Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste.

Greenfields: Minister of Building and Housing, Dr Nick Smith, has argued consistently that Auckland needs to grow out as well as up. He has just acquired a powerful ally in Prime Minister Key, who has hinted that if Auckland Council doesn't delete the Urban Growth Boundary from its forthcoming Unitary Plan, then it may suffer the same fate as "Ecan" - the Canterbury Regional Council - whose elected councillors were sacked by Dr Smith and replaced with his hand-picked commissioners.

 

OUR PRIME MINISTER has not ruled out denying local democratic representation to nearly a third of New Zealand’s population. If the Auckland Council’s forthcoming Unitary Plan retains the city’s much-maligned Urban Growth Boundary, John Key is threatening to replace them with Commissioners.

 

Once again, councillors’ strongly held opinions about highly complex planning issues are being used to justify a significant curtailment of democracy. Aucklanders have been put on notice that if a majority of their elected representatives refuse to vote for a resumption of urban sprawl, then the Council’s “Governing Body” will be sacked and replaced by a group of unelected “experts” appointed by Cabinet.

 

Cantabrians know better than to doubt the Prime Minister’s resolve in this matter. Since 2010 their right to a say in how their regional taxes are spent has been suspended. After six years of no regional democracy, they are now being invited to participate in a hybrid system featuring both elected and unelected councillors. The full restoration of democratic regional government in Canterbury will not take place until 2019.

 

The present government justified its suspension of democracy in Canterbury on the grounds that, in its deadlocked state, “Ecan” was incapable of making a number of extremely important – and long delayed – decisions about regional water allocation. At the time, National was under enormous pressure from Federated Farmers to break the deadlock and green-light the irrigation schemes farmers needed to make dairying feasible on the dry Canterbury Plains.

 

Government ministers argued that, economically, New Zealand could not afford the interminable wrangling between urban and rural interests. If the only people standing between Canterbury’s farmers and an irrigation-assisted boost to New Zealand’s dairy exports were a bunch of intransigent regional councillors, then the temporary suspension of democratic norms was a small price to pay for their removal.

 

That the deadlock between the representatives of farmers, and the representatives of those who valued water for cultural, environmental and recreational reasons, might signal the presence of a genuine policy dilemma, does not seem to have occurred to the National Government. Clearly, the deterioration in the flow and water quality of Canterbury’s rivers and streams was also a small price to pay for economic growth.

 

Equally clear, however (at least from the National Government’s perspective) is that most Cantabrians and, quite possibly, most New Zealanders, did not – and do not – consider a nine-year suspension of regional democracy to be all that big a deal. Regional government, unlike local government, has never really engaged the emotions of its electors. (Unless, as happened in Canterbury, a vocal minority of voters came to the view that it was thwarting their commercial ambitions.)

 

The question raised by Mr Key’s threats to the Auckland Council, therefore, is whether or not the suspension of local (as opposed to regional) democracy will be met with Cantabrian levels of voter indifference. In the years since the constitution and ancillary economic institutions of the “Super-City” were imposed on the citizens of Auckland, has it inspired sufficient loyalty and affection to render it invulnerable to such naked central government aggression?

 

Not without a crisis big enough to justify such heavy-handed interference.

 

Fortuitously, in the absurd escalation in Auckland house prices; and in the related, socially catastrophic, shortage of affordable housing for first-home-buyers and the poor; a crisis is exactly what the Prime Minister has got.

 

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s cynical chief-of-staff, infamously affirmed that: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

 

So, what is it that John Key believes the current Auckland housing crisis will let him do – that he could not do before?

 

The Prime Minister’s defenders will say that it offers him a virtually politically costless opportunity to rid Auckland of the irksome Urban Growth Boundary which so many politicians believe is responsible for its eye-wateringly high land prices. The only problem with this response is that Key and his government, as legislators, can abolish the Urban Growth Boundary any time they like.

 

So, what else will Auckland’s very real housing crisis let National do?

 

Helen Kelly put her finger on it during Saturday’s broadcast of TV3’s The Nation. Key’s threats, she insisted, mark the beginning of his party’s campaign to seize control of the Auckland Council.

 

Against all of the Right’s expectations, the first and second elections for the Auckland Council did not deliver it into the hands of the hard-line neoliberals for whom it was intended. Nor have the recent efforts of the Auckland National Party to assemble a winning team borne much in the way of palatable political fruit.

 

Enter the professionals.

 

Auckland’s housing crisis is entirely the Council’s fault. Therefore, vote out the guilty councillors. Then, give the Government a council it can work with.

