Russell
Palmer, Political Reporter
Explainer –
It’s billed as the
biggest shake-up to councils in 30 years, but a lot of
questions about how the government’s regional council
“reset” will work and what will happen remain
unanswered.
The government on Tuesday announced plans
to replace regional councillors with boards made up of
mayors and maybe some minister-appointed
representatives.
The ministers argue local government
has lost its social licence and change is needed – but
current councillors and opposition parties are questioning
whether the solution on offer is the right one.
Part
of the problem, according to the government, is many people
don’t even know what a regional council does.
So
here’s what we know, and the thorny issues yet to be teased
out.
What are regional councils anyway?
New
Zealand has various kinds of councils, but the main three
types are:
- Regional councils (11 of these in
NZ) - Territorial authorities (67)
- Unitary
authorities (6, including Auckland)
They have
different roles and responsibilities.
Regional
councils look after the environmental aspects of resource
management including things like: flood protection, air
quality, and pest control, as well as public transport
planning and funding, civil defence, and bulk water supply
and treatment.
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Set up under the 1989 local government
reforms, they cover large regions based primarily on water
catchments or drainage basins.
These regions usually
include cities, towns and rural areas which are in turn
managed by local councils – the “territorial authorities”
which include city councils and district councils.
As
an example, the Greater Wellington Regional Council handles
the regional council responsibilities for the Kāpiti Coast,
Porirua, Wellington City, Lower and Upper Hutt, South
Wairarapa, Carterton, Masterton and part of the Tararua
district – each of which have their own city or district
council.
The territorial authorities are responsible
for meeting residents’ needs by providing services,
including roads, water services, waste and recycling
collection, parks and libraries, and administering public
safety bylaws.
The third category – unitary
authorities – basically combine the responsibilities for
territorial and regional councils so the area just has one
council.
So what’s the government doing?
The
proposal revealed on Tuesday by RMA Reform Minister Chris
Bishop and Local Government Minister Simon Watts is a
two-step process.
The first step is abolishing the
elected regional councillors and having the mayors of the
territorial authorities in each region taking over their
responsibilities as a new group, given the memorable name
“Combined Territories Boards”.
There would be 11 of
these boards, to match the current regional boundaries, and
the government has also suggested its own representatives
could be installed on the boards to provide greater
oversight from the Crown.
It should be noted that at
this stage the broader regional council infrastructure
including staff, contracts, and asset ownership would remain
unchanged, it’s just the elected councillors who would be
replaced by the CTBs.
The second step is to task these
boards with developing a strategy (Regional Reorganisation
Plan) for how to reorganise council responsibilities in the
long term.
The plans could conceivably decide to
continue on with the CTBs, or they could come up with
something new including amalgamating some territorial
authorities, or they could set up regional agencies to take
over planning for things like public transport – which often
makes sense to plan at a wider regional level.
The
plans would need to meet certain criteria set by the
government including:
- Big picture fit:
the plan supports national priorities like housing,
infrastructure and business
competition - Short and long term
affordability: a financially responsible
arrangement to manage rates increases and support them to
manage assets well - Better services:
reorganising local services so they work better and cost
less - Clear leadership: the plan
sets out who does what and who is responsible across
councils - Local voice: decisions
happen at the right local level, and the plan provides fair
and effective representation of
communities - Treaty arrangements:
all Treaty of Waitangi settlement commitments including for
rivers are managed in accordance with the
settlements - Realistic: includes
details for how to put the plan into action, for example
with a step-by-step timeline for establishing a new regional
roading agency or setting out how council staff might be
restructured
Consultation on the plans will be
mandatory, including with local communities, iwi and hapū,
and other stakeholders.
Once developed, the plans
would go to the Local Government Minister for signoff and
the restructuring would take effect.
At that point,
the wider regional council infrastructure could be broken up
into different unitary authorities, or the territorial
authorities may find it simpler to combine into one
region-wide unitary authority.
Bishop said the
government had an “open mind” about how the councils would
be reorganised, but with the changes brought through the RMA
reforms “people will see the attraction of unitary
authorities”. He said it would be fair to say the reforms
would work best, democratically, if it ended up with more
unitary authorities.
“With my Wellington MP hat on …
the feedback I get from Wellington councils and mayors and
actually frankly Wellington regional ratepayers that having
Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt and Porirua and Wellington City is
pretty nuts – so if this proposal goes ahead Wellington will
get the chance to do what they have not done for quite a
long time and seize the opportunity for
growth.”
More information about how it could
work is available from
the Department of Internal Affairs and in the
discussion
document.
Timeframes
The ministers’
announcement at 5pm was also pitched as the launch of public
consultation on their proposal, although for now DIA’s
consultation page only said a survey would be published
soon and to check back later for further
updates.
Consultation closes on Friday, 20 February
2026.
The ministers said they aimed to have
legislation drafted based on that consultation in mid-2026,
and passed by mid-2027 – which would be after next year’s
election.
Bishop would not guarantee the current
councillors – elected just last month – would necessarily
see out their full term.
Presuming the new government
continues on with the proposed changes, the legislation
would set up the CTBs, which would have two years from when
they were established to produce the Regional Reorganisation
Plan.
