By Tommy de Silva

Copyright thespinoff

It could turn the city’s fortunes around – and actually get Aucklanders caring about local politics, argues Tommy de Silva.

It’s a local election year, and you know what that means – few people caring enough to vote and have their voices heard in shaping their towns. In New Zealand, local election voter turnout is abysmally low compared to national elections. In 2023, 77.5% of registered voters exercised their democratic duty in the general election, while in the 2022 local elections, only 35.4% of registered Aucklanders voted (Kaikōura District Council had the highest turnout, at 64%).

It’s a shame, because I genuinely believe that local elections are far more important than national ones. Does your bus turn up on time? Do the pipes in your suburb burst and flood during big downpours? Are community amenities like libraries, parks and pools readily accessible in your neighbourhood? Is one of your city’s champions at the helm or is it someone bankrolled by vested interests? Most of these questions are answered by the local, not national, spheres of government. So why don’t people seem to care?

Many factors contribute to the low engagement local elections are cursed with. For one, the issues seemingly aren’t nearly as exciting. Auckland mayor Wayne Brown ranting about bringing Auckland Transport under the democratic control of city councillors is not nearly as hard-hitting a policy platform as Wellington’s blue or red teams saying they’ll solve the cost of living crisis. Secondly, the characters don’t tend to be as exciting or well-known. Plenty of Tāmaki residents couldn’t name the mayor let alone any of the councillors, despite several of the latter being stalwarts of both local and national politics for decades. Despite their various political contributions, councillors like Alf Filipaina, Chris Darby, Christine Fletcher or Maurice Williamson aren’t household names. Local MPs like Chlöe Swarbrick, Hana-Maipi Rawhiti-Clarke or David Seymour, on the other hand, don’t struggle to attract the spotlight.

Low voter turnout is a problem because it means a broad range of ideas, interests and perspectives are not represented around our council tables. Typically those who vote in Auckland local elections are older, less likely to be Māori and less likely to live in socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods. It’s not hard to link that to the election of Auckland councillors who passionately oppose densification in their leafy inner-city suburbs, largely ignoring the needs of rangatahi renters. Another issue is the postal voting system used for local elections, which advantages homeowners and disempowers rangatahi renters who tend to move around more. Coupled with a lack of adequate funding for the Electoral Commission to run campaigns for voters to update their addresses, this means rangatahi often don’t receive their voting papers.

So how can we fix some of these problems? One idea for my hometown of Auckland is a new governance model that’s even more radical, at least by our moderate “Kiwi” standards, than the supercity. Because of its economy, population and mana, Taamaki Makaurau-Auckland needs its own state government, similar to how federal democracies operate overseas, including just over the ditch in Australia.

While we don’t agree on a lot, Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has a point when he argues that Wellington needs a drastically different relationship with Auckland compared to the one it has with other councils. Horowhenua is the mayor’s favourite example. It houses about 37,000 people, roughly half the population of Papakura, Auckland’s fifth-smallest local board rohe. Auckland, on the other hand, is home to a third of New Zealand’s population and nearly 40% of its economy. The fact that both Taamaki and Horowhenua are equally beholden to the dictates of the government is ridiculous given the contribution Auckland taxpayers make to the national piggy bank. “Auckland’s competition is Wellington. We want Wellington out of Auckland. I want to make more decisions here,” proclaimed Brown during a Herald Now interview with Ryan Bridge earlier in the year.

Within the Taamaki takiwaa, local leaders and residents should have much greater rangatiratanga compared to the Crown’s kaawanatanga. All too often, policies from Wellington’s blue-and-red ebb and flow have squandered Auckland’s aspirations. For our city and nation to truly thrive, Auckland needs to be treated more like New South Wales or Victoria than Horowhenua District Council. However, we should keep away from emulating how the Australian examples do not recognise the mana motuhake of ahikaa. Auckland’s future success and mauri requires ahikaa having a more central and powerful seat at the table. Auckland’s international point of difference is our indigeneity, and we need to lean into that as te Tiriti and Taamaki Makaurau-Auckland near their shared 200th birthday in 2040.

