Reynold Macpherson: Rotorua's Head Start Process Has Failed - The Minister Must Take Control

Rotorua Lakes Council’s handling of the Government’s Head Start reform process has a legitimacy problem that cannot be dismissed as the unavoidable consequence of a compressed timetable.

The deeper problem is that there was enough time for some people to be involved upstream.

The Council’s own report records the “valuable and significant contribution” of Te Arawa Iwi Chairs, who assisted with engagement and co-design of Rotorua’s Head Start proposal, with support from Te Tatau o Te Arawa.

At the same time, the report admits that the timetable “has not enabled the level of formal consultation that would ordinarily be expected” before a final local-government reorganisation decision.

That contrast should concern every Rotorua ratepayer.

This is not an argument that iwi should have been excluded. Te Arawa and other iwi have Treaty settlements, statutory relationships, catchment interests and governance arrangements that plainly require engagement.

The democratic problem is that selected institutional interests were given meaningful upstream access while the wider body of ratepayers and electors was not.

That is more serious than inadequate consultation. It goes to the legitimacy of the process itself.

Power is exercised not only when councillors cast votes. It is also exercised earlier, when problems are defined, assumptions are accepted, preferred outcomes are identified and alternatives are narrowed.

By 19 August, councillors were not being asked to begin an open inquiry into the future governance of Rotorua. They were being asked to choose among three options built around substantially the same objective: preserving Rotorua as the core of a new unitary authority.

Option 1 proposed joining Tauranga City Council in an eligible Head Start bid. Rotorua would become a Central unitary authority, while Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty District would form a Western unitary authority.

The difficulty was obvious. Western Bay of Plenty District Council had already decided not to participate.

Rotorua nevertheless considered supporting a configuration affecting an unwilling neighbouring council because that was the only apparent way to satisfy the Government’s requirement that at least two territorial authorities participate.

Option 2 proposed submitting Rotorua alone, while expressly objecting to forcing unwilling councils into Head Start. Council acknowledged that such a proposal would not meet the eligibility criteria.

Option 3 proposed sending Rotorua’s work to Government merely as information, preserving the same preferred blueprint for use in a later Government-led “backstop” process.

These were not three competing constitutional futures.

They were three tactics for advancing substantially the same institutional outcome.

That matters because the public had not first been asked whether that outcome should be Rotorua’s preferred future at all.

There is an important difference between consulting people about options already framed and allowing them to participate in framing the options themselves.

The first is managed consultation.

The second is democratic policy making.

Ratepayers were largely confined to the first, while selected institutional actors participated in the second.

The Council report also records collaboration among the region’s mayors, the regional council chair and chief executives through the Bay of Plenty Mayoral Forum.

Again, such collaboration is not inherently improper. But it demonstrates where influence was concentrated.

The people who pay Rotorua Lakes Council’s rates were not sitting at those tables. Nor were they given an equivalent mechanism for shaping the constitutional choices being advanced in their name.

Council may argue that the Government’s timetable made this unavoidable.

That does not resolve the problem.

If there was time for iwi chairs, Te Tatau o Te Arawa, mayors and chief executives to participate in engagement, collaboration and co-design, there should have been time to provide ratepayers with a transparent and equivalent opportunity to influence the same upstream questions.

Council repeatedly invokes the need to protect “Rotorua’s local voice”.

But whose voice?

Rotorua Lakes Council is not the same thing as the Rotorua community.

Councillors and senior managers have an understandable institutional interest in preserving their council. Existing partners have an understandable interest in preserving established relationships. Organised stakeholders may prefer arrangements through which they already exercise influence.

Those interests may coincide with the public interest.

They cannot simply be assumed to be the public interest.

The Council’s three options therefore invite a more troubling interpretation.

They appear to favour co-governed institutional survival: preserving Rotorua Lakes Council substantially within its existing boundaries while extending its authority, and doing so through a policy process in which selected iwi leadership and Te Tatau o Te Arawa were given upstream influence denied to the wider electorate.

Co-governance does not need to appear only as equal seats around a formal decision-making table. It can also become embedded through privileged access to agenda-setting, co-design and policy formation.

That is why the process itself matters so much.

A council cannot privilege selected partners in shaping the options, marginalise ratepayers from the same process, and then present the resulting position to Government as though it carries a democratic mandate.

It does not.

The Minister of Local Government should therefore treat Rotorua’s Head Start position as a Council position, not as the settled will of the Rotorua community.

More seriously, the Minister should ask whether Rotorua Lakes Council has discharged its responsibility to provide democratic policy making at all.

On the evidence of its own report, it has not.

The process privileged selected institutional participation, restricted wider public influence, and produced three options that all served substantially the same objective of institutional survival.

That is not a sufficiently trustworthy foundation on which to redesign local government.

The appropriate response is not to refine Rotorua Lakes Council’s preferred model.

It is to require a fresh process controlled by the Minister’s Office.

That process should begin with genuine alternative governance structures, independent financial and governance analysis, transparent disclosure of who participated in shaping each option, and equal opportunity for ratepayers and electors to influence the choices before a preferred model is adopted.

Until that happens, the Minister should reject Rotorua Lakes Council’s Head Start position as democratically compromised and should not entrust the Council with developing a solution whose first obligation must be to the public interest, not to the survival of the existing institution or its preferred co-governance relationships.

*Reynold Macpherson is a retired professor, former CEO and Rotorua Lakes councillor who writes about ethics, governance and public policy.