The House is sitting under urgency this morning for the passage of the Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill. Despite the innocuous name, this is a bill for a dictatorship. The decisions of Auckland's elected councils will be constrained and made subject to a veto by the new Auckland Transitional Authority - an unelected body appointed solely by the Minister on his own discretion. Those elections Aucklanders voted in in 2007? A complete waste of time. Their outcome will effectively be overturned by Ministerial fiat, under urgency.
This is National's vision of "democracy": cities run by unelected ACT cronies, with the people cut out "for their own good". It shows a complete contempt for the wishes of ordinary Aucklanders to run their own city and manage their own transition according to their own plan. But then, that's what National is all about: contempt for the ordinary people.
