This is a positive result and hopefully one that will see much benefit come to Auckland. Now is the time for long term planning and investment in the city to bring it forward. Three years is both a short and a long time in politics. I don’t know how much Brown will achieve in only three years but lets hope in the long term he will deliver much needed forward thinking for Auckland.

Update 1: A earthquake happened and Bob Parker has been re-elected to the Christchurch Mayoralty. This result shows how quickly the media and natural events can change the fortunes and expected outcomes of people in politics.

For the last few weeks there has been investigations by Police in New Zealand into voting fraud in South Auckland. In the blogosphere a number of right wing blogs have been point the finger at members of the Labour Party being involved. I refused to believe them as I did not think for one second anyone involved in a political party would be that stupid. I was wrong.

Radio NZ reports:

Two men have been arrested and charged with forgery just days before local body voting closes, accused of creating enrolment irregularities in Auckland.

Labour Party president Andrew Little says at least one of them has links to the party.

At the rate the Labour Party is going they will not be back in power for a long time. This is a real shame, while I may be a Greens supporter it is unlikely they will ever be able to form government without Labour, and with Labour just going from one self-inflected crises to the next National are likely to retain power for the better part of the next decade.

Update: Kiwiblog is reporting the names of the two people arrested, they may or may not have name suppression so I am not going to repost the names here but one of them is a JP. Fraud is one thing, fraud by a JP is another. Since when did NZ become so corrupt?

I have just taken down my post on the Electoral Fraud in South Auckland. Those involved have managed to get name suppression and news sites and blogs have also removed their political affiliation until the suppression order is lifted. As Kiwiblog points out. This is “Very ironic that this happens on the day the Government announces it will be harder to get name suppression.”

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.