Building Better Councils

Rates are soaring, transparency is declining, and too many councils are distracted from their core tasks. Whether it’s funding vanity projects, hiring communications staff instead of fixing potholes, or embarking on ideological crusades, councils are too often putting their own agendas ahead of the ratepayers they are supposed to serve.

The numbers speak for themselves. Council debt has ballooned in the last decade, and last year alone, average residential rates increased by almost 15 percent across the country. And despite all their spending, public satisfaction with council performance is falling. Infrastructure is failing, planning processes are sluggish. As a result, voter turnout in local elections continues to decline.

New Zealanders deserve better.

The proposed solutions in this paper are not radical, but are intended to reduce waste and improve performance across the sector. Local government should be lean, transparent, and focused. It should deliver high-quality services at a reasonable cost and be held accountable when it doesn’t.

These reforms are a roadmap to achieving that. This is how we build better councils.