Mike Reid The Auckland Debate: Is Big City Governance Always

The struggle for regional government in Auckland The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand had some quite interesting things to say about the future of local government. In a brief article it noted the disjunction between rapidly growing urban areas, like Auckland, and their fragmented local government systems, resulting in problems of planning, coordination and the execution of regional works and services. The writers of this particular article spoke with optimism about the recent passage of a local bill to establish a regional local authority in the Auckland urban area and suggested that this might signal the future direction of local government reform, namely a regional council exercising ‘powers and functions of a regional nature, including the functions performed by special-purpose authorities, while the territorial authorities remain in existence to perform purely local functions’ (Crompton and Williamson, 1966). Graham Bush’s excellent history of the Auckland local authorities, prepared for the 2009 Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, notes that the passage of this bill was not smooth and that while the new authority was given nine distinct regional functions, this was less than what the originators of the bill, such as mayor Dove-Myer Robinson, Mike Reid