Some politicians just don’t get the concept of democracy.
That every New Zealander, citizen and resident, gets to cast a vote of equal value in central and local government elections has to be the cornerstone of a modern New Zealand.
Yet two recent incidents make it very clear that there remain people in leadership positions who don’t trust the people to make the “right” decisions.
Firstly to the chair of the Commission which has run Tauranga City Council since early 2021. She made a complete fool of herself with the following comments during an interview on Newstalk ZB.
“I quite like democracy, we all do, but sometimes it fails.”
“The city’s going to go backwards because all the old guard are preparing themselves to be re-elected.”
“Personally I would like a hybrid model (of council) whereby some are elected and we appoint some skilled people.”
“Tauranga is a big complex beast and it takes a special sort of people to run it.”
Get the drift? Those are verbatim quotes from the mouth of Anne Tolley, a former National Party cabinet minister put into an $1800 a day job three years ago by Labour’s Local Government Minister Nania Mahuta.
As a resident and ratepayer of Tauranga at the time, I was appalled at the move. The mayor Tenby Powell had resigned the previous November saying there was a “DNA of incompetence among TCC elected members.”
In reality Powell was a bully who didn’t get his own way.
I have personal experience of his bullying because he called me in early 2019 saying he’d heard that I was running for mayor (I never had the slightest intention) and warning me not to run because he was.
Around the council table many of his plans were out voted. That’s called democracy.
One person’s big vision is often matched by another’s fiscal caution. The councilors won and Powell lost.
So the mayor used his connections in Wellington to urge Mahuta into appointing commissioners. It was a disgrace.
Worse, at a local ratepayers and residents meeting in Mt Maunganui later in 2021 Ann Tolley promised, nay insisted, that she and her fellow highly paid commissioners would not be there after the 2022 Local Body Elections.
They’re still there. Very overdue elections are scheduled for July.
I left town soon after but not before I saw the start of the Cameron Road reconstruction debacle. This was the work of the Commissioners, pushed by central government, to turn a perfectly good dual carriageway running across the spine of the city, into one lane for cars with bus and cycle lanes.
Three years later I’m told it’s still not finished.
Meanwhile the Commissioners are wanting to finalize the city’s ten year plan before the July elections.
Why?
If this was really an interim move until democracy returned, then the people’s representatives should be making the important decisions about the next decade.
But Ann Tolley and her three highly paid amigos think they know better.
Democracy cannot fail. If you don’t like decisions made by your councilors or MPs then vote them out.
There is already way too much decision making in local government made by the bureaucrats. Sadly they, and any appointed councilors can’t be voted out.
That’s the joy of three yearly elections to, as serial politician Michael Laws says, “keep the buggers honest.”
We didn’t like what Nania Mahuta did about Maori wards on local councils either. She took away the right of voters to decide whether they could exist.
But the general electorate – and indeed Mahuta’s own constituents – voted her and her government out of office, and the new coalition has kept its campaign promise to put the existence of Maori wards in a council back to the will of the people.
Over half of the nearly eighty local authorities around the country have a at least one Maori ward. The voters in those authorities will now decide whether they will stay.
The key issue around Maori wards is the value of a vote.
In Wellington City, a councilor needed between 5206 and 2841 votes in a general ward to win a seat.
For Nikau Wi Neera to win the Te Whanganui-a-Tara Maori ward, he needed just 872 votes.
So the value of a vote in the Maori ward is between three and five times that of a vote in a general ward. That is not democracy.
The Maori ward, a creation of the city’s left leaning council, attracted a luke-warm response from Maori themselves.
For a start, only 8.7% of voters in Wellington (13,670 out of 157,181) identified as Maori.
Among Maori voters, just 5604 were on the Maori ward roll. Of them a measly 1849 bothered to cast a vote, hence Mr Wi Neera’s low number for victory over the other two contenders.
Of all the eligible Maori voters, only 4799 bothered and more Maori voted in general wards than in the Maori ward.
If Wellington, politically the country’s most left leaning and Maori sympathetic city, can only muster a modicum of interest in its Maori ward then the results of local referenda about the wards’ existence would seem rather predictable.
Local Government New Zealand President Sam Broughton, the Mayor of Selwyn in Canterbury, has called the central government decision to reverse Mahuta’s ruling in 2021 “complete over reach.”
Hmm. Didn’t we elect a government last year in which the constituent parties campaigned on reverting the Maori ward issue back to where it was before Mahuta’s move?
The Coalition Government is doing its best to ensure the country is colour blind. Hence the disestablishment of the Maori Health Authority and the co-governance of Three Waters Entities.
It’s about time. A country divided by race is a country with no future.
A country where some votes are of more value than others is not a country with a real democracy.
A country where local government is run by appointments is no democracy either.
As Winston Churchill famously said in 1947 “democracy is the worst form of government apart from all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Ann Tolley and Sam Broughton would do well to remember that.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - where this article was sourced.
8 comments:
The stench of croneyism pervades government at all levels in NZ. It matters not one jot what political party a purported representative - elected, appointed, or seconded - may claim to proffer adherence to, once the whiff of power and influence travels from nostril to brain, then ego, they’re a lost cause.
