Local bodies

So, local body elections happened, and saw the re-election of left-wing mayors in Auckland and Wellington, the election of a left-wing mayor and a Labour council in Christchurch, and a Greenslide in Wellington. That's a pretty good result - especially the latter - but it does have me wondering: how long until National decides to simply bulldoze away those councils full of troublesome political opponents in favour of commissions stacked with unelected cronies? Remember, they did it to ECan, they can do it to the others too.

(Speaking of ECan, I'd love to see Labour's policy on it. An incoming Labour government can end the dictatorship with the flick of a pen, by ordering the dictators to hold elections. Will they? I'd like to see a concrete promise here along the lines of "elections within three months")

Locally, my crook of a mayor won on the first ballot. Chris Teo-Sherrell and Duncan McCann got re-elected (as did most of the incumbents), and are joined by Aleisha Rutherford and Rachel Bowen (who made positive noises on the ENM survey). For Horizons we got at lest one clean-water candidate (Rachel Keedwell) and former city councillor Pat Kelly (who's an OK guy, and looks good to Generation Zero), but didn't have the big changeover I was hoping for. But the driving issue of water quality isn't going away, and there's always next time.

Update: Added in the Christchurch council result. So they have a Labour mayor with pretty solid council backing. Brownlee is probably already firing up the bulldozer to get rid of them...