In October this year New Zealanders will vote for their representatives on local city councils, regional councils and health boards. But in order to vote you must first be enrolled.

Every vote counts, yours just as much as anyone else’s. It is a shame that voter turnout in local body elections over the last 20 years has dropped from almost 90% to a little over 30%. So make sure your able to have your say this year, click the image below to check that you are enrolled to vote.

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.