Oscar Kightley: ‘Never in my life have I noticed how many rubbish bins there are’

As rounds go, city and borough councils were not sought after by journalists in the olden days.

As a junior reporter at the Auckland Star at the end of the 1900s, I preferred to cover crime, which always made the front page; sports, which always made the back page; or music, where you’d at least get free records or tickets to gigs.

But local government? Forget about it. Getting sent to cover a meeting of one of Auckland’s many city and borough councils at that time would make you think the chief reporter didn’t like you. Apart from councillors, the only other humans in the room would be one senior staff member and the reporter from the local community newspaper.

We would sit there with thick meeting agenda papers the size of War and Peace, and exchange sympathetic looks that said, “I see you, there’s no judgment here. We’ll get through this together.”

But the local government bug bit me, as I realised that what happened at these meetings often affected people’s lives more than the decisions made in the halls of power in Wellington.

Fast forward to 2022, I was elected to the Henderson Massey Local Board in my neck of the woods in West Auckland. When you get the support of your fellow residents to do a job like that, it’s powerful motivation to make a decent fist of it. Especially when they’re among the few residents who bother to fill in their ballot papers and send them in.

The voter turnout in Auckland at the last local body elections was just under 40%, which matches what tends to happen globally, so at least we’re not the only ones wasting a chance to influence what happens in the areas where we live.

We need to do more to try to raise the voter turnout but, in the meantime, there’s a lot of work to do, especially in local board areas like mine where there is high deprivation.

The Henderson Massey local board area is second in Auckland in terms of Māori population, has the biggest proportion of Pacific people outside South Auckland, and its diverse population numbers a few thousand more than the city of Dunedin.