New Zealand’s super city?
Posted 6 April 2009 // Ben Schrader
Super city from space
Recently, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance released a report recommending merging the metropolis’s seven local authorities into one ‘super city’. It would make Auckland the biggest single municipal city in Australasia – just ahead of Brisbane – and end the ‘Auckland disease’ of fragmented and parochial local government. Well, perhaps.
Bickering has been a hallmark of Auckland governance since a welter of small councils were set up to govern the region following the end of provincial government in 1876. Rarely were these parts able to work as a whole. Projects benefiting the whole region – such as the harbour bridge – often got delayed or quashed by petty rivalries. In the 1950s geographer Kenneth Cumberland described Auckland’s local government as a ‘babel of disputing tongues … a comic opera of overlapping and ineffectual agencies we miscall “authorities”‘. In the 1960s these numbered 32; reforms in 1989 culled them to the present seven.
But it seems even seven is too many. Proponents argue a super-city council would stop infighting by working for the common interest. But in a metropolis that rightly prides itself on being New Zealand’s most cosmopolitan and diverse, agreeing on what these common interests are is going to be a challenge to say the least. New voices may well join Auckland’s babel of disputing tongues.
Meanwhile, the prospect of what the Otago Daily Times has called a ‘city state’ in Auckland raises the question as to whether we should embrace or fear the proposal. Will the proposal work? Might it mean Auckland dominates the country even more? Is that a good thing? Is there any alternative? And should other cities such as Wellington or Dunedin follow Auckland’s lead?
I don’t think I’d ever refer to Auckland as a ’super city’.
Well, I rather like the diversity, the different feel of different parts of the city. Perhaps the bickering territories get what they deserve. And whether a combined authority would make the bickering less is moot.
But local government anywhere is a nest of vipers, isn’t it? The only thing the authorities have in common is their hatred of central government, which funds them too little, they assert, and forces them to comply with unpopular and expensive bureaucratic edicts!
“…the common interest” that’s the problem right there. There are probably very few common interests between the folk who live on the north shore and the folk who live in South Auckland.
In a super city, when you don’t actually know your “neighbours”, I imagine some aren’t going to think it’s very fair when they have to pay for entry into their local public pool, and their “neighbours” in Manukau don’t…
Councils amalgamated here in Victoria in the early ’90’s into “super councils” and anything more than 2 kms from the council chambers is ignored/demolished/sold off/devalued/ etc.
Hold onto your individual councils!
Waiheke used to be independant, but then got swallowed by Auckland City Council. Rates are sky-high. For a 40 square metre bach with no sea view in a semi-industrial part of the island I pay about a third of the rates paid by Dick Hubbard (ex-Mayor of Auckland city). Waiheke has no town sewerage system, no town water, and very few footpaths! Who will benefit from the amalgamation of Auckland?
Orkulangi is no city - it’s a massive suburb with a prick in the middle…
saw a new Tui advert when i was in Auckland this weekend
“is it a bird? is it a plane? No, its the Super Mayor - yeah,right.”
not a vote of confidence then