(By Duncan Campbell, Councillor, Taupo District Council)
Deny, delay, deflect, discredit, destroy . . . the unspoken code of senior bureacrats is alive and well in our local councils, too.
The "5Ds" secret code of senior bureaucrats - Deny, Delay, Deflect, Discredit, Destroy — as Jordan Kelly skilfully explained in her earlier commentary are not abstract. They are the precise instruments used by management to erode oversight and suppress challenges to their fiefdoms and their statuses quo.
When they're explained, the average Joe Citizen can see them hiding in plain sight in almost every dealing they have with a government entity, where they're dealings the entity would rather they weren't having.
What's less obvious is how, in local councils, management all too often uses these rather despicable tools of their private trade to stymie their communities' very own elected representatives.
Now to be sure, many Councillors are just along for the ride. But there's also those of us that put ourselves up for election by our communities to make some real, positive change - and the first step in achieving that change is usually to find out what's actually going on - including where, how and why their money is being spent.
Those of us new to the Council table have found to our great chagrin, that this is more often than not a mindset and a motivation that is unwelcome by senior management. In some Councils, senior management would prefer us to be the equivalent of inanimate Council Chamber furniture. They don't want their boats rocked by pesky elected representatives of the community.
The 5Ds . . . In Clear & Present Action in Taupo District Council
Example 1: DENY
Issue: Access to basic planning documents on the most significant water restructure for decades: Local Water Done Well.
Details: Requests to Council's general management for .pdfs to
enable third-party independent review were repeatedly stonewalled or ignored, as was a request to view the project leader’s resume. A workshop had been held to set the staff's course of direction, but no reports nor financial analysis were provided beforehand. Just a few slide
shows.
Impact: Prevented transparency to the community, through the undermining of Councillors' ability to seek independent opinions or
validation.
Example 2: DELAY & DEFLECT
Issue: Request for written confirmation to justify why public consultation is being denied for a forthcoming Joint Management Agreement (JMA) between Council and local Iwi Tuwharetoa (potential connotations of co-governance by stealth, in my opinion).
Details: Despite verbal affirmations that "due process has been followed", staff delayed the release of any written material - which also served to deflect discussion, in its own right, on the
necessity for public consultation.
Impact: An agreement with Tuwharetoa, with potentially significant implications to the governance of Council, is heading to be signed off without any public input whatsoever.
Editor's Note:
This case appears to be blowing up in the faces of Taupo Council management and others supportive of its "closed door / behind-the-scenes / no public discourse" modus operandi, when Hobsons Pledge and then journalist
Duncan Garner got wind of it late last week.
Example 3: DISCREDIT
Issue: I challenged the continued withholding from public view, of the $300,000 Northern Access Transport Study, which was completed nearly a year
prior. I also challenged some of the study's conclusions and questioned my exclusion from input - despite my directly relevant professional qualifications in this
area. That is, I'm a traffic and roading engineer.
Details: I'm accused of having “undermined staff,” of “grandstanding,” and of “wasting Council’s time'.” The worst part of it, though, is that these bullets came from my peers around the Council table, in what, to me, appears to be the result of management's misplaced coaching (on what "governance" is supposed to be all about), alongside an ingrained culture of
intransigence.
Impact: An act of political courage (because it does take a bit of backbone to be one of the few at the Council table standing up to management) is conveniently reframed as disruption.
Example 4: DESTROY
Issue: A behind-the-scenes push to silence dissenting Councillors via legal threat or committee exclusion.
Details: An independent lawyer was contracted to give me a good browbeating for (allegedy and supposedly) “breaching confidentiality” - which I firmly maintain that I
did
not.
Impact: Intimidation now considered a viable tool of governance.
Community, Council & Closed Doors . . . Not A Healthy Equation!
I wrote a letter to the editor last June (2024) of The Taupo Times community newspaper, opening up about what the Taupo community and its ratepayers should rightfully know: that, I believe, Council engages in wasteful spending, and that, I also believe, the unbridled ability for management to do this is, in significant part, due to elected representatives' over-reliance on less than completely objective staff reporting.
But not all of my Councillor colleagues wanted to address the elephant in the room. So much easier to be obedient to management, rather than accountable to voters, it would seem.
So a strategy of "politicise the personality" was hatched.
Instead of tackling the issue directly (or tackling it at all), Taupo District Council's Mayor David Trewavas responded with a conflict-of-interest assertion (directed at myself), in his own responding letter to the editor, in what appeared to me to be a not particularly well-disguised attempt at character assassination. (Inferences, as I saw it, included that I was more interested in sandwiches and the state of the air conditioning, and that my questions are often politically motivated – whatever that actually means).
In an open letter of response to Mayor Trewavas, I wrote:
Dear Mayor Trewavas,
This letter is in response to your June 28, 2024, letter in The Taupo Times, whereby you made some inferences about my character and asserted a conflict of interest.
Firstly, I think most constituents believe it is not a bad thing to ask a lot of questions, especially for a first-term Councillor. It is acknowledged there is some repetition in my questioning; one reason being that I do not accept non-answers or obfuscations as answers.
Indeed, it was along these lines that a complaint was laid by myself to The Ombudsman in March 2024, and I take offence at the suggestion that my questioning is mostly trivial.
Secondly, you state - on my behalf - a supposed conflict of interest. This surprised me, because to the best of my recollection you have not previously raised this before. I do not believe that my expertise as a traffic engineer gives rise to a conflict of interest, and I am not attempting to use my position in Council to obtain business for my consultancy. Rather, I seek to use my expertise for the benefit of the Taupo district, and I suggest this is one reason people in the community voted for me in the first place.
Many are asking about my exclusion and are also probably now wondering about other decisions being made behind closed doors.
Yours faithfully,
Councillor Duncan Campbell
Is it telling that no response was ever received from our Mayor?
The point I would leave you with is that, a year later (and counting), my best efforts to achieve transparency for my constituents over financial and other decision-making made in the inner bunkers of the executive suite, remain neatly thwarted.
The broader problem is, I'm not Robinson Crusoe, either. There are other Councillors in other Councils who put themselves up for election for all the right reasons, and I know full well they're experiencing the same immense frustrations.
There's only one answer:
Those that sit around the Council table with me need to grow a pair and stand up to the Council
bureaucrats
and demand visibility over what they're doing - in our name, and with our ratepayers' funds - behind their closed doors. This needs to happen before it becomes too expensive for us to stay in our own homes.
There's an election happening this October – who else is with me?
