The perfect map for regional government already exists. It was drawn by a rugby administrator in 1995.
New Zealand’s regional councils are cooked. They’re run by semi-retired politicians who haven’t been relevant in a decade, no one seems to know what they do and the voter turnout makes NPC games look popular.
Many of the boundaries don’t even make sense. Taūpo falls within four different regional council areas; Kaipara straddles the line between Auckland and Northland; while Gisborne, Nelson, Marlborough and Tasman aren’t covered by any regional councils at all.
The government thinks the current number of 78 city and district, regional and unitary councils is too high. It’s making the system “too complex, too costly, and too hard to navigate,” according to infrastructure minister Chris Bishop. Bishop and local government minister Simon Watts announced last year that they intend to abolish the regional councils and replace them with “combined territories boards” made up of existing city and district councils.
The problem is, no one can agree how many regions there should be. The government initially proposed 11 regional boards, but some councils disagreed so the government has given them three months to come up with new proposals. So it could end up being any number. It’s reminiscent of the water entities proposed by the various regional water reform programmes. First it was going to be four entities, then 10, now could be as many as 17.
Politicians and bureaucrats have redrawn the maps for local government countless times in New Zealand history and have never gotten it right. But luckily, one organisation did: the New Zealand Rugby Football Union in 1995 when the 27 provincial rugby unions formed themselves into “catchment areas” for the five Super Rugby franchises.
The Blues took Auckland and Northland. The Chiefs took the central North Island. The Hurricanes took the lower North Island. The Crusaders took the top part of the South Island. The Highlanders took the bottom. The map they designed is a perfect execution of the regional governance systems proposed by some of the foundational thinkers in urban planning and sociology.
For example, Sir Patrick Geddes believed that cities and towns were expressions of natural geography rather than bureaucratic invention. His Valley Plan of Civilization framed the miner in the hills, the farmer in the lowlands and the fisher at the coast as all part of a single interconnected system. Each Super Rugby region has a clear geographic identity and is defined by physical boundaries: the Waitaki river, the Bombay hills, Cook Strait, and the central plateau.
Robert Dahl and Edward Tufte’s Size and Democracy argued that the optimal size for a democratic unit is one where citizens have genuine shared identity and can meaningfully participate. The travel patterns for local rugby teams form an almost perfect proxy for this. Every rugby club and school has performed real-world market testing to find out which nearby towns and cities they can reasonably travel to for a weekend fixture or regional tournament and which ones are simply too far away to make regular contact practical. This was the reasoning for the only major change to the Super Rugby map; when Taranaki switched alliances from the Hurricanes to the Chiefs in 2013.
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs argued that the fundamental economic unit in human history was not the nation-state but the “city region” made up of the urban centre and its hinterlands. New Zealand Rugby recreated “city regions” from first principles. Each of the five Super Rugby regions has one major centre, multiple secondary cities and towns, specialist industries, transport links, plus at least one major port, international airport, university and (obviously) stadium.
Michael Keating distinguished between administrative regions (invented top-down for bureaucratic convenience) and political regions, which emerge from historical experience, economic interdependence and cultural identity. He argued in his book New Regionalism in Western Europe that the second kind works and the first kind doesn’t because regions imposed on people generate no loyalty, no participation and no legitimacy.
The risk with Bishop and Watts’s proposal is that the government could spend years and millions of dollars redrawing the lines and rebuilding the organisations, and still end up with administrative regions that mean nothing to the average person.
Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities that political regions only work when people genuinely share a sense of belonging. This is the most important advantage of applying the Super Rugby system to regional government: people already understand it and identify with it. Any time the bureaucrats in charge of making the map can’t decide which region a town belongs to, they could answer the question by polling the residents to find out which Super Rugby team has more supporters. The result would be just as accurate as anything a government taskforce could produce.
We should stop trying to reinvent the wheel. The perfect map already exists. It was drawn by a rugby administrator in 1995. The government has had 30 years to catch up.
