spinofflive
Prime minister Christopher Luxum, who considers himself a localist. (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Prime minister Christopher Luxum, who considers himself a localist. (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 23, 2024

Luxon has officially abandoned localism

Prime minister Christopher Luxum, who considers himself a localist. (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Prime minister Christopher Luxum, who considers himself a localist. (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

The Luxonian version of localism isn’t devolution of power, it’s just delegating tasks, argues Joel MacManus.

Prime minister Christopher Luxon has pitched himself as a champion of localism. In his speech on Wednesday at local government conference SuperLocal 24, he proved he doesn’t actually believe it. The vision for the future of local government the prime minister pitched was deeply opposed to localism and local decision making. He announced his government’s intention to strip back councils into powerless entities responsible only for infrastructure and basic services. The Luxonian version of localism isn’t devolution of power, it’s just delegating tasks.

It was an escalation of hostilities in a long-standing wrestle for power between central and local governments. Almost every council in the country is facing double-digit rate increases. Councils have long complained about “unfunded mandates”, where central government requires them to perform a number of services without providing the funding required to pay for it.

First and foremost, councils want more money. Rates are only 7% of the total tax take in New Zealand, and councils want alternative funding sources. Secondly, councils want more responsibility. They believe that they know what their local community needs better than the central government does and can be more impactful in delivering the housing, transport and economic development needs of their city.

Local Government New Zealand has been agitating for years for the central government to introduce city and regional deals, a scheme that is common in the UK and Australia, where councils are enabled to take on major infrastructure or other projects in exchange for a greater share of the tax take. At the conference, infrastructure minister Simeon Brown revealed five regional deals will be announced soon, though didn’t specify the regions.

Central government appears to be using these deals as a way to seize more power from councils. Luxon announced his government’s intention to restrict council’s independence and decision-making power: establishing performance reviews, introducing spending caps, and generally removing any ability for councils to do anything other than provide basic infrastructure and services.

Luxon’s speech at SuperLocal wasn’t a speech by someone who recognises that he represents one form of elected power, talking to another, separate form of elected power. It was a CEO giving a tongue lashing to an underperforming business unit. He treated councils like Crown agencies that he has direct control over, rather than fellow elected politicians with a mandate from their communities.

“Localism and devolution comes with rights and responsibilities,” Luxon said. He made it clear those responsibilities were specifically to cut spending on anything his government didn’t agree with. “End the projects that don’t deliver value for money,” he told councils.

The crowd at the SuperLocal conference (Photo: Joel MacManus)

His speech was scolding. It was hostile. It was tense. “Go to your room and don’t come out until it’s clean,” was how Invercargill City councillor Alex Crackett paraphrased it.

Politically, this was very intentional from Luxon. He got to run through his best economic lines: do the basics brilliantly, cut the fat, get back to core services. It’s the greatest hits, and it works for his voters. It’s also a bit of risk management; there is a building frustration around the country about the cost of rates rises. Local governments want to point the blame at central government for cutting off its funding streams, and Luxon is trying to pull an Uno reverse card and push that blame back on councils.

The speakers following him took open pot shots at the prime minister. “Localism is about communities deciding what councils deliver,” said LGNZ president and Selwyn District mayor Sam Broughton. He pointed out that large rates rises aren’t limited to the one or two councils that have more progressive politics than the government, it’s a systematic issue across the board.

WellingtonNZ chief executive John Allen threw away his notes and dove into a series of digs at the prime minister. “There are two kinds of people; look forward or go back,” he said. “Line-by-line cutting your way to a successful council, a successful community, and a successful future seems to me to be a limited and backward-looking vision.”

As an example of what he saw as wasteful council spending, Luxon pointed to the building he was standing in, Tākina convention centre. The $180 million building was a controversial project, and is reportedly falling short of revenue targets. Allen defended it, saying “the reason this place was built wasn’t to make a profit in this place, but for the spillover benefits”, like spending in bars, restaurants and hotels. The irony is, any additional economic activity Tākina is generating for Wellington is primarily boosting central government coffers through GST and income taxes from added employment. The council doesn’t see any direct benefit except the long-term flow-on effects of city growth.

