What do you want local government to do?

Well under the Local Government Act 2002, which National and ACT are willing to continue with, for the Auckland megacity, a council can do the following:

Open restaurants
Establish independent and integrated schools.
Open hospitals
Establish welfare benefits
Set up its own bus company
Run its own taxi company
Start its own plumbing business
Open a chain of hairdressing salons
Establish massage therapy centres
Establish bookshops
Open a supermarket
Set up a telecommunications company
Set up a courier and postal operation
Open a florist
Establish an architecture firm
Promote tourism
Open its own hotel
Start a tour service
Start an airline
Open shoe shops
Establish a radio station
Establish a tv channel
Establish a newspaper
Open a bar
Publish local literature
Set up a comedy troupe
Fund any Auckland sports teams
Sell Christmas Trees
Run a harbour cruise company
Establish a bakery
Establish crèches
Set rules on what colours your property must be
Open a clock factory
Subsidise software sales
Buy out a magazine
Buy SkyCity
Establish a museum of erotica
Establish a museum of racism and homophobia
Establish a museum of religion
Establish a museum of socialism
Establish its own trucking company
Establish a water bottling company
Open a chain of stationery stores
Develop its own Wikipedia
Provide gardening advice to home owners
Organise raffles
Establish language schools
Set up a national political party
Start a fish farm
Start a dairy farm
Start a sheep farm
Buy out a deer farm
Buy out a vineyard
Subsidise motor mechanics
Subsidise braille classes
Subsidise home water collection systems
Celebrate Hannukah with a parade
Celebrate Buy Nothing Day with a parade
Celebrate Margaret Thatcher's birthday with a parade
Celebrate the Queen's Birthday with fireworks
Publish recipe books of Auckland recipes
etc etc etc.

Do you want this? or do you want your council to be able to do the bare minimum of planning under whatever happens to the RMA, look after footpaths and parks, let rubbish collection, water and sewerage become utilities, and manage the stormwater network under roads as long as it looks after local streets?

You see, it seems that the power of general competence that Labour, the Alliance (with Jim Anderton then) and the Greens passed, now has the tacit approval of Peter Dunne, the Maori Party, National and ACT - despite the latter two parties voting against it.

Is this what you voted for? Shouldn't you be letting John Key and Rodney Hide know loud and clear if you disagree?

Auckland megacity - what does it mean for transport?

According to the "Great" Auckland website, it means a council controlled organisation responsible for "all local and regional transport". However, it says little more. So let's explore that a bit further.

The key responsibilities in transport today are:
- The territorial authorities are responsible for their own local road network. They all raise rates to pay for between 40 and 60% of the cost of maintaining and improving the network, while bidding to the NZTA for the rest (which comes from fuel tax, road user charges etc). This is by far the most important function;
- ARTA, an ARC subsidiary, is responsible for contracting any subsidised public transport services, and registering commercially provided ones (which it has been discouraging through various contracting arrangements). It leads the rail project.

Note that all state highways in Auckland are the responsibility of the NZ Transport Agency, Transit's successor. Whether these will be handed over to the mega city is unclear. Hopefully not.

The megacity will no doubt take a view that the biggest problem with Auckland transport is not that it doesn't manage local roads well, doesn't build capacity when it is urgently needed and doesn't price the network to reflect costs, but rather there are too many cars.

It will want to use your money to subsidise those who don't drive, and penalise those who do. It wont be content with running the roads as a business, whereby anyone wanting property access pays an access fee, and motorists pay for what they use. It may neglect roads significantly, rather like Transport for London which has an appalling record in badly maintaining signs, and making next to no investment in improving capacity.

You see the megacity will own trains, and want those trains to grow. It wont own the private bus fleets so wont care so much about them It wont own trucks or cars, so they wont even be on the radar screen.

Most importantly, it wont own the motorways or be likely to build major new roads.

So the megacity wont do much, other than encourage more cross subsidisation of roads, and public transport dominating transport thinking across the region, even though it carries a tiny minority of trips.

A better solution would be to spin off the roads completely into arms length companies, responsible for providing access to properties and road space for motorists, and charging appropriately for both.

