Give any ratepayer around the country a soapbox to perch on and they will shout about local council spending which was unworthy.
In Dunedin there was huge controversy over the building of our covered stadium. While many ratepayers may regard it as a triumph, there are still those who regard it as an expensive millstone.
The government has cashed in on the idea spending on cycleways will provoke outrage anywhere, although we hear little criticism now of the shared pathways developed along Otago Harbour, developments which have been great for motor vehicle users as well as cyclists and walkers.
When Local Government Minister Simeon Brown announced this week the government is calling on local government to focus on fixing pipes, filling potholes, and delivering core local services, he will have struck a chord with many.
He would have us believe frivolous spending has become rampant across the country’s councils and only an edict from Wellington can stop ongoing huge rate increases.
The councils themselves tell a different story. They say they are already spending most of their budgets on essential services, with upgrading water infrastructure a major part of that, and government policies are adding to their financial woes.
The well-beings have been removed before, and Mr Brown said the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) had advised him rates increased on average 2% faster in years when the well-beings were in the legislation than when they were not.
However, as far as we can tell, he has not yet provided advice for perusal so we can see how well it accounted for other factors at play.
Bandying about figures without proper explanation has become a hallmark of this government, as we know from the Dunedin hospital rebuild saga.
One of the government’s concerns is that in some cases councils are duplicating roles which are central government’s.
It is unclear where such council staples such as playgrounds, gardens, libraries, sports fields, swimming pools, and museums fit with this back-to-basics approach.
We doubt the government is keen to step in to fund those.
There is much more to living in a thriving community than roads, rubbish, and water and sewerage services.
The government does not want councils to continue building social housing, although many councils have been in that business for decades, often because central government was not keeping up with demand.
It might have made more sense for the government to involve those councils in its social housing programme, given councils’ experience in the field.
The government is also planning to benchmark councils’ performance through a yearly report from the DIA to help ratepayers hold councils accountable and allow for comparisons between councils.
We wonder how well this will be done, given there will be vast differences between councils in size, geography and history, and how useful it might be.
How much time and money will this cost the DIA and the councils which might be better spent elsewhere? Voters who chose any of the coalition partners last year would have believed, from what they were told during the election campaign, all were keen on less influence from central government and more emphasis on localism.
There has been little evidence of that so far.
Surely ratepayers can work out whether they like what their council is doing and vote accordingly in the next election without help from a score card from the government.
If Labour had proposed such benchmarking, it would have been greeted with screeches of nanny state. There will be suspicion this back-to-basics call is designed to stifle noisy lobbying from councils over government policies and practices they consider detrimental to their communities — Dunedin City Council’s campaign over the Dunedin hospital rebuild, for instance. That may be unfair, but we fear it could be an unintended consequence.
