THE PRESS MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1980. Local bodies and local opinion

Press, 6 October 1980, Page 16

THE PRESS MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1980. Local bodies and local opinion

By the end of this week, the voters of Christchurch, like all others in New Zealand, will have had their triennial opportunity to decide who shall run their local affairs for the next three years. Regrettably, not all who are qualified will use this opportunity. Their excuses—if they bother even to make any—will be various. Among them will he that what happens in Wellington, not in local council chambers, is what really counts and that they see no important local issues at stake this year. Both excuses are irrelevant and neither are reason enough to neglect the most important, opportunity to influence the choice of people who will supervise local body affairs.

Neither candidates nor outgoing councillors can be accused of discouraging an active interest in what they have done or will do. Indeed, candidates have gone to some pains to draw the attention of electors to the important, if not dramatic, issues at stake. Local bodies in the area have made considerable efforts in recent years to encourage the active participation of residents and ratepayers in their business. Committee and other meetings are open and advertised to a degree unheard of even a few years ago.

One of the more recent initiatives of the Christchurch City Council in this direction has been to promote the formation of neighbourhood committees. An assessment of the possible roles and the prospects of such neighbourhood committees may help to identify some of the reasons why local polls are commonly evidence of too little interest in voting. Neighbourhood committees are unlikly to fulfil some of the higher hopes placed in them. This will be due in part to scepticism about local government in general.

A City Council booklet on neighbourhood committees lists no fewer than 10 local bodies or Government departments that make decisions affecting individual areas in the city. When local bodies are better co-ordinated and have more real powers and functions than they do today, people can be expected to see more point in becoming active in a neighbourhood committee, and perhaps more point in voting in local body elections. In general, they will take more seriously the need to make their views known to local authorities when they are assured that something can and will be done at the local level.

In too many areas of civic life power is either too fragmented or seems too far removed from individual reach for many people to feel confident that they can play some part in influencing decisions. It is no accident that it is in the area of town and country planning, in which local bodies have significant powers touching immediately on people’s lives, that neighbourhood and other organisations are most active.

Also necessary, if neighbourhood committees are to thrive, are assurances that the committees will not be fobbed off with token hearings. The members of such committees must be made to feel they have genuine opportunities to influence decisions. This is not to say that local bodies must necessarily and always bow to the wishes or demands of any body which calls itself a neighbourhood committee. At times a broader interest may have to override a neighbourhood interest: and conflicts within neighbourhoods are certainly not unknown and must be resolved or adjudicated. Members of local bodies may be tempted, if a neighbourhood committee makes an awkward request or demand, to dismiss it as a handful of unrepresentative activists or as a group which is pressing a neighbourhood issue for partisan political purposes. The duty here lies with the committees themselves to keep grassroots support and to avoid partisanship.

Even the need for neighbourhood committees as channels of communication between ratepayers and residents and their elected representatives can be questioned. The natural tendency of people is to look for representation on “political” questions to the specialinterest groups to which they belong. Such a committee will seem an .artificial device to people who already belong to other organisations and have social and family ties which stretch beyond the area in which they happen to live. It would be unrealistic to expect neighbourhood committees ever to play the sole role in assessing and asserting opinion. Neighbourhood committees can provide a useful addition to, but no replacement for. the existing web of special-interest groups which lobby and endeavour to influence local as well as national politicians. Nor are they in any way an alternative to that most potent way of expressing a political opinion in any reasonably functioning democracy —the ballot box.