Time for preachers to listen to congregation

Auckland councillor Efeso Collins likens the 1pm Beehive press conferences to church services in the Samoan community. The preacher gets up and says this is what we’re doing, some mumble and grumble, but everyone decides not to disagree in public because the preacher is in charge.

‘‘It feels like the Wellington bubble has driven all of this, and we just react, because it’s not like we’re directing where the money is going, so you don’t really have much of a part to play in that anyway.’’

He is frustrated, as are a lot of people around Auckland, not just because of the ongoing lockdown, but because of a feeling they no longer have much say around what happens in their region. Even getting money to encourage vaccination uptake, a major Government priority, can be difficult.

It is not difficult to foresee that Aucklanders might become resentful about not having more of a say over what happens in their patch.

There is a time and a place for both centralisation and devolution. Centralising decision-making was sensible when elimination was the strategy and the alert level system was king. Control of such a system can really only be wielded by a central authority able to weigh up pain in one region against freedom in others.

However, the new traffic light system opens the door to a lot of other calculations, and a new debate around where Covid-19 decisions are best made.

Within the traffic light system is an in-built assumption that Covid-19 is here to stay, its spread will largely be suppressed through vaccination, but that vaccination may not be enough to stop our hospitals being overwhelmed. More importantly, some regions may end up pursuing vastly different strategies to others.

Moving between these traffic lights will involve some hard trade-offs at a local and community level, and there will often be no winners in any of them. These are the kind of trade-offs local politicians are used to making, and seeking community buy-in for, and it is why these politicians should be brought back into the tent.

Local politics is a very different beast to national politics. At a national level fixtures like those daily press conferences are important, because they help you win the daily news cycle with a solution or proposal. If you win the day, the public soon forgets about the thing they were worried about.

However, local politics plays out at a much more micro level. If your proposed solution doesn’t work, the constituent involved will be back in your office complaining by the end of the week, and at every public meeting.

But distrust of local governance runs deep, and we have seen it play out in the areas of infrastructure and housing, where governments distrust councils to spend wisely, and councils occasionally prove their point. Those tensions have ended up in the push to create a national health system, Health NZ, enforcing a single approach to healthcare, rather than a regional one.

Our distrust means we seesaw between centralisation and decentralisation. It takes about a decade for the change to bed in once we go in either direction, and by the end of that decade we end up regretting the change.

There is also a good reason why Auckland might be a good place to test out a more localised approach. Its governance structures are highly developed, with a powerful governing body, several high-profile council-controlled entities, and a well-established system of local boards.

Distrust of local governance runs deep ... governments distrust councils to spend wisely, and councils occasionally prove their point.

People at the lower board level have wide connections within their communities and know which entities should be trusted and distrusted. They could be helpful for the whole response, including the economic one.

You might argue that district health boards and Auckland Regional Public Health have some control over the health response, and that should be enough. Yet when it comes to decisions on Covid-related funding, a lot of the priorities are set at the national level by entities like the Ministry of Health, or effectively decided in large ministries like the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment.

Overseas we have often seen a lot more experimentation at a local level. States in the United States and elsewhere have experimented with border settings, testing strategies, public health measures, and other systems to control the virus. Communities with higher levels of vaccine hesitancy have often mandated much higher levels of testing, while others have decided to take much stricter measures to enforce vaccine mandates.

Some of these have worked and others have not, but the ability to experiment and learn has often been crucial. Most importantly, local decisionmakers have taken the risk on behalf of communities who have given them some kind of mandate.

When it comes to sermons from the pulpit, it is time for the preacher to listen to the congregation.