Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Regional councils have got to go

The Government has announced this afternoon that it is scrapping regional councils - and I reckon you need to put this on your list of some of the best news that you have heard in a long time for turning this country around.

Regional councils have got to go.

It's not so much the elected councillors, right? I mean, obviously they have to go as well. 

But we simply don't need that layer of bureaucracy with regional councils, when we already have city and district councils and we already have central Government. It's just far too much.

But scrapping the elected guys, that's only gonna save us a little bit of money. We're talking peanuts here.

The real money is going to be saved in the stuff that happens in the back office at the regional councils, the stuff that's done by the unelected officials and the consultants that they bring in.

And when I'm what I'm talking about here is the plans.

Now let me tell you about the plans - you probably don't realize it because this stuff is so boring it will put you to sleep - but regional councils around this country are blowing tens of millions of dollars and wasting years upon years on planning new rules.

The Waikato Regional Council's Healthy Rivers Plan Change 1, let's just call it PC1 for short - PC1 at last count has cost $23 million.

That was about 3 years ago. The plan is not even fully implemented yet, so you can add to that $23 million.

Now, that is just the plan for the rivers in the Waikato. It's not the plan for rivers anywhere else in the country, it's for nothing else in the Waikato, just the rivers in Waikato - and it's already cost $23 million.

Bear in mind every single region, and there are 11 of them, makes its own plans. So you could take that $23 million and just add to it. Around this country, we're just racking up the millions.

This stuff, as I said, takes years. The Waikato river plan, PC1, that was notified in 2016. A decade on, it's still not in full operation because of appeals and all kinds of wrangles around it.

And this is where huge amounts of the rates that you pay are wasted, right? So scrapping the regional councils is potentially a massive, massive saving for us.

The question is  - what do the Nats replace it with?

If they then replace the regional councils with a system where maybe we have just one set of rules or four sets of rules or ten sets of rules that regions can choose from, pre-written rules that they can roll out that they don't have to plan themselves rather than designing their own, that may in fact be a better system.

Now the devil is in the details, but so far this has the potential to be some of the best news for this country.

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