Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has been a passionate advocate for localism and devolution in Parliament this week.
“Councils know what is needed for their communities and should not be forced or mandated to take a one-size-fits-all approach,” he said during a debate on Tuesday night.
These are core National Party principles which form the basis of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s belief about how the Government should work.
He likely enjoyed hearing Brown say: “This is about providing flexibility to councils, not just simply telling them what to do or mandating them, like the former Government did”.
These comments were made during the third and final reading of the bill repealing Labour’s water reform and kicking responsibility for water management back to local councils.
Brown argued that “many aspects” of the previous Government’s reforms were “top down and not driven by local communities and local councils who best know their communities”.
While he made these localist statements in the debating chamber, back in his Beehive office he was attempting to strong-arm a city council into obeying his edicts.
Brown, and his coalition partners, have decided to repeal the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax and are demanding that any leftover money be spent on Central Government priorities.
Mayoral resistance
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is unhappy about having a key revenue stream scuppered in the middle of developing the council’s Long Term Plan.
In retaliation, the mayor has told Auckland Transport to halt all work on anything that was funded from the fuel tax while the council works out how to proceed.
This included asking for advice on “deferring, cancelling, or rescoping” the Eastern Busway, a pet project for Simeon Brown which is popular in his Pakuranga electorate.
“Auckland Transport must not assume that RFT funding will simply be replaced by higher council rates or debt,” the mayor wrote in a letter to Auckland Transport.
This prompted a response from Minister Brown who said he would write into law which projects the remaining fuel tax money must be spent on.
In a statement he said: “In repealing the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax, we’ll be legislating to ensure that any remaining funds are spent on these priorities.”
Mayor Brown said now that there was not enough money for all planned projects, it was for Aucklanders to decide which ones to build and which ones to scrap.
“Aucklanders need to have a greater say over the region’s transport programme. We are the only council in the country that cannot set its own transport plan, and that is just ridiculous”.
Localism, when it suits
Chris Hipkins, leader of the Labour Party, said the minister was being hypocritical.
“Simeon Brown seems to be saying that he’s all for localism unless the local decision making is something that he doesn't agree with and then he’s just going to legislate over the top of it”.
“That isn’t localism,” he said.
Simeon Brown said he had a “positive relationship” with Mayor Brown and had spoken with him about where the remaining fuel tax money should be spent.
“We're going to legislate to ensure that those funds are available and required to be utilised for those projects,” he said.
He did not answer a question about whether the mayor supported those selected projects.
Matt Lowry, author of urbanist blog Greater Auckland, said the regional fuel tax only collected about $150 million per year but unlocked $4.3 billion in total funding over a decade.
Congestion charging, which has been pitched as a possible replacement for the fuel tax, was designed to change when people travelled, rather than to earn revenue.
“More importantly, even if today the government passed legislation to enable it, it will still take a number of years for the system to be designed and start to be rolled out — and in the meantime, that still leaves Auckland with a giant funding gap,” he wrote.
A Ministry of Transport briefing to Minister Brown said ambitions for transport investment had outgrown the country’s capacity to fund and deliver it.
Debt-funded Crown contributions to land transport funding had increased over the past two decades, as user charges had fallen behind these “investment ambitions”.
The ministry said a new approach to paying for land transport, such as value capture, congestion charging, toll roads, and using private funding to lower overall costs, was needed.
70 Comments
He is right. Stuff needs to happen in Auckland. Wayne Brown cannot seem to push these guys like AT into doing anything sensible. The city, much like Wellington is stuffed. as a result of years of useless Lab/Green leaders. the rot set in years ago. The new minister needs to quickly legislate to get things done (or undone as the case may be), and a lot of people need to shown the door and the clean up needs to begin in earnest.
Mind you, left-leaning folk have in many cases at least been interested in fixes such as liberalising zoning - where conservative NIMBYs have led the resistance to any progress on critical issues. Even under Wayne Brown and the Auckland Council liberalising zoning, the conservative NIMBY figures were lamenting his betrayal, when in fact Brown was simply acknowledging reality and the need to act. We've been in far too many cases pandering to NIMBY entitlement mentality to ruling over land they don't own, for far too long.
We also need to move past the idea that it should be expensive to buy at auction time "because it's a global city" while expecting it to be cheap at Rates time.
