiftly realising he wasn’t anywhere as transmogrified as they’d hoped, folk then thought “anyone but Banks” and very quickly found themselves enthusiastically ticking Len Browns’s box. And we all know how that box-tickling turned out.

Which brings us back to A, B, C: Crone—who may or may not have a political principle in her body, but who assuredly has a war chest big enough to tell the city she’s not Len Brown (or Phil Goff), which may be all much of this city really wants to hear before they put pen to voting paper.

Mind you, it would be good to hear at least one candidate of any “side” make the firm, cast-iron promise that they intend to either lower rates below the absurdly high level they are now, or even just to cap them in money terms.

The closest any candidate does come to saying that is Affordable Auckland mayoral candidate Stephen Berry, who apart from also being neither Brown nor Goff al agrees that Voters Deserve Specifics on Rates. But all he can come up with as a pledge is to “keep rates increases below inflation” – which, given their explosive increase in recent years, is like a strangler promising only to suffocate you more slowly.

And even Phil Goff can almost match that, telling Morning Report, "There is a limit to rate increases, and I think we've reached that limit."

To be fair, and unlike Berry, Goff provides few concrete examples of how rates increases might in any way be "limited." But slow suffocation is not any kind of promise on which to hang your mayoral hat.

Peters, and the path to separatism: It has been long mapped out

WINSTON PETERS ACHIEVED HEADLINES (his only aim) for arguing at Orewa that National's proposed Resource Management Act (RMA) changes will take NZ down a path of separatism.

Maybe he hasn’t noticed that we’ve following that path for some decades – and not just in planning law.

The NZ First leader said that under the new RMA bill, every council would be required by law to invite local iwi to participate in the formulation of policy plans, including water management plans…
    National had also backed away from reforming sections six and seven of the RMA, which set out environmental bottom lines.
    "It is obvious that National have been brownmailed into making policy concessions to the Maori Party. They were bent over a barrel and, not surprisingly, didn't have the backbone to stand up to them.
    "The proposed changes to the RMA are a signal flare to the entire country that the two parties are taking us down the track of separatism. We are no longer one people. We are moving towards two separate groups with separate rights."

This is true. Sections six and seven form part of the “heart” of this egregious Act. National had originally proposed adding the RMA’s first reference to private property rights; removing consideration of so-called “amenity values” and “intrinsic values of ecosystems”; and weakening the ill-defined consideration of “kaitiakitanga” that helps make iwi “guardians” of land they no longer own. Under pressure from the Maori Party and Peter Done-Nothing, they backtracked.

And proposed in the Bill are now so-called “Iwi participation arrangements” that make explicit what has been implicit for some time: that iwi are becoming “partners” with council planners in telling you what you can and can’t do on your own land.

Under the Bill [explained Audrey Young in the Otago Daily Times back in November], every council within a month of being elected will be required to invite the relevant iwi authority to take part in devising an agreement about how they will take part in plans or policy statements of the council… The proposal will be a lightning rod for those who see any consultation with Maori as special treatment.

That last observation couldn’t be more true.

Audrey Young however points out that “the irony of Mr Peters' objections to the Maori Party's plans for iwi participation”: “were it not for him, the Maori Party would not have had the bargaining power to get [the iwi participation arrangements] in the RMA Bill.” Interesting then that Prime Minister Key now suggests with Peters’s support he could “wind back” these consessions.

PETERS IS RIGHT TO say this is separatism. He is wrong to think it is anything new.

In my chapter in the recent book One Treaty, One Nation (available at all good booksellers), I point out that separatism is nothing new; it has been a growing part of New Zealand planning law—a process that accelerated in the last two decades with the introduction of the Resource Management Act.

I’lll post some excerpts here, starting my story in the University of Auckland School of Planning, where many of those now writing and agreeing to so-called “iwi planning documents” first learned their trade.

Nearly twenty years ago I sat in a lecture at the University of Auckland School of Planning (a place wherein planners’ authority to dictate to property-owners is wholly unquestioned), being lectured at by senior lecturer Hirini Matunga about future progress in “indigenous planning” (“a parallel planning system,” we were told, “grounded in indigenous knowledge, processes and institutions”). Law around the Treaty of Waitangi, said Matunga, currently only recognised an “Anglo-American” concept of property rights; to cement further progress it was important to erect “Maori rights to manage resources.”

