CO-GOVERNANCE saved Te Kūiti ratepayers thousands of dollars, former Te Kūiti mayor Brian Hanna said. FILE PHOTO
WHILE co-governance is being “weaponised” in the national political arena, the governing style has been working in the King Country and wider Waikato since the formation of the Waikato River Authority (WRA) in 2010. The WRA has its 12th birthday on November 25. Co-governance has been working very well for the authority for more than a decade now, CEO Bob Penter said. “They [ACT, National Party etc] are effectively trying to weaponise co-governance as a political tool, and the track record of the authority shows there is very little opportunity to say anything other than co-governance in the WRA has been extremely successful,” he said. In a traditional governance structure, key decisions could quite easily be made by a single vote, and at times a casting vote.
CONSENSUS APPROACH “That doesn’t happen in a co-governance environment. For us, we have to have a consensus approach, that invariably leads to better decisions,” Bob said. “If there’s an issue where we have divided views around the table, we then tend to work those through quite carefully so that everybody’s comfortable. “Perhaps at a traditional table we might, if we have an agenda, ‘let’s just move this forward to a vote’. “If it’s tied, the chair is going to use a casting vote. We don’t have that at all,” he said. “We tend to have a high degree of scrutiny on us as well. “Just by virtue of being an iwi and crown entity, there’s a high level of scrutiny,” Bob said. The authority was annually audited and the annual report tabled in Parliament. “It’s not that we are sneaking under the radar,” Bob said. “We are performing extremely well, and more and more people are approaching us to ask us ‘can we share our lessons?’”
MODEL MENTOR The WRA was now in the position of being a co-governance mentor, receiving approaches about what it has learned. “Across the board; governance, funding, projects, systems, processes, policies – our approach has always been we are a completely open book,” Bob said. “If another entity comes for assistance: “Here’s all our material, here’s what we have learned.” Co-governance has also saved Te Kūiti ratepayers a considerable amount of money and strengthened the working relationship between the Waitomo District Council and Maniapoto iwi, former mayor Brian Hanna said. A working party with Maniapoto iwi representation was set up when the district council undertook its wastewater treatment upgrade. “We tried to meet all their cultural needs in terms of discharge to water and they helped us through that, and also when it came down to it, the affordability to their people and for the average resident.
VERY SUCCESSFUL “And that was very successful because it went through the consent process for a lot less cost than it might have, and I think that is part of just having a team approach with iwi worked really well. So that’s my experience of a good outcome. “I think the important thing is getting the parameters right and the constitutions right, and obviously the government’s working on now.” Co-governance was not part of the Three Waters discussion Brian was involved in when the Government appointed him as the independent chair of the Three Waters reform steering group. “In our steering group, it was more into the nitty gritty of entity design, not necessarily because there was a co-governance or not, because the Government had already indicated that was their preferred option.” The steering group debated numbers, how many should represent what size of board, that was really the context of the steering committee participation, he said.
FEARMONGERING There were a lot of good examples where co-governance was working, Brian said. “There is a lot of fearmongering there.” Local government Minister Nanaia Mahuta said there were two reasons behind the co-governance aspects, which guarantee mana whenua equal representation with councils on an oversight group. “Part of it is because the Crown must uphold its Treaty obligations. “When I consider as Minister the conversations that I had with councils around the features of reform, many councils raised the issue with me that they have really good relationships with iwi and mana whenua and so they wanted to make sure that in some shape or form we were able to carry those relationships forward,” she said on RNZ. “The other thing is that several treaty settlements that have been reached also have obligations that are carried through in terms of the relationship with their waterways. “And so it was important to ensure that Te Mana o te Wai aspirations could be achieved through this reform programme as well.”
