National consistency, the Government’s two worst words

Sunday, 9 March 2025

Wayne Brown is the mayor of Auckland.

OPINION: With a few exceptions most organisations become bureaucratic once they reach a certain size and that goes for private companies as well as central and local government which have a tendency to be bureaucratic in any case. Just look at Fletchers, which has lost its way in recent years, and even Unilever which the PM worked for has cumbersome bureaucratic procedures as any supplier will tell you.

Governments really go in for bureaucratic growth in numbers, rules, procedures and staff costs so that our central bureaucracy in Wellington now employs so many that periodic pruning like the current government has tried doesn’t even start to get the numbers back to a sensible figure. Rather than cutting 6000 and feeling good about it there should be wholesale slashing of departments and at least 100,000 to get the country back in profit.

My own council is top-heavy especially with the CCOs which built their own bureaucracy and currently there is a heavy pruning underway as we consolidate the various CCOs into one organisation sharing services such as IT, pay, accounting, procurement and anything we can force into a more efficient way of providing the services that ratepayers need.

Make no mistake, this is a real challenge and not universally loved within the organisation.

The big organisations that resist bureaucratic growth are usually owned by a zealous few, totally focused on a small range of activities that they do very well. Examples such as Rocket Lab and Zuru here in NZ spring to mind with brilliant leaders totally focused on activities that support their limited range of very profitable products.

So back to council and the need to remove stumbling blocks to progress. Examples of Wellington interference such as setting parking fines are worth a look. At the start of my term parking fines were set nationally as $12 or a beer for every town in NZ. In most Auckland suburbs that’s not enough to encourage people to pay for parking as it’s cheaper to risk the paltry fine. Alerted to the problem, a battalion of drones in the Wellington office of the Ministry of Transport toiled for weeks to come up with their solution, which was to increase the fines to $20 or a gin and tonic.

None of them thought that perhaps councils could set them locally. Why not? The Wellington obsession with national consistency which results in Auckland city folk still not sufficiently encouraged to pay for parking and in our small regional towns people thinking the $20 fine is way too much. We don’t even want consistency for these sort of things across our city. The parking fine in Ponsonby should always be more than in Wellsford, just as the parking costs and problems are locally different. Something that should be decided by local boards is still employing drones in Wellington to get wrong for the sake of national consistency.

We are seeking to have legislation passed to allow Auckland accommodation providers to recover 2.5% charge to fund big events for the city via a bed night levy that would yield enough to fund a State of Origin game, or a Taylor Swift concert or the America’s Cup which fill the hotels who benefit. The only other places in NZ that need that are Rotorua which needs more security and toilets and Queenstown which needs cheap accommodation for low-paid workers.

Yet the Government seems averse to handing this responsibility to local government, which is just ridiculous. Wellington drones want national consistency over even this, as if the tourist numbers in Ōtorohonga deserve it.

Please Government, concentrate on your own problems and let local government do what it does close to its locals.

What do you think? Email sundayletters@stuff.co.nz. Please include your full name and address.

Editor’s note: This is Wayne Brown’s final column for the Sunday Star-Times as he begins his re-election campaign.