Auckland is broken

The theory of a super city had appeal.

Having regional and city councils under one umbrella and dismantling several councils to form a single local authority ought to have produced economies of scale.

The practice hasn’t lived up to the promise.

Instead it’s created a big, expensive and unresponsive bureaucracy, and like MMP, widened the distance between the people, their problems and their politicians.

Red tape has proliferated and regulations have become hurdles that get in the way of progress and action.

Quite how bad it is was proved on Friday evening.

Those of us watching news from a distance could only wonder at what transport authorities were thinking when they told people to drive to the Elton John concert because trains had been cancelled, then said buses would run at 10 minute intervals.

You don’t have to be good at numbers to work out that 40,000 people need more than 750 parks and it would take hundreds of buses hours to take them to and fro even if the weather was fine.

Anyone listening to the radio, watching the television news or following social media posts could see how bad problems were yet people with the authority to do something to help appeared to be bogged down in a bureaucratic morass from which no information could emerge.

Auckland’s Emergency Management and Auckland Transport both failed the city on Friday.

If residents can’t depend on the people paid to run their city to do what’s needed and communicate clearly in a crisis the people they’re paying aren’t doing their jobs properly.

No matter how good the city’s infrastructure was, it would have been inadequate to cope with Friday’s deluge. But had it been better would the problems have been so bad?

There have been on-going problems after much less rain for years. Would smaller councils closer to, and more regularly in touch with, local issues have done something to fix them sooner?

If there had been smaller, more local councils with staff and councillors more knowledgeable about, and more closely connected to, their communities,  would the response have been faster and better?

The answers to those questions might be debatable but the problems are clear and need not only answers but action that solves them.

There’s also questions about the role of central government which has been aware of the issues and done nothing to address them.

It is also responsible for widening councils’ remits to include nice to haves which has allowed them to take their eyes off their core functions including maintaining and improving roads and drains.

And two organisations under central government control failed on Friday. The civil defence mobile phone message warning system didn’t work either and Waka Kotahi staff signed off at about 7:15 leaving people with no idea which roads were safe and which weren’t.

How ironic that the agency that has spent so much on so many communications staff stopped communicating in an emergency.

Auckland is broken. The super city is anything but super and has proved that bigger isn’t necessarily better.

Breaking up the council into smaller ones could be part of fixing it.

But it’s not the only local government organisation with big problems.

All councils should be audited to ensure their infrastructure is up to the required standard and fit for purpose.

Then there’s climate change on which the deluge is being blamed.

The government and council have done a lot of talking and made fruitless attempts to reduce emissions, but neither have done anything about mitigation.

If this sort of weather will, as predicted, happen more often, central and local government must make preparing for it to reduce the damage it causes a priority.