To make the point explicit, what was poposed as “progress” over the next two decades would be the erection of “a parallel planning system” that in rejecting the so-called “Anglo-American’ concept of property rights” it would be made possible to “manage” other people’s property.

The Resource Management Act and the ‘tikanga’ already embodied was only the first step, students heard. The next was to gain political power through planning legislation for so-called “iwi planning documents,” and thence to so-called “rangatiratanga” (a “right to self-sufficiency and self-determination”).
    Twenty years later, the students at that lecture are now writing the country’s planning documents – and what’s in them should be no surprise.

“Maori tribal planning documents are now an indelible part of New Zealand’s planning landscape,” enthused Hirini Matunga [two decades later], teacher now to two generations of planners and currently head of Māori & Indigenous Development at Lincoln.
    The “struggle” has been a steady one, beginning from the first time planners gained power over property-owners with the first Town Planning Act of 1926. Major milestones in the process were passed with the Town & Country Planning Act of 1977 (making the relationship between Maori and “ancestral lands” a “matter of national planning importance”); continuing with the 1985 Waitangi Tribunal recommendation for a “comprehensive review” of planning and resource legislation that recognised Maori interests as being independent of property ownership; being further extended with the 1987 declaration in the High Court that “cultural relationships existed irrespective of title”…; through the addition of “waahi tapu” to the protections afforded by the Historical Places Act; to the Resource Management Act itself and its subsequent amendments that built in all this mush and began to turn it towards the goal of plunder.

The result, said Matunga in 2006, is that “for the first time in the world [there are clauses in a major planning document that] give statutory recognition to a parallel planning system grounded in indigenous knowledge, processes and institutions.”

Remember, this is separatism. And he says it like it is a good thing.

Remember, even without the provisions now proposed by the Maori Party, Act already

contains [at the heart of the Act all] the obligatory Tiriti-babble. You are counselled by the Act that when doing anything more aggressive than mowing your lawn you “shall take into account the principles of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi” – and to this day the country has yet to find a court willing or able to explain precisely how that might be done, nor a politician willing to acknowledge that the Treaty was intended to impose obligations only on Treaty signatories, not on councils nor on private land-holders.

And note that National had not proposed to remove that imposition.

Note also that

the [original] 1991 RMA legislation also required that authorities “have regard to” so-called Iwi Planning Documents, the “parallel planning system” in which our friend at the Auckland Planning School held out such hope. In a 2003 amendment, this language was strengthened to mean that “decision makers” are legally required to “take into account” these Iwi Documents.
    Which is precisely what Auckland Council’s “planners” did [for example] when drawing up their super-sized council’s new “Unitary Plan.” And which is precisely what every planner in every other region of New Zealand will be required to do when they next draw up their own new Planning Documents, which they are legally required to do at reasonably regular intervals…

TWO DECADES AGO NATIONAL’S now-disgraced Minister of Treaty Capitulations Doug Graham told New Zealanders: “The sooner we realise there are laws for one and laws for another, the better." At a meeting in 2013, Professor John Burrows and Tipene O’Regan talked about the Key Government’s Constitutional Review, on which they are panellists, where O’Regan announced “there are ‘big changes’ ahead in terms of how we are governed.” …
    The overt changes feared as an outcome of that Constitutional Review may be less important than these covert changes described above that have been effected over several decades by determined activists inside the planning tent.
    And in their train have come further innovations, such as section 85 of the National/ACT Government’s Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009 that “allowed the Independent Maori Statutory Board to appoint a maximum of two persons to sit as members on each of the Council's committees that deal with the management and stewardship of natural and physical resources. These members are unelected, with full voting rights alongside our democratically elected councillors.”

If round about now you feel like saying “we’re moving towards co-governance here,” then feel free.

The activists have been explicit.

Two decades ago that senior planning lecturer handed us a roadmap whose endpoint was “a review of the RMA to provide for rangatiratanga,” making it possible for iwi leaders to “manage” other people’s property.

