Op-ed: The roadmap that local government needs to follow

Kent Duston is the principal of Habilis New Zealand Limited, a consultancy based in Tāmaki Makaurau.

(Originally published in The Post on 1 July 2023)

OPINION: It’s pretty much a given that local government needs to change.

The recent Future for Local Government review, He Piki Tūranga, He Piki Kotuku, underlines the challenges every council is going to face in the coming years – a rapidly-changing climate, a turbulent economic environment, evolving demographics, fast technological progress and much more.

Councils need to be resilient and effective, and we’re increasingly expecting them to be highly responsive to whatever the world throws at us.

As the summer cyclones and the pandemic have shown, most of our community challenges are multi-faceted: it’s about roads and stormwater, but it’s also about individuals and whānau and businesses and community groups, and the ecosystems we live within.

Increasingly, we can only solve problems by making sure we’re paying attention to all the issues – just fixing the potholes isn’t enough on its own.

So the recommendation to put wellbeing at the centre of local government reforms is a smart idea.

Wellbeing isn’t the fluffy thing most people assume. It’s an increasingly hard-nosed way of assessing costs and benefits, using the rational tools of economic theory to figure out the real impacts on people and the environment and our social structures, as well as accounting for the money.

It’s a clever way of working out what’s valuable and important for the community and the environment, and the country as a whole.

Here’s an example. We recently assessed the value of a council replanting a forestry block in pinus radiata, versus reverting it to the native bush that existed before the commercial pine plantation.

While it was easy to figure out the economics, there are proven tools that allowed us to value the other factors – the ecological services, the carbon effects, the enjoyment impacts, the cultural values and more.

In the wider analysis – expressed as dollars – the ngāhere was more valuable than the pinus radiata. So the council made the decision to revert the forestry block, and the community and the country are tangibly better off as a result.

This is why wellbeing is important, and why the Future for Local Government review panel is pointing in the right direction.

We have the data, the statistical and computational tools to make smarter and more informed decisions than ever before. We can see more, know more, and understand more than was the case when local government was last reformed, more than 20 years ago.

And we have these new capabilities just as our challenges are getting bigger and more complex.

So we need to step away from thinking local government is solely about rates and infrastructure.

If we want to thrive in a more challenging world, we need to embrace wellbeing as the core organising principle of local government, so we can make better decisions and build a more resilient future.

And we need to make sure councils have the tools and capabilities to properly assess and value social, environmental, cultural and economic wellbeing in their communities.

Wellbeing isn’t just the icing on the cake of the He Piki Tūranga, He Piki Kotuku report: it’s the central organising principle, and it’s the way forward for local government in Aotearoa New Zealand.

— Kent Duston