Franks on Auckland Council
July 20th, 2012 at 7:00 am by David FarrarStephen Franks writes in NZ Herald:
The Auditor-General is unlikely to fix Auckland Council member Cathy Casey’s complaint that the council was kept in the dark on the V8 race subsidy. The law setting up the Super City deliberately created a presidential mayoralty and gave councillors no clear rights to information.
It certainly does not protect council officers who want to provide unbiased information to councillors against the wishes of their bosses, the chief executive and the mayor.
The law may have been drafted out of frustration with years of indecision fuelled by endless reporting and consultation as excuses for inaction. Perhaps the law’s designers chose to give elected dictatorship a go instead.
Not quite an elected dictatorship. The Mayoral powers are quite weak compared to say Boris Johnson’s. They are stronger than other NZ councils, but not that strong.
Amazingly till now there has been little publicised protest at the constitutional barbarity of this structure. Without clear rights to the same information available to the executive they must monitor, councillors become spare wheels.
Councillors have never had a right to all the information management has, as far as I know.
Some have called the Auckland governance structure the corporate model. If so it is a poor copy. The company model is robust about directors’ rights to oversee management. Directors have an almost unrestricted right to information from anywhere in the company.
I agree that a company director has rights to see pretty much anything from the general ledger to the petty cash reconciliation. But there is a difference between commercial directors and elected officials.
The Auckland mayor holds central power in a hybrid Westminster/presidential system without separation of powers. Unlike all other mayors in New Zealand he is not first among equals. He is the boss.
More like a senior colleague. He can not sack a Councillor, and has the same vote as a Councillor. What the Mayor does get is the ability to appoint Committee Chairs and Committees and to propose the Budget.
Worse, there is no equivalent to central government’s State Services Commission code for state servants, or the parliamentary conventions that oblige officials to provide honest and impartial advice to MPs in a select committee, and protect them from senior wrath when they give it.
Current law requires councils to have a code of conduct for councillors. It should be extended to officers.
Not a bad idea.
Auckland badly needs a constitutional upgrade. Version 2 should enshrine the right of councillors to information. It should protect and constrain council employees along the lines of the State Services Commission code that guides public servants and protects the impartiality of their service.
Auckland Constitution 2 should also require council consultants to certify their work to councillors. They are now a vital part of local government quality control.
With intense competition and Auckland being the major employer of many consultants, the temptation is too great for consultants to tell council officers (who control where the next contract goes) what they want to hear.
All sounds sensible suggestions.
Related posts:
- Auckland Council Bill reported back
- Equal votes for the proposed Auckland Council?
- Douglas & Hubbard on Auckland Council
- Auckland Boards on the Auckland Council
July 20th, 2012 at 8:21 am
Auckland is a great example of what happens when you have no official/effective opposition to Mayor Brown’s agenda.
Maybe they should change the structure so that the councillors elect one of their own to be an official opposition to the Mayor.
(Perhaps call him the anti-Mayor?!)
Their job would be similar to the Leader of the Opposition – hold the Mayor to account for his decisions – loopy or otherwise.
Or alternatively Aucklanders should get with the program and elect a Mayor with half a brain.
Vote:July 20th, 2012 at 8:31 am
Stephen Franks is hilarious in a majesterial, pompously hypocritical way. Here is a man who routinely beseeches the government to grow a pair and stand on its authority to ride roughshod over popular opposition when it suits him and his ideological agenda. But when it doesn’t suit him and his ideological agenda he pops up in the Herald bleating about the evil of elected dictatorships, complete with pompous declarations of the sanctity of the Westiminster system (as if he is the only person to have noticed this) and the need to defend it all costs! Mr. Franks is really only upset because as far as he is concerned the wrong guy won the mayoralty, thereby indicating there is something “wrong” with Auckland democracy requiring reform until the “correct” result is achieved. He might live in Wellington but he is a JAFA alright – Just another fucking ACToid.
Vote:July 20th, 2012 at 9:08 am
A CCO is the local body equivalent of an SOE. ATEED was within its delegations. It went to the council as a courtesy. That’s the nature of the model.
MPs have no right for commercial information from, say, Air NZ either. The strength of the CCO and SOE model is that politicians appoint the board and give the board the operating parameters and let the get on with it.
The board are then held to account for their performance.
Vote:July 20th, 2012 at 9:32 am
“Councillors have never had a right to all the information management has, as far as I know.”
This is interesting. I would compare the situation between company directors, councillors, school board trustees and cabinet ministers. They are all in governance roles, and collectively are entitled to all relevant information held by management (some personal information and state secrets would be exceptions). Individually they are generally not entitled to information any more than the public. Cabinet ministers would be an exception, so would chairs / mayors to the extent to fulfil their statutory functions. As far as I can see, if one councillor is given information, then all councillors in most circumstances should be given the same information. I remember a case some years aho where a council resolved to order the CEO not to provide any information to the mayor. This would surely be unlawful to the extent the mayor needed information to carry out statutory functions.
Company directors (and I would include committee and board members of charities, sports clubs and independent schools) can be between a rock and a hard place on this, since recent court cases have really sharpened up their accountability. If a director is not happey with the direction of the company and considers he or she has inadequate information or analysis to make proper decisions – he or she should resign – as a judge told the ex Bridgecorpo chairman who argued he was ‘powerless’ to intervene in the purchase of that boat – he got home detention.
Councillors and state (including integrated) school board members seem to be in a somewhat different situation. A balance needs to be struck between complying with reasonable information requests while not wasting council resources on frivolous information requests. Unlike a company it would not be reasonable to expect a councillor or school board member to resign because he or she is unhappy with governance. But then presumably it is extremely unlikely a councillor would be held personally accountable for problems if a councillor expressed concern by abstaining, dissenting, or complaining to the Auditor General.
Vote:July 20th, 2012 at 9:20 pm
No. DPF and Franks have the wrong end of the stick. There’s English law on this, which would apply by analogy in NZ (in fact stronger in NZ). Crs have a right to access all info held by a local authority (except when conflicted from a relevant committee). Different for info held by CCos, though.
Vote:July 21st, 2012 at 3:14 pm
Spare me the faux outrage from that know-all Franks. Councils have kept reports secret for years. The last North Shore City Council was one of the worst. Some of those now complaining about this “secret” report were instrumental in hiding reports under that council. At the end of the day the councillors are accountable: They either voted for or against the V8s and next year the voters will have their say on that. If councillors didn’t want the V8s without seeing the full information they wouldn’t have bloody voted for it!!
The Auditor-General has been used in the past under the old Auckland structure, and hasn’t done much. Nothing to really see here. Move along.
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