While the supercity council is far from perfect, its relationships with ahikaa are continuously improving, albeit slowly, as colonial processes are slowly upended in favour of following tikanga. One way to cement those hononga is to give mana whenua secure seats on whatever the city’s highest decision making table of the future ends up looking like. However, because maataawaka (Māori from other iwi) outnumber mana whenua in Taamaki, they too require their own representatives. So of course an Auckland state government should make space for Maaori leaders.

What else would an Auckland state-like government look like? First things first, the city requires more control over the tax take extracted from local residents, plus a greater ability to generate its own avenues of revenue. How unbalanced is the status quo? Central government “draws in 93% of public revenue and has the power to override local government whenever it chooses, and it is choosing to do so more often”, former mayor Phil Goff recently told Stuff’s David Long in August. Waipapa Taumata Rau urban planning wizard Timothy Welch has run the numbers and estimates that Taamaki loses $415m annually in GST collected on local rates which is siphoned to Wellington. Alongside that, Welch says that our city loses another $36m annually from kaawanatanga property holdings being exempt from paying the rates that struggling local whaanau and businesses are forced to front.

Taamaki would be much better off if this $451m in annual puutea went directly into our city’s piggy bank. While the tax sharing and revenue generation for an Auckland state government should go much further than just that $451m, said figure lays a realistic foundation to build upon.

Secondly, if we had our own state government, it should ditch the antiquated mail-voting system and institute booth voting like in national elections, which would contribute towards solving the low engagement issue that plagues local elections. Having a dedicated election day plus an early voting period would motivate people to treat Auckland’s local election more like a national election. There’s a lot of support for this from different quarters. As Phil Goff said, “Postal voting has not encouraged higher participation, and without the hoopla of election day, voting papers often just sit on the fridge and don’t get posted. For younger voters, they probably never post letters or even know where to.”

More Aucklanders voting locally would necessitate more seats at our governing table. The current figure of 20 councillors plus the mayor wouldn’t be enough for a Taamaki state government. New South Wales’ parliament has 93 representatives, while Victoria’s has 128. Auckland is much smaller than both those places, however, so would a figure of, say, 50 suffice? That would allow the separation of wards into more representative rohe. For example, let’s split Albert-Eden-Puketaapapa into several local electorates. Giving the townhouse- and apartment-living immigrant whaanau who call Roskill home a voice independent to the villa-living Nimbys in Mount Eden would bring our city’s delightful diversity to the fore of our local politics.

The major roadblock to Auckland developing a state government doesn’t have anything to do with Taamaki. Our biggest problem is Wellington. Unfortunately for this thought experiment, an Auckland government would require legislative sign-off from the Beehive, which is much easier said than done. Despite talking a big game during the 2023 election campaign about devolution and local leadership, Christopher Luxon’s government has been a particularly paternalistic bunch. So we aren’t likely to nationally engage in this necessary conversation seriously for a wee while yet. But the koorero must begin somewhere. Radical change requires having a critical mass of residents and local leaders onboard – just ask the anti-nuclear advocates of the 70s/80s – hence why I am putting this argument out there. Let’s get the whakaaro of a Taamaki state government out there wherever Jafas go: the maunga, sports club, pub, marae, dog park, workplace or beach. Heck, let’s even have this koorero where it really matters, inside the ivory towers down in Pooneke. For the nation to thrive, the Beehive needs to view Auckland as a more equal partner instead of a pesky problem.

The final word goes to Welch, who has pointed to research indicating that in nations that fail to invest in their primary city, like Taamaki, not only does the quality of life deteriorate, but the economy of the nation is dragged down too. “Auckland isn’t a problem to be managed, it is an asset to be leveraged. Every successful developed economy has learned this lesson,” he wrote. To leverage the asset of Auckland, “infrastructure investment proportional to its economic contribution, governance structures that reflect its scale, and political leadership that understands agglomeration economics” is required. “The question isn’t whether Auckland is too big. The question is whether New Zealand is big enough to nurture it.”

The double-vowel spelling of te reo Māori words in this piece reflects the regional dialect of the author’s iwi.