Local Government Minister Simeon Brown says fixing roads will be prioritised over social housing under new reforms designed to get councils “back to basics”.
[…] Back then, the Government promised “final” policy decisions to be made “later this year”, but on Monday Brown said the reforms will be split into two parts.
The first part will involve the publication of new reports of council spending, due early next year, and the second part, involving legislation, will be introduced mid-2025 and passed by the end of the year.
That legislation will include measures to force councils to keep rates low, should the Government decide to go down that route. Brown has long floated copying an Australian model which pegs rates increases to a figure deemed reasonable.
Actually making councils transparent and accountable...I can hear the wailing from here.
[…] Brown will also amend the Local Government Act to remove the “four wellbeings”, a topic over which National and Labour have been feuding for a quarter of a century, ever since the wellbeings were included in the first version of the Local Government Act in 2002.
In case you’re wondering what these “wellbeings” are, don’t bother clicking the link. It doesn’t actually tell you what they are and just leads you on a wild goose chase. The four “wellbeings” are described in section 10(1)(b) of the Local Government Act as “to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of communities in the present and for the future”.
So, if you’ve been wondering how councils can get away with spending hundreds of thousands on Māori art work while sewer pipes remain blocked, there’s your answer.
And if you’re also wondering how councils can spend your rates to ‘fight climate change’, there you go.
[…] Brown said yesterday that he believed removing wellbeings from the act would focus local government on the “basics”. The minister said Internal Affairs had advised him that rates had increased “on average 2% faster in years when that has been in the legislation than when it hasn’t”.
[…] Brown said the wellbeings “effectively increases the scope of what councils should be focused on rather than those core basics of fixing the roads, fixing the pipes, delivering local services effectively and efficiently”.
“It increases the scope and therefore councillors vote to increase what the council is doing, which costs more money,” Brown said.
Brown offered little clarity on how councils would decide what was basic and what was not.
One area that appears to be non-core is providing social housing.
[…] “If your council had a choice about whether to fix roads or build more social houses, they should be focused on fixing roads,” Brown said.
He noted that Housing Minister Chris Bishop was leading the charge for the Government to steer social housing, rather than councils.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, appearing beside Brown, agreed.
“There will be councils that have legacy assets and social housing or council housing – that’s fine, they need to be well managed. But what I’d say to you going forward is we’re expecting [the] Government to deliver social housing,” Luxon said.
To me it’s actually arguable as to whether this should be the responsibility of councils or government. But so far ‘social housing’ has basically meant ‘slum housing’. By the way, if you ever find yourself driving around the poorer parts of Auckland, don’t be surprised when you see that almost every state house has at least one 50k+ car parked in the front yard.
The challenge in Wellington is that the central Government is not keen to deliver this housing themselves, but rather to deliver it through Community Housing Providers (CHPs), which are charities that collect a subsidy from the Government to deliver social housing.
In the capital, the largest CHP is Te Toi Mahana, created in 2023 to manage the Wellington City Council’s social housing portfolio. It’s the second-largest social housing provider in the city after Kāinga Ora.
The big question is how successful have they been. Not very, as far as I can tell.
In any case it’s clear that Simeon is promising to bring councils to heel and stop them wasting ratepayer money on bullshit. I’m actually starting to like Simeon.
Kevin is a Libertarian and pragmatic anarchist. His favourite saying: “There but for the grace of God go I.” This article was first published HERE
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