David Farrar at Kiwiblog this morning posts that under the new structure for the Auckland council the total number of elected representatives drops from 258 to 147 and then proceeds to say “I’d say 111 less Councillors etc is a good start!”.

How is it that less representation is good?

Currently with 258 democratically elected representatives across the region there is one representative for every 5,426 people (from a population of 1,400,000 people). With only 147 elected representatives this drops to one representative for every 9,523 people.

However, what is worse is the drop in the number of councilors from 109 to 20. In other words from one councilor per 12,844 people to one per 70,000 people.

That is a massive drop in representation.

Community boards simply do not cut the mustard when it comes to representation. The reality is community boards are designed to feed a majority view into the council. However it is only a view, and only a majority one. They are essentially nothing more than people with good intentions who unfortunately will have the majority of their good views railroaded by the superiority of the much more powerful council. This is hardly good democracy.

The call for one united Auckland council was primarily focused around reducing bureaucracy rather than mucking about with the representative democracy. It is unfortunate that the National Government has overrun this process and turned it into a farce by playing politics with the biggest city in New Zealand. Pathetic.

Tags: Auckland, Democracy, Local Government, Politics, Representation

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 10:58 am and is filed under Comment and Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.