Complications: Votes and boundaries
…
The proposal sounds simple on the surface, but
there’s some things which make it all a bit more
complicated.
One thing the discussion document seeks
further feedback on is how much power each mayor would have
on the board, the problem being that it’s difficult to find
a solution that’s fair for everyone.
A simple model of
giving each mayor one vote means smaller rural populations
would have a lot more power, proportionally, through their
mayor than those representing big cities. Then again, giving
each mayor a number of votes based purely on population
would tilt things in the other direction – basically giving
the city mayors all the power.
The government’s
solution is to primarily use a population-based vote
approach, but have the Local Government Commission apportion
more votes to smaller districts to balance it out a bit.
This would either be left entirely up to the commission or
the government would provide it with a set of criteria based
on the feedback from the public consultation.
For
resource management decisions, a majority of both the
population-weighted votes and a majority of board members
would be needed, as a way of providing an extra
backstop.
The discussion document sets out that Crown
Commissioners could also be brought in to “ensure that the
national interest is considered in regional
decision-making”.
They could either replace regional
councillors (instead of having the CTBs), or could be
brought in as additional members of the CTBs – with a range
of options for how much power they could
wield:
- Observer only:
non-voting - Veto power:
able to stop decisions where they think it’s
necessary in the interests of New Zealand as a
whole - Majority vote: Crown
Commissioners hold more than 50 percent of the weighted
votes, with the rest distributed among
mayors
The document did not give an option for
giving the commissioners a minority vote.
Another
difficulty is that some territorial authorities are split
across multiple regions, for example Taupō District is
mostly covered by Waikato Regional Council, but also has
areas in Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay, and an apparently
unpopulated sliver of Manawatū-Whanganui.
The
government says it doesn’t want to change regional or
district boundaries, so the discussion document presents two
options:
- Having smaller isolated areas “adopted”
into a neighbouring region, with the district mayor given
additional voting power in line with the additional
population. For example, the roughly 150 people of Taupō
district who are in the Bay of Plenty region would be
‘adopted’ by a nearby mayor who gets extra votes on their
behalf. The community is not currently expected to be able
to vote on which mayor would represent them, but the
government is considering that as an option. - Having
districts with isolated populations represented on all CTBs.
For example, the Taupō communities would have a share of
the votes on three different regional CTBs based on the
population within each region. It’s possible a local ward
councillor might represent Taupō district residents in Bay
of Plenty, instead of the mayor.
The government
proposes to either decide these on a case-by-case basis by
the Local Government Commission, or based on some population
threshold set by the government.
Hang on, why is all
this happening?
The ministers give two main reasons
for making these changes: that the coming RMA reforms will
shake up regional responsibilities anyway and it makes sense
to change local government at the same time; and that the
status quo setup of councils simply isn’t fit for purpose
anymore.
They argue the two layers of council
(regional vs territorial) means costly duplication of
services and that each can disagree over how things should
be done, slowing down progress.
Shifting to one layer
would be expected, Bishop says, to save ratepayers money by
putting “downward pressure” on rates increases – stopping
them from rising as quickly – and the discussion document
says it will make decisions “much more
coordinated”.
Bishop on Tuesday pointed to turnout at
the recent local government elections as evidence local
government as a whole “has lost the social licence, and that
New Zealanders have lost faith in local
government”.
But while warnings
were sounded about low turnout ahead of the recent
elections concluding last month, a bump on the last day
meant the final
turnout at 39.4 percent ended up close to the previous
election in 2022.
Voting rates have been falling over
the past three decades, but the rate is close to that
of the UK, and higher
than in the US.
Another reason for the government
to step in is cost: council rates have been rising
significantly in recent years and the government wants to be
seen to be tackling the cost of living.
Prime Minister
Christopher Luxon last August led
the charge on calling for councils to tighten their
belts and stop wasteful spending on “fantasies” – a message
that seemed at odds with his previous anti-Three Waters
campaign promising localism and devolution.
Some
councils pointed out the government had continued to place
additional demands on them without providing the funding to
do so; that laws prevented councils seeking new funding in
ways that did not rely on rates; that the rising cost of
water services were forcing councils to prioritise spending
on that; and that councils’ share of total taxation through
rates was about 10 percent compared to central government’s
90 percent.
Reasons not to do it?
Opposition
parties seem to agree something
should be done to change the structure of local
government in New Zealand – but warn the government’s
approach could remove expertise and community
voice.
They argue it is undemocratic to remove the
elected councillors – particularly if Crown Commissioners
reporting to government ministers end up with the power –
and that it removes environmental protections the regional
councils were set up to oversee.
While Treaty
of Waitangi settlements will continue to be honoured,
the government is also doing away with Māori constituencies
and other regional constituencies – potentially erasing
those protected minority voices from the democratic
process.
The question of unexpected costs from setting
up the boards and restructuring things also remains
unanswered, though the ministers are confident it will keep
overall costs down in the long run.
Finally, another
consideration is that the problem of the structure of local
government has been looked at before, several times – most
recently and comprehensively with the Future of Local
Government review commissioned under the previous Labour
government.
Rather than building on that work, the
coalition essentially
binned that review on coming into
office.
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