Hawke’s Bay amalgamite Rebecca Turner is fitting the mold of rose-tinted supercity advocates.
She promotes her dream world where politicians and bureaucrats in an enlarged regional government don’t snipe and fight, where rates never rise, and where they listen to every member of the public and do what each of them wants, no matter how contradictory.
She promotes a dream world in which a supercity, through some unexplained mechanism, attracts more investment, creates jobs, creates more money, doesn’t get in the way, but gets in the way just enough to build the right think big projects not the wrong think big projects, and everyone is happy. Have you ever seen government do that?
Now this dreamer has the audacity to request the debate ‘stick to the facts’,
Not surprisingly, the facts she wants people to stick to are her ones – the ones made up by the pro-amalgamation zealots at the Local Government Commission.
But let’s be clear. These aren’t facts. These are paid-for economic assessments. That means guesses rife with assumptions, provisos and qualifications. They are theories and hopes.
Here’s a real fact for you. Not a single report ever produced to support an amalgamation case anywhere in the world has ever… ever… proved correct. Every one of them has got its estimates wrong. Every amalgamated region has proved to be more expensive and less efficient than they were before.
That’s a fact.
