After nACTional annexed Auckland, now you can have your limited say

Large maori contingent to voice claim for seats
Many Auckland Maori are expected to voice concern at the Government's decision not to include Maori seats on the proposed Auckland super council. Parliament's Auckland governance legislation select committee is hearing submissions on the Auckland Super City proposal. A subcommittee will look into the issue of Maori wards at Orakei, Te Puea and Hoani Waititi marae, from Wednesday to Friday. National Party MP Tau Henare is chairing it and is expecting many of the submissions to be heated. "Most definitely, I think people are coming along to have their say. It should be all on for young and old."

The window dressing that is this ‘consultation process’ is under way. After nACTional annexed Auckland and appointed 5 of Rodney’s handpicked unelected mates to rule Auckland in the interium, and after ramming the whole process through Parliament under a misuse of urgency, NOW Aucklanders get to have a limited whisper at nACTional’s privatization and mass immigration plan for Auckland.

As the brilliant Gordon Campbell over at Scoop has been pointing out for 6 months…

Rodney Hide’s latest plan for gutting local democracy
Rodney Hide’s agenda for local government involves – as Scoop reported six months ago – the importation of an American model that has resulted in drastic cutbacks in the public services provided by local government, and the privatization of some current services as a result. Colorado and California are two fairly chilling examples of what Hide has in mind. This agenda is outlined in a Cabinet paper whose contents are being wheeled into place in New Zealand under the cover of sweet-sounding terms like ‘greater transparency’ and ‘more accountability’.

In its purest form – first put in place in Colorado in 1992 – the process involves a spending cap for local government, and a requirement that elected councils must hold a referendum if any spending above inflation is contemplated. Over time, that spending cap becomes a sliding scale downwards, since the same mechanisms also require that any rates revenues collected above the previous year’s limit must be returned to ratepayers as a rebate.

Thus, the extent of local government spending at the trough of a recession quickly becomes the maximum allowed. It becomes a radical strait jacket for local government. Here, similar procedures are being enacted to serve an extreme anti-government agenda that – beyond the crackpot libertarian fringe – has never had a mandate in New Zealand.
The full account of Hide’s enthusiasm for the Colorado model – he mentioned the Colorado precedent explicitly in his 2006 private members Bill on local government reform – can be accessed here.

As with the Super City proposal for Auckland, Hide wants to have his reform structure enacted in legislation in time for the local body elections in 2010. In other words, the Key government will have radically reformed the structures of local government in Auckland and in every other council in New Zealand during its first term in office, by means of extremist solutions that it never put before the public at the 2008 election.

…as Gordon points out, this radical coup on the Government system has not been sanctioned by NZer’s, in fact NZers have actively resisted hard right economic policy as social policy for a long time. The definition of ‘core functions’ has been deliberately vague so that NZers won’t see this until it is rammed through Parliament late at night under urgency again.

New Zealand - you are being screwed by a privatization agenda and you don’t even see it yet. How is that change feeling?