Enough of the same old faces
It’s not just a tedious truth, but a real worry, that our local government councillors are a homogenous crew dismally lacking diversity and wildly unrepresentative of young New Zealand in particular. Not one local authority comes close to demographically reflecting its community. A survey after the last election found four out of five elected members were over 51, and 6 per cent under 40.
That our elections reliably deliver something distressingly close to a conveyor belt of older white men doesn’t mean that, whatever our own background, we share a collective contentment that these are the people we need, such is the depth of their skills and the acuity of their social insights.
It’s more a repellent effect. Local government has long been a stale puff of halitosis in the faces of so many people who don’t vote, but might if they weren’t so poorly informed about the impact councils have on their daily lives.
Especially the young. Often they don’t consider themselves ratepayers, even though rates are built into their rents. They know full well they’re not all that well informed about local government – but they also know to mistrust anything that looks like council-boosting PR output.
And they are understandably repelled, alongside almost everyone else, by the heft, detail and complexity of indigestible annual plans and long-term plans that the law requires a council to drop, thuddingly, on to the internet, council offices and libraries near you.
These are necessary for the diligent, close scrutiny of the already-interested, but are hardly
recruitment tools for the electoral process.
It’s a good thing that this year there are real signs of youth activism, albeit pretty tightly focused on local reactions to climate change. Whether this energised display is reflected in the voting turnout and results is an intriguing question. Actually, two questions. Whether the kids will vote, and whether they detect candidates to champion their thinking. Neither is a given.
To correct the non-representative mix of our councils, quotas to force-feed diversity around council tables are not the answer. They reliably invoke a democratic gag reflex.
A halfway decent commitment to civics education is what’s needed. We’ve never had that.
Under-represented groups are reachable if we prioritise civics education. And it’s not a task to be placed, alongside so many others, solely at the door of our schools.
We, and the Government, should be demanding better communication from the councils themselves, with an emphasis on engaging people with information rather than assailing them with it. So that in between being confronted with an array of Why Vote For Me grandstanding, they have been given halfway-engaging Why Vote At All information.
The news media must also play its part and one development here has been the governmentapproved collaboration by the Newspaper Publishers Association (including Stuff), RNZ, and New Zealand on Air, recruiting eight reporters to augment reporting of councils, community boards, council-owned businesses, trusts and health boards around the country.
Local government has long been a stale puff of halitosis in the faces of so many people who don’t vote, but might if they weren’t so poorly informed about the impact councils have on their daily lives.