Only elected councillors will be able to vote on council committees under a Government law change, removing voting rights from appointed members who were not elected.
Local Government Minister Simon Watts announced the change on 2 June, saying it strengthened democratic accountability.
“Councillors are directly accountable to voters for their decisions,” Watts said.
“We are amending the Local Government Act 2002 so only elected members hold voting rights at council committee meetings.”
He said councils and the public had raised concerns about unelected individuals holding voting rights, “undermining decision-making and diluting the influence of democratically elected members”.
“We’ve seen examples in the Far North, in Tauranga and in Hastings where individuals, such as iwi representatives and young people aged under 18, have been appointed to council committees and given voting rights without being elected by the community,” Watts said.
“That’s not democratic, so we’re fixing it.”
Councils will still be able to appoint non-elected members for their skills or to represent communities, but those appointments “will not come with voting rights or count towards a quorum”.
The change is part of the Local Government (System Improvements) Bill before Parliament, and once it passes councils will have six months to review their delegations before it takes effect.
Committees and appointments made under a Treaty settlement, or under laws other than the Local Government Act, will keep their voting rights.
That means Auckland’s Independent Maori Statutory Board, known as Houkura, is not affected, because it was set up under a separate Act.
The board has since become the target of a separate New Zealand First push to abolish it altogether.
The voting change has been criticised as an attack on Maori representation in local government.
Te Kahu o Taonui, the Te Tai Tokerau iwi chairs’ collective, said appointed iwi members brought knowledge that council decisions depended on.
Its spokesman Aperahama Edwards said the change reflected “decades of Treaty partnership-building, legal recognition of our mana whenua status, and the practical reality that decisions about land, water, and environment in Northland can’t be made well without the knowledge we bring”.
“This is not about democracy,” Edwards said.
“This is about silencing Maori voices in the rooms where decisions about our rohe are made.”
Te Pati Maori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said the Government was “doing everything they can to ensure that Maori get absolutely zero say in any decisions made on our whenua”.
Labour has been critical of the Government’s wider local-government overhaul, with its local government spokesperson Tangi Utikere calling a separate council-reform plan “a messy, watered down plan from National”.
