The number one reason why Simon Watts and Chris Bishop have suddenly put the brakes on Head Start is a fear of suffering at the next election, write Andy Asquith, Adjunct Research Fellow, University of Western Australia and Jeff McNeill, Honorary Research Associate at Massey University.
The French military phrase ‘Order, counter-order, disorder’ is playing out on the battlefield that is New Zealand local government. And the Government’s unexpected postponement of its ‘Head Start’ campaign to reform local government validates French general Napoleon Bonaparte’s aphorism.
Councils were given three months to reorganise or face government-arranged solutions. The postponement, after they spent millions of dollars identifying potential partners, consulting with their citizens and negotiating solutions, has left a battlefield with some councils that had been advancing their positions anxious to progress, others retreating and the rest halted in bemusement.
Unfortunately, ad hoc policy has seemingly been adopted by local government ministers in this country since 2022. This Government’s campaign to sort out local government has been a series of badly thought through missteps pursued firstly by former Minister of Local Government Simeon Brown and then by his successor Simon Watts, not to mention those of Chris Bishop, the Minister of Infrastructure, Housing, Transport, and RMA Reform. This is despite Prime Minister Christopher Luxon entering office espousing pro-local government views with his support for ‘localism’.
In the last three years, over and above the ‘usual’ commentary from the Beehive around local government’s so-called incompetence and inefficiency, our local councils have had to deal with cost shifting, the abolition of regional councils, RMA reform and rates capping. The 11th hour announcement of wholesale amalgamation was ill-thought-out overreach.
We have a local government sector which, despite being stretched both financially and from a human resources perspective, had somehow managed to continue delivering many essential and necessary services to their communities.
The “Head Start for Simplifying Local Government” pathway was a bridge too far. It was a classic example of policy made on the hoof. There was no consultation with the sector or even prior warning, simply a ministerial announcement. To our knowledge no one in the local government sector sought this policy – rather, they were managing to maintain operational stability despite the raft of major reforms already underway.
In our last column, we opined that the real winners of the Head Start pathway were the army of management consultants who suddenly found themselves in great demand. Again, we ask how many essential services have been sacrificed to pay the fees for consultants?
We are at a loss to think of a single benefit the workstream has generated for local communities. We also wonder about the cost of the burnt goodwill of citizens who engaged with their councils and responded to the amalgamation options they proposed.
What has been missing from any ministerial statements has been honesty. History is littered with examples of higher tiers of government seeking to amalgamate local government, almost always in the name of “efficiency” but never in the name of “effectiveness”!
Democratic decision-making, recognised in many of the council reform options, never features except, in the Government’s words, that it should demonstrate “fair and effective representation for communities of interest and how decisions will be made at the local level, balancing urban and rural interests”.
The upshot of many imposed local government initiatives is that the Government that is seeking to abolish or amalgamate local councils suffers at the next election.
This is the number one reason why Watts and Bishop have suddenly put the brakes on Head Start. It was not to reconnoitre the battlefield, regroup and try a less fraught attack.
The postponement is down to good old electoral politics: the hope the National Party and its coalition partners had that they were about to remove their local democratically elected councils. Then, should National return to the front benches, the Head Start campaign can begin apace.
The Minister of Local Government is no Napoleonic grand strategist. He faces not General Winter but General Election, and that may determine both his fate and that of local councils.
Politicians duck for cover on Head Start