A 2011 roadmap published by another academic* now sees the endpoint of activism as “explicit devolution of power to Maori,” with “co-management” of other people’s property by government and iwi leaders; “exclusion [of iwi] from control by regulatory regimes; and, finally and explicitly, “Maori veto powers” over all development in the country.

So you see, “iwi participation agreements” are only another station on that journey begun some decades ago—and certainly a very far cry indeed from our “Anglo-American’ concept of property rights

One important question now then would be: does Peters genuinely wish to help those trying to derail that train? Or merely to score another easy headline.

His response to Key’s offer then will be telling.

---

* Appearing in S.G. Wevers’s 2011 Otago University thesis at the Faculty of Law, Recognising Rangatiratanga: Sharing Power with Maori through Co-Management, p. 22

Mayoral candidates to ratepayers: “Let them eat monuments”

 

In the old days to win a mayoral election a candidate had to promise bribes and monuments costing in the millions. Now, that wouldn’t even get you into the debates. Now, to head Auckland’s super-sized council bureaucracy, you have to make promises costing ratepayers billions – Victoria Crone to build bridges, Phil Goff for new train sets, John Palino for satelite cities somewhere.

Promises costing billions at a time when the city’s debt, $7.6 billion and rising, has never been higher!

The debt is unprecedented. And not one of them has a plan or any intention to bring it down.

Rates are at an all-time high, and rising – and the council is borrowing hand over fist to keep spending rising even faster! – and yet not one of these pricks has made any pledge* or has any intention of slashing spending or bringing rates down.

Not one.

Oh yes, they all talk vaguely about reducing “waste.” Of making “savings through efficiencies.” About “reducing non-core and wasteful spending.” But this is all just hand waving to suggest they’re concerned about spending while concealing they have no intention to make the savage substantial cuts necessary to begin making the city affordable again.

Instead, they all talk as if there’s a bag full of cash under your couch that they get to spend on monuments.

You might think all the monuments are worth it. You might think they will make the city more liveable.. You might think it will add to the city’s prestige. But whatever you think, for or against, you’re going to be paying for them anyway. And the “prestige” of the projects will fall like manna from heaven on the heads and shoulders of your autocratic leaders.

So it has always been.

One may see in certain biblical movies [writes Ayn Rand] a graphic image of the meaning of public monument building: the building of the pyramids. Hordes of starved, ragged, emaciated men straining the last effort of their inadequate muscles at the inhuman task of pulling the ropes that drag large chunks of stone, straining like tortured beasts of burden under the whips of overseers, collapsing on the job and dying in the desert sands—that a dead Pharaoh might lie in an imposingly senseless structure and thus gain eternal "prestige" in the eyes of the unborn of future generations.
    Temples and palaces are the only monuments left of mankind's early civilisations. They were created by the same means and at the same price—a price not justified by the fact that primitive peoples undoubtedly believed, while dying of starvation and exhaustion, that the "prestige" of their tribe, their rulers or their gods was of value to them somehow.
    Rome fell, bankrupted by statist controls and taxation, while its emperors were building coliseums [ to deliver bread and circuses]. Louis XIV of France taxed his people into a state of indigence, while he built the palace of Versailles for his contemporary monarchs to envy and for modern tourists to visit. [Meanwhile, as the bread in the kingdom dwindled, his queen Antoinette was advising her subjects’ rulers to “Let them eat cake.”]

And now, in a New Zealand already mired in debt, our mayoral candidates are going to rate us further into penury to make us believe they’'’re making our cities liveable.

Do any of these political leaders really believe anything they say about making the city affordable?

 

---

* Yes, to be fair, Palino’s website talks about a “wasteful council” and has a policy of reducing rates by 10% over 3 years. But he has no serious plan to make the savage spending cuts commensurate with that, and since that was set up he’s been talking instead abour “capping” rates to the Reserve Bank’s rate of inflation. In other words, no rate cuts.

.

The Rodney that super-sized your rates

When Rodney Hide began super-sizing the Auckland Council, we heard him blathering that the "efficiencies" from the exercise meant that rates could be cut.

They won't be.

Rates will be going up. By nearly six percent in some places; around nine percent in others.

You can thank Rodney Hide for that entirely predictable outcome.

It was said too that the super-sizing would give planners more power to "plan" the city according to their own vision.

They will be.

