Memo to Shane Jones: what if NZ needs more regional government, not less?

If the headlines are anything to go by, New Zealand’s regional councils are on life support.

Regional Development Minister Shane Jones recently wondered whether “there’s going to be a compelling case for regional government to continue to exist”. And Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is open to exploring the possibility of scrapping the councils.

This has all been driven by the realisation that the government’s proposed resource management reforms would essentially gut local authorities of their basic planning and environmental management functions. Various mayors and other interested parties have agreed. While some are circumspect, there’s broad agreement a review is needed.

At present, each territorial council writes its own city or district plan. Regional councils write a series of thematic plans addressing different environmental issues. All the plans contain the councils’ regulatory “rules” that determine what people can or cannot do.

Under the coming reforms, the territorial and regional councils of each region would have only a single chapter each within a broader regional spatial plan. Their function would, for the main part, involve tweaking all-embracing national policies and standards.

Further, all compliance and monitoring – now a predominantly regional council activity – is to be taken over by a national agency (possibly the Environment Protection Authority). This won’t leave much for regional councils to do, compared with their broad remits now.

How regional government evolved

In truth, regional councils have been targets since they were created as part of the Labour government’s 1989 local government reform. Carried out in lockstep with the drafting of the Resource Management Act (passed in 1991), this established two levels of local government.

City and district councils were to be responsible for infrastructure and the built environment. The new regional councils were more opaque, essentially multi-function, special-purpose authorities, recognising that some government actions are bigger than local but smaller than national.

In the event, they became what in many countries would be thought of as environmental protection agencies. Their boundaries were drawn to capture river catchments, reflecting their catchment board antecedents, which looked after soil erosion and flood management.

Other functions were drawn from other government departments. Air-quality management came from the old Department of Health. Coastal management was partly inherited from the Ministry of Transport, shared with the Department of Conservation.

Public transport and civil defence were tacked on, given their cross-territorial scale and lack of anywhere else to put them.

Parochialism and politics

All their various functions have meant regional councils determine who gets to use the region’s resources – and who misses out. And political decisions are a surefire way to make enemies.

For example, the Resource Management Act applied the presumption that no one could discharge any contaminant into water unless expressly allowed by a rule or a resource consent. Regional councils therefore required their territorial councils to upgrade their rubbish dumps and sewage treatment systems.

Similarly, farmers could no longer simply take water to irrigate or empty cowshed effluent straight into the nearest stream as of right. The necessary infrastructure upgrades were expensive.

Ironically, these attempts to minimise the immediate impacts of such demands on water users saw urban voters and environmental groups criticise the councils and the government for being too soft on “dirty dairying” and other polluters.

Parochialism also plays a part, as does the feeling in some rural communities that they’re forgotten by their regions’ cities, where most voters live. The perceived poor handling of events such as last year’s Hawke’s Bay flooding and the 2018 Wellington bus network failure have not helped.

The government even replaced Environment Canterbury’s elected council with appointed commissioners in 2010 over performance concerns, particularly in water management.

Yet the regional council model has largely survived intact – with two exceptions. The Nelson-Marlborough Regional Council was replaced by the Nelson City and Marlborough and Tasman District unitary councils in 1992, as a token sacrifice to the conservative wing of the National government, which vehemently opposed the new regions.

The genesis of the Auckland Council super-region can be traced to the 1999–2008 Labour government’s frustration at getting a unified position from the city’s seven councils on where to build a stadium for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Not everyone is happy with the resulting metro-regional solution.

Who will be accountable?

If regional government is indeed put to rest, it will be another phase in this piecemeal evolutionary process. But the new model will still require central government to have a significant regional presence – and commensurate central government funding.

But central government has had a regional-scale presence for a long time. Police, the fire service, economic development and social welfare agencies all have their own regional boundaries. Public health and tertiary training and education are also essentially regional.

All these functions are inherently political. And in many other countries, they are are delivered by regional governments. Maybe, once the implications are looked at more closely, leaving regional councils intact will seem the easier and cheaper option. Indeed, there is a counter argument that we need more regional government, not less.

The current impulse for local government change – including district council amalgamation – continues an ad hoc process going back more than 30 years. As I have argued previously, the form, function and funding of local government need to be considered together.

The regional level of administration will not go away. But the overriding question remains: who should speak for and be accountable to their communities for what are ultimately still political decisions, whoever makes them?