Listen, I don’t often bring my work home & share it, but I’ve just spent the past two days off work, and attending to my meeting duties as an elected member of the Otago regional council.
For a long, long time I have opined that local government in NZ is run by, and for, the bureaucrats. That elected governors play increasingly lesser roles in decision-making and that they are effectively sidelined by senior local government managers in a variety of ways. It’s the reason that people don’t vote in local elections, or make submissions to annual plans and the like. The public well understand that their input, and their elected reps, make bugger all difference to the local government machine.
But on Wednesday past, that belief/prejudice received dramatic confirmation around my council table.
To cut a long story short - the ORC want to establish a $2 million per annum fund, to finance worthy community environment projects. Big ones. They already spend around $1 million a year on small ones. Now we don’t have any specific projects in mind, but $2 million a year is to be rated against everyone irrespective.
The ORC staff wrote a paper - for governance approval this week - setting out the criteria for eligibility to that $2 million a year. And the very first one was this:
“Alignment to inter generational aspirations of Mana Whenua, with a demonstrated level of support obtained for the initiative from Mana Whenua/Papatipu Runaka”.
Now the “mana whenua” down here are about 3-4 local Maori committees, subsets (hapu, I guess) of Ngai Tahu. They are represented by a commercial entity that they’ve established called Aukaha.
When I questioned the ORC chief executive as to the meaning of “alignment” and what “a demonstrated level of support“ meant, I was informed that the eligibility criteria quoted above is actually “a core priority for the Council.”
Not just the $2m per annum environment fund, but the Otago regional council in general.
As you can imagine, I went ape (hopefully, intellectually ape but ape nonetheless). I charged that we were taking $2 million a year from hard-pressed ratepayers and then saying to a tiny fraction of the indigenous population of Otago that their preferences and values were not just critical, but the ONLY preferences and values that counted. Which is … racism. The racial preference of one group over all others, by dint of their ethnicity.
To make matters worse: if a really GREAT project came up that benefited the entire Otago environment and wider community, and it didn’t “align” with “Mana Whenua values”, then it would get no funding. Extraordinary, and wrong.
But staff dogma masquerading as staff recommendations, and promoting their bizarre (only word) representation of “partnership”, with local iwi representatives is what ORC staff do.
In the end, I was surprised that a majority of councillors felt a similar discomfort. We have a left/green majority, after all. The item is to be word-smithed but it will return. And bureaucracy, like rust, never sleeps.