Amalgamation is back on the menu (again)
If you’re reading that water and Resource Management Act reforms are leading to a need to also reform the structure, funding, and role of local government you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve woken up back in 2020. All that’s missing is me calling for a Royal Commission into Local Government.
But alas, no. I can assure you that it is April 2025 and it’s simply a case of the more things change, the more they remain the same. It’s just that the National-led Coalition Government is finding itself inevitably heading down the exact same path the former Labour-led Government did in 2020.
Of course, there are some small differences.
Labour’s water reforms were trying to force the regionalisation of three water infrastructure and services while National has given councils and communities the illusion of choice (while strongly hinting regionalisation is the way to go and that they could compel councils to do so).
Likewise, Labour’s RMA reforms were about the regionalisation of planning, while National seems to be tracking towards the standardisation of planning and stripping local government (primarily regional and unitary authorities) of their environmental compliance monitoring and enforcement responsibilities while apparently delegating down their environmental planning responsibilities to territorial authorities. Though it’s important to note we’ll need to wait until National reveals their specific legislation by the end of this year to have this all confirmed.
Just as Labour realised in early 2021, and National will eventually figure out too, when you shift and alter significant parts of local government’s raison d'être, you’re going to have to grapple with whether what’s left is still an effective, efficient, and sustainable expression of local democracy.
As much as current Local Government Minister Simon Watts might want to keep saying that central government isn’t going to force council amalgamations on communities (echoing the position of his predecessor Simeon Brown), I’m not sure such noble sentiments are going to last long. Once Local Water Done Well and the replacement of the Resource Management Act are in place, councils are going to find their sphere of responsibility and their financial stability have shrunk considerably. There’s more than likely going to be some sort of reckoning to ensure local government entities remain viable both financially and democratically in a post-water and post-RMA reform world.
Reading between the lines of the Coalition’s current RMA replacement plan, the future role of regional councils as stand-alone entities is one such issue that will need to be resolved. If the environmental compliance monitoring and enforcement roles of regional councils are taken away from them, and environmental planning is largely delegated down to territorial authorities, at a high-level regional councils are going to be left with biodiversity, biosecurity, some natural hazard management, and (depending on the area) public transport. Arguably spatial planning could be handled by regional councils, but it could also be handled by joint committees across a region - or a single unitary authority.
With the direction of the RMA replacement and the likelihood that three waters is largely going to be managed by separately, albeit council-owned, water entities, and considering the significant changes in our country since 1989 when the current form and structure of local government was locked in, something has to change to ensure local democracy remains viable and remains relevant to the 21st century.
As much as I’ve been an advocate of Wellington regional amalgamation, I’m also aware that amalgamation isn’t the only option and that it comes with its own trade offs. Proponents and opponents of amalgamation are famous for overselling the benefits or being doomsayers about the cons.
Acknowledging that I have a hammer and there’s a risk of seeing every issue as a nail (hat tip to The Spinoff’s Joel MacManus for reminding me of that great saying), I still can’t escape the feeling that we need that Royal Commission I called for back in November of 2020.
While the Review into the Future for Local Government was a valiant effort it was limited by its terms of reference. As a result it produced something much more akin to a think tank-style white paper than what was needed to implement the wholesale reform of local government that would have been required had Labour’s Three Waters and RMA reforms survived.
Consider the whopping final report from the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance. It was a comprehensive plan on what the future role, structure, and funding of local government should be for Auckland, as well as detailing how to transition into those new arrangements. While the subsequent National-led Government didn’t implement all of the Royal Commission’s plans, most of them were retained.
The Royal Commission was a massive body of work. We shouldn’t be under any illusions that a similar undertaking with a scope across the entire country isn’t an even more complex beast. But trying to tackle this holistically must surely be a much better approach than the piecemeal, death by a thousand cuts method currently taking place.
The sooner the National-led Coalition comes to accept that they’ll need to show leadership on the future of local government and have to come up with an actual plan for that future, the sooner they can get on with things.
Ideally they’d have a new local government system ready to roll out in time for the next round of local government elections in 2028, which would line up nicely following the replacement of the RMA, but I’m not holding my breath.
A boy can only dream.