Luxon’s speech was met with groans and various oral expulsions of disapproval. But there was applause too – there are plenty of conservative councillors out there who liked his message of spending restraint.

This is a battle being fought on two fronts: politics, and power. Politically, each council will have their own ideas about how to spend money based on what their voters want. Those ideas won’t always align with the government. Luxon and Brown are showing a clear willingness to override the will of councils to push through their own ideals. As politicians, that’s their prerogative – they want to achieve as much of their priorities as they can for their voters. It’s just not localism.

The second, more important conflict is about power. Local governments and central government are two separate forms of elected government, each of which can claim to represent, collectively, all the voters in Aotearoa. They are two separate and independent democratic entities, each tussling for authority. Right now, central government is by far the more powerful of the two, due to “a decades-long accumulation of power at the expense of iwi and local government”, as Justin Tipa, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, put it.

Technically, councils get their power from the Local Government Act, which parliament has the ability to change at its will. But that’s not really where the authority lies. In reality, local governments get their power from the people and from the democratic process. People expect to be able to vote for local leaders to make decisions about local issues and projects. Councils have always had a role in building town halls, libraries and community centres, and running economic development programmes – all sorts of the stuff that Luxon described as “white elephants and wasteful spending”.

It’s not hard to imagine how this could escalate into a small constitutional crisis if a council decided to simply ignore a central government directive. If central government keeps taking away decision-making power from local governments, there will be a backlash. There is already one building.

Keep going!
Darleen Tana
Darleen Tana

PoliticsAugust 22, 2024

Does Darleen Tana’s party-hopping legal argument stack up?

Darleen Tana
Darleen Tana

The Green Party is considering using the party-hopping law to expel now independent MP Darleen Tana from parliament. Tana thinks the party may legally be unable to do so – but is almost certainly wrong, writes Andrew Geddis.

Darleen Tana, Darleen Tana – they seem to have been in the news forever. Remind me why are we still talking about them?

Darleen Tana was elected as a Green Party list MP (due to their ranking at lucky number 13) at the 2023 election. In March of this year a number of allegations were made regarding their knowledge of, and involvement in, the treatment of employees at a business they ran in conjunction with their husband. Those employees allegedly were hired in breach of their immigration visas and allegedly were improperly paid. 

The Green Party placed Tana on paid leave while these accusations were investigated by an independent lawyer, Rachel Burt. After a lengthy period – some four months! – Burt reported her conclusions that Tana had at least known about the alleged mistreatment and had failed to tell the Green Party about their involvement. The Green Party MPs then arranged a caucus meeting to discuss expelling Tana, but before they could do so Tana tendered their resignation from the party. The Greens leaders then told the speaker that Tana was no longer one of its MPs, whereupon the speaker declared them to now be an independent MP. 

We’ve seen stuff like this before, though. Jami-Lee Ross, Gaurav Sharma, Elizabeth Kerekere, Meka Whaitiri … didn’t they all become independent MPs and carry on until the next election without any ongoing attention?

Yep. The rules of parliament are that if the speaker is told an MP is no longer a member of the party that the MP was elected for, he must declare that MP to be an independent MP. They then get to stay on as MPs, albeit in a largely useless capacity, until they get voted out at the next election (as always happens).

What makes this situation different, however, is that the Green Party seriously is considering going a step further and invoking the party-hopping law to have Tana’s seat “declared vacant” (ie to have them kicked out of parliament altogether). That didn’t happen with any of the other recent independent MPs.

The party-hopping law – another thing that keeps on coming up. How does it work?

As I previously have explained, the party-hopping law applies either if an MP “self-sabotages” when quitting their party, or if the MP’s former party chooses to “axe” them from parliament after they leave. Because Tana didn’t tell the speaker (in writing, with a signature) that they now wanted to be an independent MP they avoided the self-sabotage option. Meaning that for the party-hopping law to have effect, the party-axing option would have to be invoked.