And that's one primary reason that rates will be going up.

Because when you have an ego the size of a planner, and a bureaucracy the size of this one, then everything begins to look like it should be a monument to your “vision.”

And those visions never come cheap.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the both the super-sized government and the rates increase were delivered by the leader of a party purporting to believe in lower taxes, smaller government, and restraints on political power.

Apparently not.

So given that Epsom voters will be opening their rates demands about the same time next year they’ll be opening election campaign literature—many of whom will be wondering why their MP devoted all his party’s hard-won political capital to raising their rates, and to expanding the power of planners over their lives and property—I’m looking forward to watching voters to take a very large Rodney on him at every public meeting, and in the final vote.

He will have earned it.

Who pays for Len Brown?

Rodney Hide’s super-sized city bureaucracy was sold on the basis of greater “efficiencies” for the bureaucrats, and greater cost-savings for rate-payers.

Virtually the first statement by the vertically-challenged new Auckland mayor Len Brown is to confirm that whatever savings do emerge (if any) they won’t be used to reduce your rates, they will be rolled instead straight into monument building by those bureaucrats that have just been empowered.

This is what Rodney Hide delivered.

So much for your hopes for lower rates—which for every New Aucklander are going to go up in any case just to pay for the billion-and-a-half debt that Banks and Brown (the two most spendthrift mayors in the previous city setup) managed to rack up over their last terms.

Just one of the many monuments talked up by the midget mayor is an underground rail loop around the inner city. A monument with a price tag of $2 billion, plus cockups.

That’s big money. And that’s just one of the many monuments Brown wants to erect in the next few years—train sets for everyone—a “world-class” convention centre (another one?)—cruise terminals—eco this—sustainability the other—any one of which will easily suck down any savings that might emerge from the merger, let alone any hopes you or the local govt minister might have had of rates decreases.

"There will be a cost,” says the midget mayor, “But we will do it.”

There sure will be a cost. And we will be the ones have to pay for it. (And how long before Brown demands a flash new building to accommodate an ego pumped up by the power to dispose of that which he has not earned, and by the view of himself as the embodied voice of “the public.”)

The only question is whether we pay for it as rate-payers, or as taxpayers.

The Prime Minister reckons it won’t be taxpayers. Put down your plan for monument-building, says John Boy, and get on instead with implementing your “long-term spatial plan for Auckland.”

What’s a long-term spatial plan, you ask?  Let me tell you. Section 79(2) of Rodney Hide’s Super-Sized Bureaucracy Act says:

The purpose of the Spatial Plan is to contribute to Auckland's social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being through a comprehensive and effective long term (20 to 30 year) strategy for Auckland's growth and development.

And section 74(4)(d) says the Spatial Plan must:

identify the existing and future location and mix of—
(i) residential, business, rural production, and industrial activities within specific geographic areas within Auckland…

As Owen McShane says of the powers given the central planners, “Even Stalin might blush.”

The Spatial Planners are invited to contribute to “Auckland’s social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being” rather than let the people take care of themselves…
    These new Spatial Plan’s requirement to specify the mix and location of land-use activities throughout the region is much more far reaching [even] than the Resource Management Act, which never mentions land use planning at all.
    …These highly detailed three-dimensional plans leave little room for private innovation or change. Forget about spontaneous order…

This is what John Boy reckons the midget mayor’s new council should be doing—instead of building monuments themselves, they should be writing plans ensuring property-owners may not build anything at all except with the express permission of a central planner.

In other words, all Rodney Hide has delivered to Auckland is a battle between monument builders and central planners.

Guess who loses out in that one?

“How do you know when a politician is lying?” The mayoral edition.

Q: How do you know when a politician is lying?
A: Their lips are moving.

Latest example, John Banks.  The Minister for Rhyming Slang.

CLAIM, John Banks: “I am probably the only mayor in Auckland to have contained rates within council's rate of inflation every year I have been in office.”

FACT:
Rates have risen 5.1 per cent, 2 per cent and 1.9 per cent during his term …  [and] council debt [increased ] from $322 million to $867 million. He also voted to raise $12 million in bus lane and parking fines over this term...

His main opponent in the battle to control Auckland’s new super-sized bureaucracy is no better.

