Zoran Rakovic - Selwyn’s 634 Pages of Silence: The Theatre of Democratic Surrender

Selwyn councillors received a 634-page agenda just 3 days before voting. Why did no one protest? A searing critique of silence, theatre, and complicity.

Let us begin not with outrage but with a shrug—the shrug that echoes from the silence of elected councillors handed a 634-page agenda with three working days to digest, interrogate, and resolve it. This is not merely a matter of poor administrative timing or clerical overload. No, the real scandal is not in the bureaucratic gesture itself but in the cynical normalisation of such acts, and more terrifyingly, in the docile submission by those elected to resist them. There is a quiet apocalypse taking place in local democracy, and its soundtrack is the passive assent of councillors who have, perhaps unconsciously, chosen comfort over conflict, posture over principle.

When democracy begins to resemble a theatre of the absurd, it is not the actors who should be blamed first, but the audience that claps politely. The councillors, in their inaction, have performed the final act of what Mark Bovens would call an accountability blackout. The information exists, yes—it is produced, formatted, and distributed in impressive bureaucratic mass. But it overwhelms, it obfuscates, and ultimately, it silences. Bovens reminds us that accountability depends not on the mere existence of information, but on its usability, timeliness, and comprehensibility. What happens when a governance system performs the ritual of disclosure while ensuring its content is functionally unreadable within the allotted time? It becomes Kafka, rewritten by Microsoft Office.

Here we must invoke Habermas, who posited that legitimacy emerges through rational-critical debate among informed participants. But where is the space for such discourse when councillors are drowned in unread agendas, then perform the vote as if deliberation had taken place? We are witnessing the reversal of deliberative democracy: the illusion of procedure without the substance of comprehension. It is the very negation of Rawlsian public reason—decisions not made in a spirit of fairness, but in the fog of exhaustion.

What is more obscene, however, is the willingness of the representatives to accept this. Not a whisper of protest, not a gesture of refusal. Their silence is not neutral; it is complicity. It is the silence that Hannah Arendt warned against: the passive submission to bureaucratic domination, the erasure of the political subject in favour of administrative flow. Arendt did not fear totalitarianism as an external imposition, but as a gradual internalisation of obedience. And so, the councillor becomes less an agent of the people and more a curator of paper, a reader of scripts they did not write and do not understand.

This is not merely incompetence. It is what Herbert Simon anticipated in his theory of bounded rationality: when decision-makers face complexity that exceeds their cognitive limits, they do not decide better—they defer, they guess, they rubber-stamp. Bureaucracy knows this. It does not require that you read, only that you nod. The 634 pages are not a burden; they are a screen, a shield behind which true power operates unchallenged.

The irony is that local government, that supposedly intimate sphere of democracy, is the site of this hollowing out. Elinor Ostrom believed in the strength of local institutions, but only when they were polycentric, participatory, and informed. What we have here is the inverse: a monoculture of submission, a procedural authoritarianism masked in community branding. And those best placed to resist it—those elected precisely to protect the people from administrative excess—have chosen instead the warm, sleep-inducing bath of quiet compliance.

The question is not why the agenda was so long, or why it arrived so late. The question is why no councillor stood up and said: this is madness. Why none insisted: we will not vote until we have had time to understand. Sherry Arnstein taught us that citizen participation is often an illusion, a carefully managed performance to give the impression of inclusion. But when even the elected representatives participate in that illusion, when they become performers in the farce, then the game is over. What is left is not democracy, but simulation.

Lon Fuller’s morality of law required transparency, stability, and the ability to comply. But here, the very method of governance defeats that morality. Councillors are expected to engage in legal and policy reasoning without time to think. To vote on documents they have not read. This is not merely flawed process—it is a procedural obscenity.

Even in the age of behavioural nudging, as Cass Sunstein might describe, there is still an ethical line. Nudges are meant to help citizens make better choices, not to paralyse elected officials through information bombardment. Yet here we are, not with nudging, but with bludgeoning—not with simplification, but with saturation.

Where, then, is the democratic courage? Where is the rebellion? Archon Fung described empowered participation as a model where governance is shared, informed, and accountable. Selwyn has instead offered a parody of empowerment, where councillors are given all the documents and none of the time. It is like handing someone a scalpel and demanding they perform surgery without training, under a stopwatch, in front of a silent crowd.

We should not pity the councillors. They are not victims. They are agents, and their choice to do nothing is an act. Their silence is not neutral. It is betrayal. The public trusted them with scrutiny, with resistance, with care. Instead, they gave us quiet faces nodding through unread lines.

The point is not to perfect the system, but to pierce the illusion. To shout, in the style of the fool in King Lear: the emperor has no clothes, and no one even read the briefing. Until councillors refuse this grotesque ritual, until they demand time, clarity, and space to think, they are no longer representatives but relics. Democracy deserves sharper minds, louder voices, and the refusal to nod politely at the machinery of its own erasure.

There is a time to deliberate, and there is a time to dissent. That time is now.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. He blogs HERE.