Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide a ‘work in progress’ report on some initiatives emerging from local government practice in New Zealand which should help us consider how we think about the role of local government in a world which is undergoing dramatic change. The starting point is work which the writer undertook with the support of Local Government New Zealand (the national association) and a number of New Zealand councils considering the ‘proper role’ of local government. The context is an ongoing public debate driven substantially by the New Zealand business community from a perspective that this ‘proper role’ should be restricted to the delivery of local public goods, narrowly defined. This has included argument that local governments themselves should be structured substantially to promote the efficient delivery of services generally within the now well understood prescriptions of the ‘new public management’. One implication which the business sector in particular drew in looking at the workings of local government was that there should be economies of scale through further amalgamation of councils (the local government sector having been through a major amalgamation process in 1989 which eliminated a large number of special purpose authorities and reduced the number of territorial local authorities from more than 200 to 73). Debate continues, with the latest manifestation being the National Party led government's proposals for the restructuring of local government within the Auckland region, New Zealand's major metropolitan area. The initiatives discussed in this paper are partly a response, but more significantly a result of selected local authorities reflecting on the nature of their role, and the opportunities for being proactive in using their statutory privileges in ways that could produce benefits for their communities without any associated increase in the cost of local government itself.
Highlights
The purpose of this paper is to provide a ‘work in progress’ report on some initiatives emerging from local government practice in New Zealand which should help us consider how we think about the role of local government in a world which is undergoing dramatic change
Moving to a ‘general manager’ model of administration under which the council ceased to be the employer of all staff and instead had just one employee, its chief executive, who had a statutory monopoly on advising the council itself
What had been largely missing in the changes in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s was any substantive debate over the proper role and function of local government
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to provide a ‘work in progress’ report on some initiatives emerging from local government practice in New Zealand which should help us consider how we think about the role of local government in a world which is undergoing dramatic change. The context is an ongoing public debate driven substantially by the New Zealand business community from a perspective that this ‘proper role’ should be restricted to the delivery of local public goods, narrowly defined This has included argument that local governments themselves should be structured substantially to promote the efficient delivery of services generally within the well understood prescriptions of the ‘new public management’. As already noted, underwent substantial restructuring in 1989 This involved amalgamating smaller local authorities and doing away with a number of special purpose bodies, and absorbing their functions into general-purpose territorial authorities. It was a matter of attempting to improve both the efficiency of operation, and the transparency and accountability of individual councils. The New Zealand government saw this as an appropriate role for local government, especially as it was becoming more and more
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