Media Release
1st April 2015
Auckland Long Term Plan Feedback Withheld From Elected Members under Direction of Mayor and Senior Staff
John Gillon, Lorene Pigg, Dr. Grant Gillon – Elected Members of the Kaipatiki Local Board

Kaipatiki Local Board members John Gillon, Lorene Pigg and Dr. Grant Gillon are outraged that the feedback that the public gave on the Auckland Council’s Long Term Plan is being withheld from elected members.

“I have been advised that the order to withhold this information from elected members has come down from the Mayor’s office and Council senior management,” said John Gillon, elected member of the Kaipatiki Local Board, “Local Board members are to instead rely on staff-written summaries of feedback to make important decisions, such as on library hour cuts, rate rises, motorway tolls and contentious local projects. This is an intolerable situation and I wonder what the Council is trying to hide?”

Undemocratic

Local Boards are a critical part of Auckland Council’s Governance model, having jurisdiction over local issues, facilities and projects. In order for Local Board members to make sound decisions on the use of public money, elected members must have unhindered access to applicable information, especially where that information is readily available to staff.

“It is undemocratic - and possibly illegal - for the Mayor and senior staff to remove my right as an elected member to receive formal feedback from the public”, said Lorene Pigg, elected member of the Kaipatiki Local Board. “It is fundamental to my role to be able to listen to the people of Kaipatiki and respond accordingly. How can I make good-governance decisions when the information that the public have taken the time to submit for me and other elected members to read is being withheld?”

Local Board member Grant Gillon asks “Is this the cruellest type of April Fools’ Day joke ever sprung on the Auckland public, who expect elected members to have seen their responses and submissions and not just a staff-generated summary?”

The “need to know”

A legal opinion obtained by Clr. Sandra Coney on a similar issue in 2013 was reported by the New Zealand Herald as saying:

"…councillors are entitled by virtue of their office to have access to all information held by the council for which there is good reason for such access. This principle is known as the 'need to know test'."
[Source: “Bureaucrats beaten at own game”, NZ Herald, 25/08/2013, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11112918]

“We believe that the ‘need to know’ test applies to public feedback obtained specifically for the purpose of informing elected members on the direction that Local Boards should take on proposed projects, services and spending priorities,” said Kaipatiki Local Board members John Gillon, Lorene Pigg and Dr. Grant Gillon.

Consultation Problems

The withholding of information from elected members is not the only cause for concern in regards to the Long Term Plan.

“The Long Term Plan consultation process has been a concern from the beginning, with a huge number of residents not receiving submission forms in their letterboxes, the wording of the questions spun to encourage certain answers, booklets running out at libraries, and project and budget details omitted from the information,” said Grant Gillon, elected member of the Kaipatiki Local Board, “But despite that, I expect to see the comments that the public has taken the time to provide without a layer of interpretation.”

ENDS

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