Politician behind mega council amalgamation in the 80s backs reforms
Thursday, 7 May 2026
Almost four decades after former Labour minister Dr Michael Bassett oversaw the most significant overhaul of local government in New Zealand’s history, he is now watching from the sidelines as similarly sweeping changes unfold.
On Tuesday, the Government gave councils three months to draw up amalgamation plans and confirmed regional councils would be scrapped altogether.
The move echoes Bassett’s 1989 reforms, which reduced 850 local bodies to 86 multi‑purpose authorities — 73 territorial and 12 regional.
“There were an enormous number of local authorities, little wee ones - road boards, river boards, rabbit boards, for God's sake,” recalled Bassett, who saw it as “high time” change took place.
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Bassett is supportive of the Government’s moves, saying it was evident there were too many regional councils, and unitary authorities had proved to be far more efficient.
The unitary authority structure did not exist during his reforms, and regional councils were only set up a decade before, so it would have been going “too far” to scrap them, he said.
But he did see a weakness in the amalgamation announcement - there was nothing that dealt with the “extraordinary” over-staffing in local authorities.
“The best argument for amalgamation is you’re getting rid of a layer of people that cost the ratepayer money.”
He said the number of people on council payrolls had gone up and up, and when Auckland Council amalgamated in 2010, around 8000 staff were employed. That number has grown to around 12,000 today.
“Councils have become careless because they can pass on the costs by rates. They don't monitor as carefully as they should,” he said.
A recent report by the Taxpayers’ Union found Auckland Council employed 948 managers and 77 communications staff, while Wellington City Council had 19.3 fulltime equivalent staff per 1000 households.
In the 2024 financial year, Wellington City Council’s total wage bill was $151 million. Its staff numbered 1907 as at April 2025.
History of local government
As Bassett detailed in a column, New Zealand’s local government system proliferated after the abolition of the provinces in 1876, as establishing a council was remarkably easy.
As settlement expanded, so too did the number of councils and by 1900 there were 101 boroughs; 86 counties; 227 road districts and 35 town districts. There were 29 river boards, 1 drainage district, 2 water supply districts, 17 land drainage districts and 26 harbour boards.
By 1912 there were 457 local authorities in a country of a million people, but no politician wanted to risk backlash by threatening someone else’s elected office, he wrote.
A need for amalgamation didn’t come until the Great Depression, and in the early 1930s a few councils went under.
It wasn’t until the Labour Government came to power in 1935 that amalgamation was talked about seriously and in 1947 it introduced legislation establishing a Local Government Commission.
But loss of staff and resources during the post-war period saw the commission unable to carry out any major reorganisation.
Bassett noted only a few amalgamations had occurred and under the Labour Government, the number of local authorities actually grew.
This was partly because the law provided a poll for ratepayers, and many were against changes, he said.
With significant economic restructuring in the 1980s, local government was no exception, and so Bassett directed the Local Government Commission to consult with councils across the country on amalgamating.
He said the proposed changes made “a real big noise”, and he was taken to court by a handful of councils, but won.
“You'd have thought that I was freezing hell over.”
Opposition came less from the public than from councils themselves, and he expected regional councillors to fight in a similar way, though he thought the backlash was likely to be milder than the 1980’s given the change is on a smaller scale.