As I have said (hypothetically) to a friend … ”I don’t give a toss what ethnicity you claim to belong to, if you want to have a say, have influence, make a difference, stand for election! If you’re good, and I think you’ll be right for an equal value seat, I’ll vote for you in a General contest.”
Ah, silly me, I forgot … they breathe different air.
Agree absolutely. Under the late government race relationships in this country, something, with its imperfections, we can take great pride in, deteriorated through this divisive representation. Central government Māori electorates will be a harder nut to crack, but the right of the people to reject local government racial representation is a good start.
Individualism always - please
Most of the political debates of our time – at least in the Western world – can be divided into just two viewpoints. It is a contest between the ethics of Collectivism vs Individualism.
Collectivism is based on the belief that the group is more important than the individual. According to this view, the group is an entity of its own and it has rights of its own. Furthermore, those rights are more important than individual rights. Therefore, the individual must be sacrificed, if necessary, for “the greater good of the greater number.” Who can object to the loss of liberty or property or even life if it is for the greater good of society?
The ultimate group, of course, is the State. Therefore, the state is more important than individual citizens, and it is acceptable to sacrifice them, if necessary, for the benefit of the state. This concept is at the heart of all modern totalitarian systems built on the model of collectivism.
When collectivists argue that individuals must be sacrificed for the greater good of society, what they really are saying is that some individuals will be sacrificed for the greater good of other individuals. The morality of collectivism is based on numbers. Anything may be done so long as the number of people benefiting supposedly is greater than the number of people being sacrificed.
Only individuals are real and only individuals can have rights. Just because there are many individuals in one group and only a few in another does not give a higher priority to the individuals in the larger group – even if you call it the state and/or a corporation.
A majority of voters do not have more rights than the minority. Rights are not derived from the power of numbers. They do not come from the group. They are intrinsic or inalienable with each human being.
Those who drafted the American Constitution believed that a democracy was one of the worst possible forms of government and so, they created what they called a republic. This is why the word democracy does not appear in the Constitution; and, when Americans pledge allegiance to the flag, it’s to the republic for which it stands, not the democracy.
The reason this is important is that the difference between a democracy and a republic is the difference between collectivism and individualism.
In a pure democracy, the majority rules. It is always temporary in nature – it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy – usually followed by a dictatorship.
A republic is a state based on the principle of limited majority rule so that the minority – even a minority of one – will be protected from the whims and passions of the majority. Republics are characterized by written constitutions that spell out the rules to make that possible. These limitations on majority rule are the essence of a republic, and they also are at the core of the ideology called individualism.
The proper role of the state is negative, not positive; defensive, not aggressive. It is to protect, not to provide; for if the state is granted the power to provide for some, it must also be able to take from others, and once that power is granted, there are those who will seek it for their advantage. It always leads to legalized plunder and loss of freedom. If the state is powerful enough to give us everything we want, it also will be powerful enough to take from us everything we have. Therefore, the proper function of the state is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens; nothing more. That state is best which governs least.
And the other quote is you get the Government you deserve
Wellington's ship of fools shows the makeup of the voter pool
Trouble is now capable people don't bother standing (Mr Williams clear stand for example) and you get a bunch of ego seeking, income seeking political driven bunch who lack any business skills
Kieran McAnulty said last year "one person, one vote - oh that's just an academic version of democracy ".
And there he is, still in our NZ Parliament, not voted in, as a list MP trying to destroy what remains of democracy after two terms of Labour.
Where did he come up with the concept of "academic democracy " ??
Would he like NZ to have a voting system like the recent Russian elections ?
The way people in positions of authority act, and the way the world is going, it would not surprise me to see that the next person to be elected Pope would be a Protestant!
Kevan
Just to support Peter Williams' analysis of Maori ward voting patterns in Wellington - Maori wards in local government are patterned on the Maori seats in Parliament. The original justification for these disappeared in 1879 when all men gained universal manhood suffrage. But we still have them. Maori wards in local Government arrived in the year 2000 with three wards in the BoP Regional Council. The average voter turn-out in these constituencies in all elections since has been less than 10 percent.
IN 2022 the Hamilton City Council decided to create two Maori wards without giving the public a say. A Maori voting roll was created by moving voters listed on the Waikato-Hauraki Parliamentary roll en-mass without the consent of those voters, across to a roll for the local election. Of these @13,300 voters only 14.7 percent voted. The two successful Maori ward candidates received on average 650 votes each. by contrast successful candidates in 'general' wards were backed by @2400 votes each.
GEOFF LEWIS HAMILTON.
Extrapolate ahead another 100 years and a person with say 1/16 part Maori has children, who have children, who have children, who has a child.
That child then is 1/256 part Maori .
According to the nutty cabal currently running NZ, that child ,because of that remnant DNA, has continuing greater rights than other citizens of any other heritage ???
Bloody ridiculous nonsense that must be stopped right now - its a real shame that Luxon refuses to see the issue and act decisively.
That could be, and should be Luxon's indelible mark on history.
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