Fasten your seatbelts!
Like the now defunct Stuart Nash, Michael Laws is seeking a Parliamentary re-birth as a NZ First MP candidate.
After starting as a National MP, then shifting to NZ First (quickly ended by scandal), Laws has served on several local councils (including Napier, 1995/96) and was mayor of Whanganui (2004-2010). He’s not uninformed on the workings of local government.
He offered some advice on how to ‘fix’ local government in a recent address to his new party faithful. Not one to shy away from controversy, he delivered on cue. Here are his suggestions, presented as ‘food for thought’.
I suspect most BayBuzz readers will be buffeted by his remarks. Which boxes would you tick?
Says Michael Laws …
If I was Minister of Local Government this is what I’d do:
1. Allow everyone to stand for elected office. Currently the only people standing are unemployed, self-employed or retired. Why’s that? Because the staff arrange countless meetings during their work hours effectively excluding any waged or salaried person from office. Got a job or a family? Forget it.
2. Eradicate council workshops. I did in Wanganui. Waste of time. Sorry, that’s too moderate. The greatest waste of time outside of watching grass grow (and even then). I don’t go to them because they turn into staff lectures about the paths/decisions that they’d want you to make. And so many are secret.
3. Reform the Local Government Act 2002. Restore real power to the community and their elected representatives. Make it plain that there is NO dividing line between governance and operational. Elected members are responsible for everything a council says and does.
4. Get rid of the monastic order that is local government senior staff. Trained, recruited, retreaded always from within. Recruit senior managers from the private sector with the emphasis upon customer service and maximising efficiency.
5. Aggregate services (this is where local government unification and unitary authorities make sense). It’s crazy that each council has its own payroll, IT, HR, consents, compliance, infrastructure and management teams. That’s an inefficient madness all of its own.
6. Come up with something a lot better and more effective than Three Waters or its successor, Local Water Done Well. They’re still as woke as buggery and as costly and bureaucratic as anything they will replace. And a lot less accountable.
7. Make sure that there is no co-governance. That you sit around the council table because you’ve won the trust and faith of your local community. All the community. Restore a working democracy – a real democracy’.
Ending with … “And that’s just the start. Well, you did ask!!”
