The novel and film starring Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, is a study of the psychiatric institutions of the mid-twentieth century and the human mind. Nicholson’s character, the inmate McMurphy, attempts to take control of the asylum through cunning manipulation. He fails.
In New Zealand, it appears that the inmates, I mean staff, have taken over our asylums, I mean councils.
Here is how they do it. Figures are from Hamilton.
Councillors receive several hundred pages of reports usually just three days before a council meeting. As most councillors have other jobs, it is an impossible task to read all the material before the meeting.
Why three? Because that is the legal minimum. Despite this, there are numerous instances of information being sent out with two days to go. This includes a meeting for a council’s 10-year plan (the most important document of a council’s term) with a thousand pages to read.
Council meetings are run by a set of rules known as Standing Orders. Most councillors would be surprised to learn that they can actually change the Standing Orders by a vote, because they rely on council staff to tell them the rules and this option doesn’t get mentioned.
Last year, the Hamilton Residents and Ratepayers Association lobbied council to change the Standing Orders to an outrageous five days. The chief executive argued against it. I wonder why? In the end, the councillors voted on four days.
Meeting dates are set at the start of each year, so there is plenty of warning of upcoming meetings. Despite this, staff have failed several times to meet the four-day rule.
The reports are prefaced with a summary written by staff, followed with a staff recommendation. If a councillor doesn’t have time to read the full report, the summary is all that gets digested and the recommendation is an easy cop-out for a decision.
Our councillors are poorly informed, with only a single source of information and a single point of view being provided. As much of the detailed report is of a technical nature, whether it be legal, accounting, engineering, or some other area of expertise, very few councillors will have the background to question any of it. Even with a suitable background, it would take a brave councillor to argue a complex point against staff who have had weeks to prepare and access to information not in the report.
This last point is also critical. Councillors are only able to make decisions based on the available information – not the stuff that has been (deliberately) omitted or not even considered. It is no wonder that councils repeatedly make poor decisions.
The solution is simple. Standing Orders need to be amended to at least a week and this needs to be enforced. Councillors still won’t have time to understand it all, even if they do have the relevant skill set, so they need to be able to disseminate the reports to experts in the community for a second point of view. This may mean having a budget to employ independent experts, but in most cases, there are experts for whom giving a report a quick once-over is a community service. There is no need to rewrite the reports, rather simply provide the councillors with relevant questions, in particular about what is missing from the report.
Contact your local councillors and ask them to implement this. There is absolutely no excuse not to do it.
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