At the end of July, Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick kicked off this party-axing option with a letter to Tana telling them it was under way and giving them the chance to respond. Tana has now done so.

Saying what?

Well, saying quite a lot, most of which is that Tana did nothing wrong and has been treated poorly by the party. However, the interesting bit (for nerdy lawyer types) is that they dispute that the legal basis for invoking the party-hopping law exists. To lapse into legalese for a moment, they deny that they have “acted in a way that has distorted, and is likely to continue to distort, the proportionality of political party representation in parliament as determined at the last general election”. That’s the statutory requirement for when the party-axing option can be taken.

Does Tana have a point?

They quote a paragraph in a 2004 Supreme Court decision discussing when the party-hopping law can be invoked. In it, Justice Blanchard states that an MP being declared an independent is not enough by itself to trigger the party-axing option. Rather, “if it is not the actions of the MP which have led to the declaration [that the MP is an independent], it cannot, in my opinion, be said that the member has acted in a way that has distorted etc.”

And, says Tana, because they have done nothing wrong and have been treated poorly, it is not their actions that led to them being declared an independent MP. It rather was the Green Party that did so through its treatment of them.

That sounds compelling! Maybe Tana is onto something!

Maybe … but, no. First of all, it’s one paragraph from one of five judgments. The other four judges in the case are more accepting of an approach that becoming an independent MP in and of itself gives grounds for the party-axing option.

Second, we need to note the facts of the 2004 case. It involved an MP who accidentally forgot to renew her party membership and so became an independent MP when her party told the speaker she was no longer a party MP. Justice Blanchard – who Tana relies on as saying the law doesn’t apply to their situation – then accepted that “it was reasonable to believe that the root cause of the distortion was [the MP’s] failure to maintain her membership of [her] political party.”

In Tana’s case, the “root cause of the distortion” is that they actively quit the party. And so, if accidentally failing to renew your party membership is enough to trigger the party-axing option (as Justice Blanchard accepted), then surely deliberately resigning from the party is as well!

The debating chamber at parliament (Photo: Parliament.nz)

What is going to happen next?

The Green Party must actually invoke the party-axing option by sending a written notice to the Speaker. It is holding a meeting among its members on September 1 to give its leadership permission to do so. That’s not required by the party-hopping law, but given that the Greens once told parliament that “the Green Party has committed to not using the power that the legislation currently grants”, it obviously has to do a bit of soul searching before choosing to execute a complete U-turn on what once apparently was a core principle.

Then, the law requires that at least two-thirds of the party’s MPs must agree that the written notice should be sent to the speaker. You would think that’s pretty much a fait accompli, provided the party members first have given their blessing. With that backing, the party leader can then write to the speaker, and upon receiving this notice he must immediately declare Tana’s seat to be vacant. It then gets filled by the next unelected candidate on the Green Party list – Benjamin Doyle, from Hamilton.

Is there anything Tana can do to stop this happening?

Well, only a mug says that anything is certain. But it seems hard to see what they really can do, aside from trying to lobby members of their old party to oppose using the party-hopping law at all. 

They could try to go to court and seek an injunction against the Green Party leaders from delivering the relevant notice to the speaker under the party-hopping law. That would be really expensive for Tana, and it probably wouldn’t work, because (as I’ve noted above) the relevant Supreme Court precedent interprets the party-hopping law in a way that covers their situation. Finally, there’s a real question as to whether judges can even look at this issue any more following the passage of the Parliamentary Privilege Act 2014, which expands the range of “parliamentary proceedings” that are put beyond the courts’ reach.

As such, Tana’s parliamentary fate really rests with the Green Party and whether its commitments not to do something in the future come with the caveat “unless we really, really want to”. 

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’
Madeleine Chapman
— Editor
But wait there's more!