Explainer - Radical overhaul is needed - that is the conclusion reached by a panel which spent two years reviewing the state of local government. RNZ has all you need to know.

This is a summary of the Future for Local Government report - He piki tūranga, he piki kōtuku.

Recommendations that stood out to me were reducing the voting age for local elections to 16, implementing ranked voting (STV), and increasing the term limits to four years.

Also, not mentioned in RNZ’s summary is the recommendation that the number of local councils is reduced from 80 to about 15.

  • @DaveMAEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Yeah I think you’re right, though in my experience local elections have more options because you’re voting in a whole council by name, rather than just a party and one person to represent you…

    I still feel compelled to make sure I research and correctly rank all the other candidates in relation to each other

    I started to take this more seriously when I found out about some crazy people in the running, like one that owed the council large amounts of money and I guess thought if he got on the council he wouldn’t have to pay? Or he thought it was a silly rule so he’d get it changed so he wouldn’t have to pay?

    Anyway, he didn’t make it in by it was closer than I would have liked, and his blurb was very general and non-crazy sounding (there were words, but they didn’t really say much in terms of actually deciding who to vote for).

    I ended up tracking a lot of them down on facebook, they often had campaign pages with 5 or 10 followers and if you read back through some posts you could get a feel for a lot of them.

    I’m not sure how I feel about compulsory voting. I’m a big supported of compulsory voter registration, but to actually make people vote… I feel like you’ll just get a bunch of people who don’t care so will tick the one they’ve seen the most ads for rather than going on policies.