"cannot seem to push these guys like AT"
That is an intentional part of the design of the "Super City". You should be directing your scorn on the likes of Rodney Hide, who chose to ignore and not implement the various originally proposed Ombudsman who would oversee Water, Transport, etc.
Wellingtons localist idiocracy in action
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/02-02-2024/the-first-recommendations-…
Edit: Wellington's current list of virtue signalling vanity projects
Town Hall music venue $340 million
Rebuild central library rather than use existing ones – $189 million
A $13 million carpark building
Cycleways $226 million
Convention Centre $169 million
$32 million corporate welfare for Reading Cinemas
$139 million on the Golden Mile (removing cars)
$236 million on food recycling
And yet Wellington Council are seeking to save by doing things closing a library and swimming pool - stuff that actually adds quality of life.
The ineptly conceived, self-aggrandising projects that councils keep ambushing ratepayers with, when we only get to have a say on their performance every three years, need to be controlled. We need greater protections, like: binding referenda, recall legislation and public petitions for commissioners to replace councils.
We can't afford the vanity projects when the basics are disintegrating in front of us.
Dan, I don’t quite understand why you think scuttling the regional fuel tax flies in the face of localism. Auckland has the opportunity to raise funds by alternative methods according to Auckland’s priorities. And ultimately there will be congestion charging.
It’s the timing of the fuel tax removal that is the issue, not its removal per se.
Don’t agree. Council has the ability to accrue revenue as it sees fit to pay for projects its community deems necessary.
I do agree with you in so far as it was apparently done with insufficient consultation and with insufficient lead time to plug the revenue gap with alternatives. But that’s more a process and timing issue than a substantive one around local autonomy.
Nonetheless it is simply absurdly hypocritical for the Labour party of all people to criticise when they brought in so many too down mandates.
If the government told AC they could no longer charge for water, that’s still localism? If the government told AC which pipes they could spend their water bill money on, thats still localism?
It’s not hypocritical for labour to criticise because they didn’t claim to want localism.
HM, you made the wrong decision voting for NACT, just own it and stop trying to defend this shambles of a government.
Aucklander's support the regional fuel tax to support transport projects Aucklander's want. Simeon disagrees with those projects ideologically, not based on evidence, not based on efficiency, not based on best bang for your buck, ideologically. This is the worse sort of decision-making. One based on petty, uninformed, culture-war nonsense. He's a disgrace and reinforces Luxon as being the worse National leader in living memory.
A vote for NZ First was a vote for NACT.
Auckland Council consulted on the projects in 2018. The Mayor's office more recently surveyed Aucklander's to find out.
Simeon is not looking at funding efficiencies, he's trying to make Auckland stop projects he doesn't want and trying to resuscitate Frankenstein abominations like East West (the world's most expensive motorway on per km basis) and force them back onto Aucklander's.
Lol
Guess what - the market won’t address the affordability issue. It’s an odd but common belief amongst the woke left
And guess what - Queenstown are introducing a 2% financial contribution on development to go towards genuine affordable housing. The thing that the market won’t, and indeed can’t, deliver.
Do you really think 2% on a 900k townhouse is going to meaningfully worsen affordability
Guess what - the market won’t address the affordability issue. It’s an odd but common belief amongst the woke left.
What a clown comment.
1- I never said the market would solve it
2- traditionally it is the more right leaning people who think the market will address housing affordability
3 - what is "woke left"?
Land receives betterment from infrastructure provided by rates, including roads. This is easily seen in the difference in value of remote, unserved land to central city land. Thus, rates are a good component of funding that infrastructure.
We're not automatically entitled to having others pay for all of the cost of a road to our land, or its maintenance.
but they got the cheap option hence the bottleneck at the harbour bridge into town, if they allocated one side of the clip-ons for busses it would solve that problem, and it was only 300 million to build, rather than light rail i think busways give more bang for buck + one day you will have driverless electric busses so think of all the money you could save on drivers.
Wayne Brown has been doing an outstanding job as mayor, the 2023 wobbles aside (a few months into the job). Fiercely Auckland focused, and getting what's best for the city (in his view). I don't recall much more than the occasional peep from Goff or the other Brown during their tenure. I've interviewed Goff before - he's a really nice guy, but maybe the Mayor of Auckland shouldn't be nice if it means getting walked over.
