Race relations gives people the ick, but stripping unelected members of voting rights was obvious - Heather du Plessis-Allan
Simon Watts moved to remove the voting rights of unelected members on councils under the Local Government Act. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Credit to Simon Watts. His call to strip the voting rights from unelected members on councils was well overdue.
It felt like a call he didn’t want to have to make. It took him weeks to announce the obvious solution.
It was April when news first broke that the
There’s a good reason he took weeks to make up his mind. Race relations is a subject that gives people the ick. The National Party has shown a habit of trying to avoid taking positions on the subject if possible lest they are labelled racists.
And there is no pretending that this is not a race relations issue. Yes, there are examples of youth and rural representatives being appointed with voting rights too. But what really gets the public angsty are the iwi representatives. They also happen to make up the vast majority of these appointments.
Defenders will tell you the angst is overblown. It’s just a committee. It’s not the full council. The full council can always undo the decision if the committee gets it wrong. But it would be a brave council that would overturn the decision of the committee for Māori strategic relations because being tagged a racist would follow as sure as night follows day.
But this is also more than a race relations issue. It is also a debate about democracy.
Given the enormous amounts the council now forces us to pay in rates, it is more obvious than ever that ratepayers should be able to choose who makes decisions about that money.
The tricky part for Watts now is defending having only gone halfway. He has only stripped voting rights from unelected members installed under one piece of law: the Local Government Act. But there are five laws in all that install various other members. Which means he hasn’t touched the voting rights of mana whenua members in two of the most contentious examples: the Auckland Council and Ecan.
Ecan he may be able to explain away because the entire body will be scrapped within two years when all regional councils are binned.
But the Auckland Council is not so easy. There are two unelected representatives who have full voting rights and have used them to help Wayne Brown win close votes he would otherwise have lost. In other words, without them the democratically elected part of the council would have reached a different conclusion.
Watts’ argument here is that he hasn’t enough time before the election to fix all five laws. What he’s done is easy because the Local Government Act is already before Parliament for amendment. That is a fair argument.
But he should avoid the trap of thinking it gives him a chance to escape doing the final clean-up of all five laws because this issue is likely to crop up again. The strength of feeling on the Far North case suggests this winds people up. All it will take is one controversial call by one of the iwi representatives on one of these councils to make the news – or one vote screwed against the democratically elected councillors – and this could fire up again.
Because the principle is the same across all councils from the Far North down to the deep south. Democratic decision-making over vast sums of ratepayer money matters.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.