However, politicians wouldn't have control, and it wouldn't be democratic - which of course, is how everything should be - up to a vote.

Greens promote racist representation

Metiria Turei is upset that the government isn't going to introduce guaranteed race based Maori seats for the Auckland planners' wet dream megacouncil.

What evasion of the truth is it to say "The biggest Maori urban population shut out from their own city"? How are Maori residents shut out?

Have they lesser voting rights? No.
Have they lesser rights to make submissions on consultations? No.
Have they lesser rights to stand for office? No.
Have they lesser rights to apply for and be considered for employment? No.
Are Maori residents treated in any way differently from those of the many dozens of ethnic backgrounds in Auckland? No.

So why make it up? Why lie? Maori will NOT be shut out. Nor would they let themselves be shut out. Metiria is confusing South African apartheid with New Zealand local government. Why?

Because it suits her post-modernist identity politics based worldview of Maori as perpetual victims that can never be equal under systems that are not ethnically defined.

She links the lack of Maori city councillors to meaning Maori are not represented. This is presumably because the brain and views and experiences of a Maori individual can only be adequately represented by another Maori individual - NOTWITHSTANDING, any difference in philosophy, ideology or experience. In other words, your views are not something consciously chosen, but you inherit them from your ethnicity and identity.

This is why the left eschews the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Richardson, because as women they SHOULD have certain political views - but they don't.

It classifies all Maori as shut out, because even though thousands vote for non-Maori council candidates (and Maori candidates), it can't mean anything. They must feel "disenfranchised".

This is like saying that if my local councillor happened to be a Chinese lesbian, I wouldn't feel represented. It is reality evasion, and by evading the truth (Maori vote for non-Maori candidates, and less Maori are interested in becoming control freaks on councils than non-Maori), you create a proposal that evades reality too.

Separate Maori seats are racist - they discriminate and distinguish on the basis of race. However, Metiria would say they are the opposite - evading reality.

So a non-race based system is racist, and a race based system is not - as long as the selected race is identified as "victim" not "oppressor". A glimpse into the mindset of the radical left.

UPDATE: Some are "angry" at not getting special political privileges based on who their ancestors are. Easier to moan and demand apartheid than to actually encourage Maori voter turnout and put up candidates isn't it?

Say no to big local government!

So according to the NZ Herald the government is going to support a modified mega city. A proposal born of the Labour inspired Royal Commission, has support from the National/ACT/Maori/Dunne government.

I already have blogged about what I think should be done with the proposal - it would make a good doorstop. How local government needs to be constrained. How a super mayor will end up being some less than competent personality with more control over your life. Owen McShane described it as fascist.

Without a cap on rates, Auckland property owners will be forced to pay more and more as the megacity grows its functions like a cancer on the life of Aucklanders.

So are Aucklanders going to put up with this? The "strengthening of democracy" only counts heads, not what's in them.

If ACT goes through with it, without a rates cap, without severely constraining the power of local government, it will prove ACT can't even drive policy when its leader is a Minister.

It is time to give the government a strong message if you're fed up with rates increases well above inflation year after year, fed up with central planning local government, fed up with petty fascist politicians and bureaucrats who think they know how to spend your money and regulate what you do with your property.

Say NO to big local government, it's time to put it on a diet, and repeal the power of general competence.

UPDATE: Not PC is eloquently making the same point in a different way.

In my entire life if I do something, I do it properly

so said Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, administrator of the Tuol Sleng torture and murder prison in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge was in power.

The Daily Telegraph reporting on his trial said: "His nom de guerre came from a textbook story about "Duch" a model pupil who always had his hand raised.

"I liked the name Duch because I wanted to be the well disciplined boy who respected teachers, who wanted to do good deeds,"

I remember reading that Khieu Samphan, the number two in the Khmer Rouge was a well disciplined boy too, who never had a girlfriend, and who was constantly teased.

Therein is the mind of the psychopathic mass murderers who obey the state they helped create, and spill blood as if it were water. Typically not that different from the occasional teenager who takes a gun and shoots out his fellow students.