Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Are we asking too much in local body elections?

We need to talk about why we're persisting with having so many local body politicians.

We clearly have too many positions, don't we? I mean, just look at how many people are winning their seats at the moment.

The elections are this weekend - look at how many people are winning their seats without any elections, without anybody standing against them. With more than 200, that's 1 in every 7 council races.

So Hurunui already has its mayor, even though the elections are this weekend. It's Marie Black, no one's standing against her.

Manawatū already has its mayor, Michael Ford, no one's standing against him.

There are more than 80 councillors who are already elected across the country, there are several on the Southland Regional Council already elected.

Lower Hutt, Southland, Buller, Stratford, Marlborough councils, two of Auckland's councils already elected - unopposed - as well as 3 of Christchurch's.

There are also empty seats that no one wants to fill in community boards in the Rotorua Lakes, New Plymouth's Kaitake, Clifton as well, rural Hastings, Hanmer Springs, Twizel, and Mataura.

What that tells you is that you have more positions to fill than you have people who want to fill those positions.

Now, please have a look at your voting papers and vote if you can.

I voted in Auckland already, right? I had 1 vote for mayor, I had 1 vote for council, and then I had up to 7 votes for my local board.

I didn't vote 7 times for my local, I didn't know who all of those people were.

I knew about 5 of them and at least 2 of them I knew for bad reasons, so I didn't want to vote for them.

So, you know, I think we clearly are asking too much.

And by the way, in Auckland, we have 172 local board politicians by the end of this process, and I'm not even counting the local licensing board.

The most junior of which, the ward councillors, get paid more than $54,000 each.

Now, I think looking at all of this, we are well overdue tipping all of this up and changing it and massively reducing the number of people that we're paying to do probably not a lot.

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