He came to Auckland to have a chat with a few people who had opinions about what is happening in Auckland. Wanted to see if there were any ideas he could take home. Because the Government there has problems with what they've done. A major backlash in fact.
I told me much of the forced amalgamation happened around Noosa, Cairns and Port Douglas. Was a bit hard to understand the nuances of what he was saying. He said the Property Council of Australia was the main organising force for these amalgamations. It seems as if some parts of Queensland had been resisting high growth. Places like Noosa for example. And so a strategy got put together to amalgamate the "good" with the "bad" - the "pro-growth" with the "anti-growth". You might say, to eliminate inconvenient councils standing in the way of development.
The Trade Union movement also got involved and required employment protection contracts to be agreed to as a pre-condition of its support for the amalgamations.
So no-one got sacked, but there was quite a community back-lash. He wasn't that clear about what the backlash was over. Apparently the Labour Government generally reckoned there would be some grumpiness from some communities, but that it would die down quickly, after a few months.
They didn't bank on it getting bigger and bigger. Then along came the regular parliamentary election cycle. Jason's majority of 12% got cut to just 2%, and he swears the single reason for that was public anger over forced amalgamation. Then along came the local body elections for the newly amalgamated regional councils. he told me that the mayors who got elected were all candidates who had strongly opposed amalgamation.
Labour's understandeable concern is that the backlash will continue, and Jason, and many other Labour MPs will be history, as the LNP or main opposition party takes power.
This is very interesting. And particularly relevant to Auckland. Does the Government not anticipate a similar backlash here in Auckland? Does it really believe that it will get away without blemish from the fallout that will surely descend from such huge scale abolition, and merger?
Anyway. being a curious sort of chap, I've been doing a little research to get some independent insight into what was happening in Queensland. I guess the involvement of the Aussie Property Council was interesting. How was that influencing Labour? And why?
This from a March 29th 2008 posting to a website called: "Can Do Better" (byline: A website for reform in democracy, environment, population, land use planning and energy policy) :
"...Naturally, in 2007, with local governments such as the Douglas Shire Council and the Noosa Shire Council receptive to the wishes of their constituents to stand up to developers, the News Limited editorial writers gave their full support to the Queensland government's forced local government amalgamations inspired by the Property Council of Australia.Very interesting, don't you think. Part of the reason for the website is to critique stances taken by the Australian newspaper (owned by Murdoch). Take this quote for example:
However, the hopes The Australian held out for in these amalgamations came unstuck when, on Saturday 15 March, anti-development candidates standing in the amalgamated shires were able to overcome the additional difficulties posed by their having to campaign in larger shires and were able to defeat candidates backed by developers. These included the Cairns City Council into which the Douglas Shire had been forcibly amalgamated and the Greater Sunshine Coast Council into which the Noosa shire had been forcibly amalgamated. In at least two other large local government regions, the Gold Coast City Council and Redland City Council, anti-development tickets won control in spite of extravagant developer-funded advertising campaigns against them...."
"...In response, on 18 March an editorial in the Australian entitled "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development" was published. It commenced:What is really interesting here, is that whole communities in Queensland are reacting against the effects of high levels of growth and development. Effects which are damaging the lifestyles of existing residents. That's a familar story here in Auckland. But not one which has much strong currency right now. But that could change quickly. If - for example - stronger regional government (a change which is very strongly supported by our very own Property Council of New Zealand), came to be associated with a destructive growth machine....
Queensland's local government elections demonstrate the difficulty that beset public administrators trying to manage the competing demands of population growth.
The 'difficulty' being that electors in those council areas were not prepared to put up with the further degradations to their quality of life necessitated by continuous population growth. As has become the established practice with the Murdoch Press, the question as to whether population growth is an issue over which affected communities should have any say, is not even posed, rather population growth is treated implicitly as a given over which no power in Heaven or on Earth can have any control:
... the Queensland (state government) must grapple with an influx of thousands of new residents each week and deliver, health, education and other public services.
In fact, the choice is being made, but instead of it being made by the affected communities, it is being made by politicians, like Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who serve the same vested interests as does the Murdoch media. They include principally the aforementioned Property Council of Australia, whose members gain from population growth, through land speculation and property development, at the expense of the rest of the community, the environment and future generations...."
Going back to the "We Can Do Better" website we read:
On 22 April 2007 Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, then Deputy Premier, rejected calls for ending Queensland's population growth, claiming that it "would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs."The key thing to note about the characters named here, is that Bob Abbot won the Mayoral race, against a candidate supported by Property Council and Developers.
A year later, on 25 April 2008 as reported in the Sunshine coast daily, town planning lawyer, Andrew Davis, similarly objected to the plans of newly elected Sunshine Coast Mayor, Bob Abbot, to cap the coast's population growth at 400,000 from the current population of 300,000. Davis claimed that Abbot's initial plan to reduce annual population growth from 3.5% to 2% would result in the loss of 8,500 of the region's 20,000 construction jobs. He also claimed that there would be further job losses in the transport, property and business service sector, with flow-ons to other sectors of the economy like retail, tourism, manufacturing.
Indeed, in a manner uncharacteristic for property developers' advocates, even Andrew Davis implicitly acknowledged that such a transition would be necessary when he said, “Turning off the tap of growth, without first achieving success in creating sustainable business, will cause enormous pain for everyone, whether you work in growth industries or not.”
Given that the region does not have adequate water resources, transport infrastructure, electricity generation, or health and education services to meet the needs of the existing population, many argue that it is urgently necessary to end growth now rather than to increase the number of people who will become dependent, for their employment, upon further growth. At the very least, a plan to end the region's dependence upon growth must be adopted without further delay.
Could something like that be about to happen in Auckland?
NB: Website: http://candobetter.org/node/435
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