The case for abolishing regional councils in NZ

NZ Herald

10-07-2025

Inspired by the Swiss system pushed by New Zealand Initiative executive director Oliver Hartwich, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says his vision for local government is about greater devolution to local communities.
But, as Bishop and his Undersecretary Simon Court have recognised, that is not where the logic of his Government's policy programme leads.
The whole direction of its resource-management reforms is about streamlining and often centralising decision-making.
Bishop regularly cites New Zealand councils having established more than a thousand different types of zones, each with their own technical rules that everyone in the infrastructure and commercial and residential property sectors has to discover, understand and comply with.
He argues this makes a lot of work for resource management lawyers but adds to the cost and complexity of getting any individual project built.
Japan, Bishop points out, with a similar size and geography as New Zealand but a population 25 times bigger, has just 13 zones that its local authorities can choose from – six for residential, three for commercial, three for industrial and one for central business districts.
In Bishop and Court's telling, having, say, 20 different types of zones in New Zealand would provide ample choice for local councils to reflect local characters across their territories, ensure the construction industry could more easily and cheaply comply with the rules, and force resource management lawyers to find more productive areas of the law to focus on.
What role would then be left for regional councils that either the central Government or city and district councils couldn't do, at least no worse than the status quo?
The Government's critics argue that getting rid of them would weaken local democracy, but regional councillors usually find themselves unable to genuinely reflect local views anyway, for fear of judicial review.
So constrained are they by their council officers that a regional council chairperson is even less a genuine community leader than a city or district mayor.
Their roading, civil defence and emergency management functions could easily be split between central Government, for big projects and disasters, and city and district councils, for smaller ones.
As the interest in city deals has demonstrated – not least the two-year quest by my friend and client Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown for a single agreed transport plan between central Government and Auckland Council – the major projects that local people most care about can often only be done as a partnership between the two.
Why keep up the charade that the entity with the bigger budget doesn't call the shots anyway?
Major projects like Auckland's City Rail Link can obviously only go ahead when central Government agrees, but that is often true even of things like two-lane bridges in places like Northland, as so crudely revealed in byelections.
Abolishing regional councils and devolving some of their functions into city and district councils raises the question of whether the smaller ones could cope. That in turn raises fears of mergers that, in some cases, risk sounding more like city and district councils being taken over by the unpopular regional ones.
Aucklanders' anger at their big so-called Super City, which combined smaller city and district councils with the old Auckland Regional Council, might recommend Bishop and Court tread carefully.
But that anger is mainly driven by fury at the so-called Council-Controlled Organisations (CCOs), deliberately set up by then Local Government Minister Rodney Hide to be independent of the democratic process, the way central Government's State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are meant to be.
The problem is that CCOs and SOEs only make sense when the plan is to turn old, inefficient government departments into something that can make a profit and then be sold.
Democratic oversight is removed to allow the new CCO or SOE to focus on profit, a new commercial discipline that also helps set their price.
But when there is no intention ever to sell a CCO or SOE, we end up with the worst of both worlds: entities that are neither democratically nor commercially accountable.
Better to sell the ones with no public purpose, and bring the functions of the rest under democratic control, as Brown has finally achieved, at least to some extent, with Auckland Transport.
If that reform succeeds, it will be even more difficult to find an Aucklander urging a return to the old system.
How bad would it really be if, say, the Far North, Whangārei and Kaipara councils were merged and also took over any remaining responsibilities of the unloved Northland Regional Council? Would anyone notice, other than the bureaucrats and politicians involved?
Yet abolishing regional councils does not necessarily demand mergers of city and district councils. Depending on how much of their existing functions were centralised, including roading, emergency management and monitoring water and land quality, a case could be made for splitting some of them up, as Hartwich and Luxon might prefer.
If Bishop and Court's vision of a small number of zone-types comes true, then even the smallest district council would be able to decide how to paint their local zoning map.
In Auckland, the 21 community boards were meant to ensure local communities still had a voice when the Super City was set up. They have failed largely because they have so few responsibilities and powers that they struggle to attract credible candidates.
But if community boards were empowered to decide how their local areas would be zoned from Bishop and Court's streamlined menu, then perhaps they would start to matter.
That could encourage voters and potential candidates to take them more seriously. In some areas at least, Hartwich and Luxon's vision of localism might end up sitting happily alongside Bishop and Court's vision of a streamlined, workable and efficient resource-consenting system.