CLAIM, Len Brown: Rates bills will increase by no more than the rate of inflation during my first term as Manukau mayor (election promise, 2007).

FACT:
Rates have increased by 4.9 per cent, 4.8 per cent and 3.9 per cent this term…

So one has racked up nearly one billion dollars in debt while talking about containing costs, and the other just hasn’t got a clue. Would you give either of these two fuckwits the steam off your used credit card?  Let alone the keys to the biggest bureaucracy Auckland has even seen? Thanks to Rodney Hide however and to the Local Government Act that gives them virtually open slather to sate their egos with our money and property, come November, you will have.

PS: Look forward to a huge jump in rates next year, whatever happens, especially in Manukau, Papakura, North Shore, and Waitakere where “rates increases of 100 per cent or more” are “a real possibility” in order to pay for the profligacy of John Banks’s council. Thanks again, Rodney hide.

The ingenious Phil Twyford

The new minister for housing and transport has found a way to pay the unaffordable bill for Auckland's new public transport infrastructure, and that's to help make Auckland housing even more unaffordable.

What could be more ingenious!

He'd already signalled that Labour's faithful promise to voters neither to raise taxes nor to introduce a capital gains tax was going to constrain him -- he'd already announced plans to get around that simply by raising the 'bright line' period for paying National's own tax lie (the 'capital-tax-in-drag' introduced just because lying governments can) from two years out to five. Because there's no politician like a money-hungry politician, is there.

And with Auckland's council having already borrowed way beyond what it can reasonably repay (in political-speak this is known as the Council being "up against its debt limits," as the new minister is quick to acknowledge) and the new Government having no spare cash to throw around after funding all of their promises plus those of Winston and James, Twyford now has the job of filling the $6 billion black hole in Auckland's transport bill that Len Brown and Phil Goff have helped dig.

But he has "big plans" to do that, he tells faithful recorder Bernard Hickey. "Big plans" to fill the black hole. "Big plans to change the way Auckland's multi-billion dollar light rail projects will be paid for," he says. Which means: big plans about who he is going to soak to pay for all the monuments, of which "light rail" is only the most ill-defined. And the answer in four words, dear reader, is: "motorists and property developers."

Now that smokers have slunk away quietly, motorists are the new lepers. Hitting them with new fuel taxes is only the starting point. He has an endless stream of new ideas about how to soak anyone who drives a car. Lock up your wallet now, while you can.

He also plans to sock property developers, hinting he will hit them with a new super-rates bill on developments. This appears to be in addition to "targeted rates" to repay infrastructure bonds (and in addition to the almost already crippling rates rises that Mayors Len and Phil have been exacting to pay for their grandomania and Rodney Hide's super-sized stuff-up.).

At this stage these are only just hints about his big plans. But any added tax burden on the developers who build Auckland's houses will only make it even more difficult for developers to make a margin on building those houses, making it more likely rather than less that lots more affordable housing for would-be first-home buyers will ever easily be built. (Every single change from every single housing minister has made this hope less likely rather than more, so he does at least follow in a grand tradition.)

But motorists, vendors, and property developers and their erstwhile first home-customers will not be left to suffer alone. Mum and dad and several kids already happily home-owning anywhere near any part of Auckland's expensive upcoming light rail- and rapid transit-building orgy will also be hit with something special too, in the shape of extra special "targeted rates" -- Mr Twyford's favourite new phrase, it seems -- all the better for him "to capture the value uplift in property prices" mum and dad might otherwise enjoy.

What he may miss out on with his 5-year capital gains levy on mum and dad if they don't sell their house within that time frame, he'll claw back from them anyway with his "targeted rates" if they stay put.

And if they don't enjoy any value uplift at all? Fear not. They and everyone else will still receive their share of the disingenuous Mr Twyford's $6 billion bill anyway.

TANSTAAFL.

.

Emancipating govt, enslaving free men [update 2]

IT’S SAID  OFTEN ENOUGH in coaching circles that no matter how well you train someone in a new style of play—changing their golf swing, improving their kicking style, remedying their bowling action—when push comes to shove in a pressure situation, they’ll revert regardless to what they do instinctively.

So it is with this National-led Government who, when the chips are down, revert to what they know best.  Big Government.

