Voters of the North Shore, Waitakere, Manukau and Franklin will be very concerned with the announcement that Auckland City based Citizens & Ratepayers is going to run a single slate(r) of candidates across the region at this year’s supercity election.
The reason? Auckland City Council undertook some research that showed ‘There are real concerns …. that local identities and issues will be swallowed up, lost or ignored, and that the council will be overly focussed on the CBD. Rural residents in particular feel their needs and concerns will be ignored.’
The problem for C&R, along with John ‘Mayor for Remuera’ Banks, is that they are intimately associated with the CBD and all the negative politics associated with what’s wrong with Auckland.
They’re right to be concerned. It’s called the so-called ‘Otahuhu Effect’, where C&R have conspired to make sure Otahuhu hasn’t got the community pool it has been trying to secure for a decade, while Judge’s Bay in well-off Parnell has had $5 million spent on sand for its foreshore.
The fear is that the C&R CBD old boys are gonna do to communities in Waitakere, Manukau, Franklin, Rodney and the North Shore what they’ve done to Otahuhu.
Local government politics in other parts of the region is not the same as Auckland. Other parts of the region do not have strongly whipped caucuses. Locals should be worried that C&R candidates will not represent their local interests when they have to sign a pledge such as this:
If elected I agree to abide by the majority decisions of any caucus meetings of the elected members of Citizens & Ratepayers.
The partisan whipped politics of Auckland City are set to spread around the region, unless a loose coalition of community focused progressive candidates can knock C&R off. Good luck to them.
And I have to say – the inspired selection of ex 1990s National Government Minister/ex Auckland City Council Mayor Christine Fletcher show C&R to be a truly future focused organisation.
P.S On a related note – what is going on with Monte Cecilia School? Why is John Banks forcing this school to move when it doesn’t need to and the community doesn’t want it to? And why is Banks, supposedly in favour of prudently spending ratepayers’ money, pushing this through and wasting $15 million in the process?
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