Policy By Announcement

Ah Chris, is three months enough time for these councils to pull together the plan? Well, I'm worried about the greater Wellington region, uh, and I've long been in favor of some form of amalgamation, whether you do it incrementally by bringing together the three councils and the Wairapper into one uh merge uh upper hut and lower hut, or whether you have the big bang. I actually think there is a way in which it could be done that improves on the Auckland model. Uh maybe the local boards need to have more uh standing, slightly more uh responsibility. So there's no reason, for example, why you can't continue to have a mayor of the Waira Rappa, a mayor of the Hutt Valley, a mayor of Wellington, and the sorts of things that Phil's been talking about could be done by the uh the Uber body with a chair or a czar or something. Uh but I I just think there does need to be some movement in Wellington. I mean, I go back to the 1980s uh and um Michael Bassett uh was dealing with, for example, the extremely absurd new market borough, which had a thousand residents, uh, and um uh apparently the mayor used to walk around with his chains on because he was quite pleased with the fact he was the mayor. But so there was a need for some kind of the Mount Albert Borough, the Mount Roscalborough. So that was the first tranche of amalgamation in the late 1980s. But the other thing I would say is that uh Bassett became the minister of local government when he was tossed out of health in 1987 and had the plan knocked into shape with the former mayor of Palmer Stone North, Brian Elwood, and it was all in place by 1989. Uh and the idea that in August, before the House is prorogued and then dissolved for an election, uh, you'd come up with this sort of thing. It's getting pretty late in the piece. So uh we'll talk about careful proper legislative processes later on. I you know, I don't want to sound like a boring lawyer, but the fact of the matter is it's good to get these things if you're going to have revolutionary change, bed it in slightly earlier than the August before a November election.