Their legislative response to Canterbury’s earthquake is a classic illustration of what I mean. Maintaining  that "we need to be able to … remove bureaucracy that would slow up” rebuilding,  you need to understand that by “we” here they intend not you and me, but themselves. The bureaucracy  they have removed is from them.

To those now expressing surprise at the dictatorial powers they have now granted themselves I say, “Why be surprised?” Because when the rubber that is an earthquake meets the road that is economic reality, you really do see what implicit conviction a governing party really does hold. And whatever their stated principles might suggest about their convictions, enough clues have already been scattered throughout this government’s term to quite easily determine their real, implicit convictions.

Let me give you a few leading examples.

• EXAMPLE NO. 1: Take a look at what they did with the RMA.  They announced even before the election that they would “simplify and streamline” the Resource Management Act (RMA) to stop the impediments to development.  And so they did.  They simplified and streamlined the RMA, not to make it easier for you and me to get on with our renovations, but to make it easier for the government to get out the bulldozers and get on with its Think Big 2.0 infrastructure programme.  To impose “greater central government direction” (Nick Smith’s words) not less.  To set up a whole new bureaucracy, an Environmental Protection Authority, to ride herd on those pesky property owners seeking the same freedoms from the constraints of the RMA the government was simplifying and streamlining for themselves.   The RMA was streamlined all right – streamlined to make it easier for ThinkBig 2.0, and make like easier for planners.
• EXAMPLE NO. 2:  “Fibre to the home.” Announcing that the ability for every home to download porn is crucial to this country’s development, this government then continued the meddling in the telecommunications market begun by the last government (ensuring no sane investor would risk their own money on any sort of large-scale fibre network) before announcing the government itself would risk several billion of our tax dollars (that’s $1.5 billion plus cock-ups) by undertaking this important mission itself.
• EXAMPLE NO. 3:  How about what Rodney Hide is doing in National’s name in Auckland, undertaking “local government reform to “get the city moving.”  How will a super-sized bureaucracy (staffed with super-sized egos) do that, you might ask?  Simple, says Rodney Hide. It will give one mayor and one unified council undreamed of power to dictate what happens from Pukekohe to Warkworth—a megalomaniacal concentration of bureaucratic power “focussed on big picture issues” paid by big city rates, all to make sure the trains run on time.

Are you getting the picture yet?

This is a government that does want to see the country moving forward.  Let’s give them that much.  But when push comes to shove, and despite their stated principles of “maximum freedom and the avoidance of unnecessary controls,” the freedom they seek is not for you and me, it’s for them.  And the avoidance of unnecessary controls is not for the entrepreneurs, investors and businessmen and women who actually do drive the creation of wealth—it’s for themselves and their bureaucrats.

That they don’t even see this themselves was evident only yesterday, when Steven Joyce spoke in Rotorua at a New Zealand Computer Society Conference

on how Governments are not good at innovation – tried that in an experiment known as the Soviet Union. Said innovation happens in all the companies and firms that are represented at this conference, and the Government’s job is to try and facilitate a supportive environment.

He said all that out of one side of the mouth, while out of the other he was telling the audience how excited he is about the government’s $1.5b urban fibre project, and the urgency of (and votes in) “advancing the rural fibre project….”

And by “advancing,” he means risking bucket-loads of your money on something no private investor can yet see a profit in. Not, at least, while the govt talks like this.

LET ME SAY IT again. Despite their stated small-govt principles, the only agent for change this government takes seriously is Big Government.  The only agent who knows best, they assume, is Big Government.

Every important reform or undertaking this government has undertaken since it came to power has been an expression of that same inner conviction. RMA. Smacking. National Standards. A new War on P. Three Strikes. Boot Camps. DNA Testing. Car Crushing. Infrastructure Spend-Up. Auckland’s Local Government Reform. Fibre to the home. The Canterbury Reconstruction (All-Powerful Govt) Bill.  . .

From the first hundred days to now, it’s been one sopping seamless stream  of state worship. So why should anyone be surprised now when Gerry Brownlee adopts the mantle of Nero and National supporters like David Farrar start writing encomia to benevolent dictatorship.