 

Or else.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 31 May 2016.

Shaken - But Not Stirred: Canterbury Is Denied Democracy For The Third Time.

Water and Grass: The economic value of productive pastures is deemed by the National Government to be more important than popular political control over the water that keeps them green. In Canterbury this has led to a third delay in the return of full democracy to the region.

 

THE GREAT CANTABRIAN RIGHTS ROBBERY continues. With six of the thirteen Regional councillors set to be appointed, until at least 2019, by the Environment Minister, Dr Nick Smith, Canterbury’s long-promised return to democracy has, once again, been delayed.
 

And still the streets are empty.
 

That the people of Christchurch have been a little preoccupied since 2010 is acknowledged. But the same high-handedness that prompted the elimination of Cantabrians’ regional democracy has also been a frustrating feature of their city’s rebuild.
 

And still the streets are silent.
 

Large sums of money continue to be extracted from the people of Canterbury by “Commissioners” for whom no one has voted. Practically without a murmur, the oldest principle of democratic governance – that taxes may only be levied by representatives chosen by the people themselves – has been cast aside.
 

“No taxation without representation!”: the principle for which seventeenth century Englishmen were ready to execute their King, and in the name of which eighteenth century Americans proclaimed a revolution; has stirred New Zealanders hardly at all.
 

Where are our John Hampdens? Our John Pyms? Why have we yet to produce an Antipodean version of John Adams? John Hancock? Thomas Jefferson? All of these champions of representative government – the farmers, merchants and lawyers who challenged King Charles I and King George III – were men of substance. They dared to win, even though to lose meant death. But New Zealand’s men of substance; our farmers, merchants and lawyers; what have they dared?
 

Precious little has been risked by those whose screams would, undoubtedly, be among the loudest were Cantabrians rights being abrogated by a left-wing government. Indeed, one could argue that the destruction of regional democracy in Canterbury was undertaken at the behest of farmers, merchants and lawyers. For isn’t it these latter groups that have the gained the most from the elimination of their fellow citizens’ democratic rights? While ordinary Cantabrians retained the capacity to thwart their grand plans for Canterbury’s precious water, how could the region’s farmers, merchants and lawyers possibly have attracted the level of investment required to bring them to fruition?
 

Dr Smith dismisses all such claims as cynical. Rather than a case of careful political engineering, erected in the interests of the farmers, merchants and lawyers who vote National, the destruction of Canterbury’s regional democracy is presented by the Minister as some sort of glorified water conservation measure. Any return to normal democratic governance, argues Dr Smith, would inflict irreparable damage on a process which he clearly believes to be beyond the capabilities of elected citizens.
 

“The fear would be that you’ve got this population divide pretty even between rural and urban, and rather than those commissioners being able to look for the middle way through, that you end up where we were – a highly polarised council not making any progress on these very important issues.”
 

Dr Smith refuses to accept that, by silencing the voice of urban conservationists, he has, in effect, facilitated the water exploitation schemes of rural Cantabrians. His justification hinges on what he considers to be the superiority of technocratic over democratic decision-making.
 

But this justification works equally well for any and all attempts to limit the scope of democratic decision-making. The notion that society would be morally and materially improved if all the important decisions were left to a self-replenishing caste of “philosopher kings” is as old as Plato’s Republic. That every attempt to put Plato’s ideas into practice has very quickly resulted in the decisions of the wise becoming practically indistinguishable from the interests of the wealthy, has always been one of the strongest arguments in favour of democracy.
 

Nor is it reasonable to suppose that Dr Smith’s technocratic problem-solving will remain quarantined in Canterbury. In October 2016 it is likely that the balance of power on the Hawkes Bay Regional Council will shift decisively against the proposed Ruataniwha Water Storage Scheme. But, after what happened in Canterbury, the region’s voters are surely justified in wondering whether their democratic judgement will simply be over-ruled by Dr Smith, and a group of Commissioners installed to make certain that “progress on these very important issues” continues.
 

Would this be enough to see the people’s pitchforks lifted up and their flaming torches lit? One hopes so, but all the evidence so far suggests otherwise. New Zealanders definition of democracy appears to embrace a sort of plebiscitary oligarchy, under which a group of politicians are given the right to govern exactly as they please – subject only to a triennial vote of confidence.
 

But this definition of democracy condemns us all to live under an elected dictatorship where politicians are free to impose decisions of ever-increasing mendacity: ceasing only when a decision of such outrageous awfulness pushes the population beyond its collective pain threshold; and the people remember that they have rights.
 

This essay was originally published by The Press of Tuesday, 24 March 2015.