New Zealand’s super city?
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?
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