THE IRONY OF CHEERLEADER FARRAR being the first one to openly and enthusiastically embrace the dictatorial implications of the Brownlee Brownlee Enabling  Bill was lost on few people. After all , as everyone from The Standard to Kiwipolitico to David Slack points out (“Reading Kiwiblog on ‘wise dictatorship,’ you'd think Thomas Jefferson never put quill to paper,” said Slack) , today’s chief blogetic cheerleader for dictators was 2007’s leader of the campaign against the Electoral Finance Act—a campaign whose ads argued that Helen Clark’s attack on free speech in the EFA put her on a par with dictators like Frank Bainimarama, Robert Mugabe, and Mao Zedong.

How quickly a manatee changes its spots.

But so too, it must be said, have many of those once former advocates of the Electoral Finance Act who now talk so nobly about Thomas Jefferson and the virtues of small government.* As Craig Ranapia said in jest about the complaining going on about the Bill over at Public Address, “I’m shocked how close you commies are to forming an Ayn Rand book club.”

How quickly commies change their spots too, eh, when it’s not their team who’s in power.

Wherein, perhaps, lies a lesson that the various party cheerleaders might think about when they go home at night to their various book clubs. We’re very far from ever having any serous constitutional restraints on governments in this country, more’s the pity. But how about those who are in power, and those who support them, begin by imagining how much power the the legislation they do write will give to the other team should they ever get back behind the Treasury benches.

That at least might exercise the small fibres of small-government thinking still residing in what they call their brains, sufficiently perhaps that these sentiments might burst forth at times other than just their party conferences, or when they’re in opposition.

[* CLARIFICATION: David Slack reckons “you'll find that you'll search high, low and in vain to find anything I've ever written advocating the EFA. I could be mistaken, but I'd be mightily surprised.” e’s not so sure about the commies, but. ]

UPDATE 1:  Chris Trotter opposes the Gerry Brownlee Enabling Bill with some convincing arguments,  somehow contriving not to notice both his blatant violation of Godwin’s Law and the undeniable fact that the intent of this Bill, of Auckland’s new super-bureaucracy, of the sacking of Environment Canterbury’s councillors, of all the other examples I’ve indicated above, are not examples of the government giving power to itself . Instead they somehow demonstrate, says Trotter trying to convince himself as much as his readers, 

the continuing radicalisation’ of the neoliberal project… which "works toward" the final triumph of the unregulated market.

A remark that represents either astonishing blindness or a capacity to believe two impossible things before breakfast, since if his own favoured party was packing on the same power this one is he’d be first out there in the cheer squad.

Mind you, this is the same Chris Trotter who, when his own favoured political regime was at the top table and extorting your money to find their election campaign , wrote a very long and learned  piece arguing that this ransacking of the public purse for their electoral war chest was “justifiable” or “acceptable corruption.” 

Which I guess, given the symmetry with Farrar’s “I Heart Dictators” post this week, makes him something like Farrar’s alter ego.  Or maybe his Red twin.

UPDATE 2:  Lyndon Hood at Scoop scores an interview with someone not exactly like, but very like, the Canterbury Caesar. We start in mid-flight…

Scoop: Doesn't this all seem a bit authoritarian to you?

Brownlee: 'Authoritarian'. Yes, I think that's exactly the word. Well done.

Scoop: So your Government…

Brownlee: I'll just write that down.

Scoop: Your Government rammed through the Super City and disestablished the Canterbury local government. One of your Ministers released personal information on people who complained about their policies. Is authoritarianism your answer to everything?

Brownlee: I wouldn't say that.

Scoop: I know you wouldn't say it, but is it true?

Brownlee: I don't think it's very fair.

Scoop: Well can you think of any problem you wouldn't solve with authoritarianism?

Brownlee: Well, I, for example if my problem was I wanted a cup of tea, I might boil the jug or I might ask someone to make some for me.

Scoop: And if there wasn't any tea?

Brownlee: Well, if it was like that I suppose I would go for the authoritarianism.

Scoop: Perhaps you'd commandeer some tea?

Brownlee: Obviously I'd have to suspend the Crimes Act first otherwise it would be stealing. But look, that's not reason to go around calling us names. Some might say that's hampering the reconstruction effort.

Scoop: Oh.

Brownlee: There must still be a gallows somewhere in this country…