Really what business it is of the governments what local transport projects the Council focusses on? They should stick to inter regional or national scope projects and get their noses out.
Mayor Brown is correct. Governance arrangements in Auckland need to revert back to what applies in every other region in the country, included the transport department (AT) being brought back under direct councillor control.
that is the massive problem AT cannot do anything sensible and it seems their whole mantra is to make things worse for aucklanders and spend as much as they can doing it, the amount of dumb stuff you see from them, example they have down my bus stop as closed for two months on the app because a road of the same name in another suburb is getting redone they cannot even use google maps to double check info they give out lucky for me the bus driver ignore their own organisation and stop to pick and drop people off, or we have two bus stops on the same side within 50 metres and took the one on the other side of the road out so none to get off on the other side, i wrote to them 3 years ago and they said oops we got that wrong will put the one back on the other side and have done nothing
will he, or will he get stupider with age, he does not strike me as very bright and on top of that he has a BIG problem listening taking things in and making an informed decision, i watched him on the transport committee and he had a lot of problems understanding the CEO's answers, if it didn't fit his ideology, it didn't make sense to him.
i suspect he will leave us with untold PPP disasters and tolls all over the place, not that i am against those but they have their place, i.e build the 4 lane to Whangarei and toll it, as long as you leave a free road for those of us not in a hurry that's fine BTW i was against them removing the toll on the harbour bridge imagine what they could have built by now with that revenue
Selling off Watercare is something that has been discussed in National and ACT circles for eons.
And the easiest way to do it, based on how it's been done in the USA, is to ensue the Councils get so impoverished that they are forced to sell stuff. We'll be sold the 'private enterprise will do it better' nonsense but in in 10 years time we'll be paying through the nose while 'investors' make massive profits.
Sorry to say this - but 3 Waters would have made such a plan impossible. (One again, it appears kiwis aren't that bright.)
100% correct.
It's the same playbook the Tories have used in the UK. It amazes me that Kiwis are able to see the terrible consequences of shit policies implemented abroad 10 years ago and yet they vote for the same shit here. It's almost like we deserve what we get for being stupid and falling for culture war nonsense.
Yeah I was happy that Auckland finally had a plan to pay for Auckland problems. I lived there 20 years ago and it was bad then. I've never looked back. Have lived in Wellington & Sydney since which are much easier to get around with better public transport.
Scrapping the RFT is as much about being seen to be getting rid of another Labour policy than anything else. It's also a quick and easy thing to add to their 100 day list. Yay.
a BIG portion of the price is made up of government taxes,/levys so the road user charges for cars will be huge when SB changes the system and as you can see below those that use diesel trucks farmers are subsidized by all the petrol users.
Fuel excise (petrol)
The fuel excise portion includes:
Did you know?
It's now government policy for all petrol tax to be directed back into New Zealand's road and transport system. The AA lobbied hard on behalf of motorists to achieve this.
Previously, over a third of the tax collected on petrol was diverted by the government to other areas of spending.
- 70.024 cents - National Land Transport Fund
- 6 cents - ACC Motor Vehicle Account
- 0.66 cents - Local Authorities Fuel Tax
- 0.6 cents - Petroleum or Engine Fuels Monitoring Levy
In addition, GST is collected on the overall price of fuel, including the excise (which is essentially a "tax on a tax").
There are no excise taxes on diesel other than 0.33 cents Local Authorities Fuel Tax, and GST. Instead, diesel vehicles pay Road User Charges.
All fuels also pay an Emissions Trading Scheme levy, which has added between approx. 10-20 cents per litre depending on the price of ETS units (of which the price has varied between approx. $30-90 per tonne).
I guess this is part of the fallout from voters swinging widely on support of the major parties. when both parties get down into the low 30's / high 20's , out goes a whole load of MPs that were just getting 3 - 6 years experience.
So suddenly , a MP who graduated frrm Uni in2016 , somehow went straight into a "senior" position at a bank for a year , and has been a MP for 6 years becomes the minister for several key portfolios.
His "senior" position at the bank was one of the positions the banks provide to National politicians to get a private sector tick on their CV. My mate works in one of the Big Four consultancies and they do the same thing. There are roles reserved for people that aren't going to stay and do fuck all, the point of them is to then call in favours once the future politicians get into power. Soft corruption.
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