LOCAL GOVERNMENT REFORM

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 24 June 1937, Page 4

LOCAL GOVERNMENT REFORM

SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS NEED FOR MORE DETAILED PROPOSALS 111 this article in “The Press” a general survey is made of the progress of the South Island local body amalgamation schemes put forward by the Minister for Internal Affairs, the Hon. W. E. Parry. It is suggested that the generally unfavourable reception accorded to these schemes by local bodies has been due in part to errors in tactics. The reasons against amalgamation given by local authorities are also discussed.

In previous articles in this series the amalgamation schemes for Westland. Grey-Inangahua, Nelson, Marlborough and South Canterbury have been described in some detail and something said about 1 the reception accorded to these schemes in the districts concerned. Since it can be expected that before very long the Minister will announce other amalgamation schemes for the South Island, it may be of some value to enunciate certain conclusions which emerge clearly from a survey of the progress of the five schemes already described. 'HOSTILITY OF LOCAL BODIES The reception accorded to the Minister’s proposals by local bodies in each of the five areas has been uniformly discouraging. Not only have the great majority of these bodies passed resolutions in favour of a maintenance of the status quo, but they have made no response at all to the Minister’s invitation to work out his schemes in greater detail and to examine theii financial and administrative implica tions. A possible exception is Westland, but in this case the scheme involves merely the absorption of certain small authorities within Ihe county area and not a merger with any other county. REASONS A GAINST AMALGAMATION The reasons advanced against amalgamation are depressing in their sameness and their vagueness, the two most popular being that the proposed amalgamation ignores community of interest and that the administration of the enlarged area would take up too much of the time of council members. The truth seems to be that community of interest means everything and nothing. The term can be used to strength the case for amalgamation and quite as easily to weaken it. An impartial critic would admit, however, that .the Minister’s schemes bear far more relation to community of interest than existing county boundaries. The people of South Canterbury are consciously the people of South Canterbury; but no one would claim that the Levels County is marked off from the rest of South Canterbury by either local patriotism or natural boundaries. Indeed, the great objection to most of the existing counties is that they are mere arbitrary divisions of the map of New Zealand.

Moreover, it is important not to confuse community of interest with vested interest Some of the strongest opposition to amalgamation comes from the small ' country towns which, under amalgamation, will cease to be county headquarters To the tradespeople of these townships, loss of the county headquarters means loss of business. Council -members coming in to attend meetings, farmers cofning in to pay rates, will usually find it convenient to make the township their shopping centre.

LENGTH OF COUNCIL MEETINGS

The argument that larger counties will take up too much of the time of council members is as unimpressive as the community of interest argument One frequently hears it said :“At present the council has to sit for the whole day to transact its business; if a larger county is created, the council will have to spread its meeting over two days or do its work less thoroughly. You can’t expect farmers to give up two whole days a month.” A careful study of county council procedure suggests that the duration of county meetings has no relation to theamount of work done or to the efficiency with which -it is done. When members of a county council assemble for their monthly meeting, they usually make a day of it; it does not matter much whether the county concerned Is spending £SOOO a year or £50,000 a year. A FAULTY APPROACH It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the method of approach adopted by the Minister of Internal Affairs and his department has tended to accen tuate rather than to diminish local opposition to amalgamation. Up to a point, the method of approach chosen was a good one. It can be assumed that the Minister was anxious that local bodies should be consulted, but that he was anxious to avoid the mistake made in 1912 by the Hon. G. W Russell, - who submitted his scheme of local government reform to a national conference of all classes of local auth critics. Inevitably, such a conference was too unwieldly to function effectively, and quite as inevitably the great majority of its members were opposed to any change in the status quo. Mr Parry therefore decided, ane wisely, to deal with the local authorities in small and manageable groups. The great mistake, though perhaps the Minister and his advisers are not to be blamed for failing to anticipate this was to announce the.group amalgamation schemes only in the barest outline. For it is the details that matter. In South Canterbury, for instance, amalgamation has been under discussion for years. The Minister’s proposals brought the discussion no further forward; and there were only two ways in which he could have brought it further forward. The first was to announce whether the prosed amalgamated county was to be divided into ridings, what system of franchise was to be adopted, what rating system was to be enforced, where the county headquarters would be. and how indebtedness was to be adjusted, these details could have been regarded, not as finally settled, but as open to discussion. The second way of advancing the discussion would have been to request the conference at which the general proposals were announced to set up a committee to formulate a scheme in detail and to leave an officer of the local govern-

ment section of the Internal Affairs Department in the district to assist the committee. Either of these methods of procedure would have steered the discussion away from unhelpful generalities to practical details. MORE DETAIL NEEDED It must be emphasised that a bare proposal to amalgamate a group of counties means very little particularly where there are substantial differences of indebtedness or rateable value. The case of the Murchison county, dealt with in a previous article, illustrates this point. Murchison has a large area and a very low rateable value. If, in the proposed large county, Murchison becomes the Murchison riding, and continues to finance its own roading system by means of a separate rate, then clearly amalgamation will be of little benefit to Murchison ratepayers. If, on the other hand, all road works in the' new county are financed out of a general rate, Murchison will gain by amalgamation. But since . this point was not cleared up, the Murchison County Council pronounced against the. Minister’s scheme, for the very inadequate reasons which lead most small authorities to oppose amalgamation. It is worth noting that in Nelson, Marlborough, and Westland conferences to discuss amalgamation were held as the result of local initiative months before the Minister announced his schemes. All these conferences were in effect an admission that local administration in the districts concerned was not in a satisfactory state; and they created an atmosphere fav-, ourable to the consideration of comprehensive and detailed schemes of reform. The Minister was expected to produce such schemes. Instead he produced proposals which left the discussions still in the air. A SHORTAGE OF EXPERTS It is, of course, true that the Minister is somewhat handicapped in the matter by the inadequacy of the local government section of the Department of Internal Affairs. In New Zealand there has never been a close central supervision of the local government system, such as is exercised over the English system by the Department of Health, the successor to the old Local Government Board. The local government section of the Department of Internal Affairs contains several highly competent officers, but their number is so small that it seems impossible either to work out each scheme in detail in advance or to give local committees the assistance of a departmental officer in developing the Minister’s proposals. In any case, it is not desirable that decisions on points of detail should be !pft entirely to the local authorities affected. Uniformity within limits is an essential condition of local government efficiency, and if uniformity is to be secured in the amalgamation schemes it is necessary that certain principles should be laid down governing !he adjustment of rating burdens, indebtedness, the franchise, and the superannuation of employees, and that the application of these principles should be supervised from the centre.

SUPERANNUATION OP EMPLOYEE!-

It is particularly unfortunate that no general pronouncement has been made on the subject of the superannuation of county employees. In the whole of the West Coast area there is not one local government superannuation scheme, and of the 13 counties whose affairs have been discussed in this series of articles only two nave superannuation schemes A uniform system of superannuation is one of the essential conditions of the creation of an efficient local government service, and the amalgamation schemes provide an opportunity to introduce such a system—at any rate in the counties. f the Minister would lay it down that all amalgamation schemes must include provision for superannuation he would allay the fears of those few employees who already have superannuation rights, and would at the same time strengthen support for his proposals among local body employees generally.