Twelve momentous months behind us…

In the offices of any newspaper or magazine – here in New Zealand or in Afghanistan for that matter – the end of the year irresistibly leads editors to go back into the files to ‘review the past 12 months’.

This isn’t because at the end of any year the editor is literally on his or her physical and emotional knees in terms of energy spent through the year and can see only Christmas pudding and the promise of a couple of chardonnays as a pathway to the last few days of the past 360-odd.  No, not at all, editors of NZ Local Government magazine are made of sterner stuff and we don’t need pathetic emotional crutches to get us past the last issue of the year.

But it just so happens I had a stack of 2011 issues of NZLG next to my desk and so I picked out issues at random to gain an insight into how local government in New Zealand fared during the year.
Well, it was obvious what filled the magazines’ news and editorial pages in the first few months of the year. It was ‘the big one’ we have all been dreading, and yet we were all amazed it was Canterbury and not Wellington that took the big hit from the tectonic plates that will ultimately decide whether this country of ours is viable as a place to live –and we are all now sweating over the answer to that question.

Early in the year we were backing Mayor Bob Parker for his leadership through the seismic shocks and we still are, 100 per cent, even though the mayor has almost inexplicably attracted negative heat from some commentators.

In June, we revisited amalgamation, but from the point of view of smaller councils who were doing meerkat imitations as they emerged from the burrows to peer into the distance and see who was looking to take them over. We also made initial, questioning comments about the new Auckland council, about inconsistency, a lack of openness, funding of the Independent Maori Statutory Board and other issues.

In July we looked forward to the Rugby World Cup and reported Rodney Hide’s judgement that Auckland Council was already a financial success. Perhaps as cover for fears that Mr Hide’s judgement might be slightly ‘out’ we urged people to enjoy the rugby and celebrate New Zealand’s time in the spotlight as a host of a major, global, sporting event.

In August, we were reporting local government finance analyst Larry Mitchell’s ‘league table’ of councils who were facing financial sustainability issues. He reported on the more successful councils also, but then came the shock admission from Dunedin City Mayor Dave Cull that his council was facing an $8 million shortfall in revenue from one of its CCOs.

In September, as editor, I asked: ‘Are we there yet?’ in relation to the launch of Auckland’s supercity. Since then there has been criticism and irritation from within Auckland Council at my stance. There’s no need. The people of Auckland won’t be swayed one way or another by the opinion of the editor of a magazine that covers local government issues. Especially since the content of that editorial was mostly made up of some written comments made by the Mayor to a suburban newspaper, including: “by and large things are going pretty well and services provided are at least as good as they were under the legacy councils”. He then wrote: “At the moment we have a mishmash of old and new. That will change, things will make more sense and you will get even better value from your council as time goes on.”

In October I expressed doubts that Auckland could provide 400,000 new dwellings to accommodate an additional one million people within 30 years, and backed my humble opinion with the judgements of experts. That wasn’t well received in some places either, but in November I was reminding the people of New Zealand that Cantabrians are still significantly traumatised by the earthquakes. It’s not time to be worrying about Auckland’s problems, or whether the Hawke’s Bay councils need to amalgamate, or whether the next local body elections should be run under a different system of voting.

This year is going to be tough. I hope the Prime Minister was not misquoted in a newspaper report I saw in which he said 2012 was going to be “very, very, very, austere” financially. If next year is anywhere near that tough, it’s not just councils who will need to watch the pennies – and look in the next issue of our magazine for the other side of the coin from our page 3 story about Wellington City trying to secure its future as a destination and a provider of business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Enjoy the Christmas break. It’s going to be a year of small steps, hopefully they’ll be confidently forward.