Picking a candidate

It is generally acknowledged that local Government rates are increasing very much faster than prices generally.

We all know Government especially the last one piled increasing responsibility onto local councils effectively shifting the burden and this certainly had an effect on costs, however I think much of the reason is due to the people running local government, especially our elected representatives.

Being a local councillor requires no qualifications what so ever, other than being able to persuade voters to support you. There no vetting, no checking qualifications and experience, nothing in any way to ensure a candidate is capable of understanding the issues and making informed decisions.

A person could be illiterate and still turn up meeting after meeting voting on all sorts of issues of major importance to the community, without understanding anything of the subjects involved.

As Councillors often have no idea what they are doing this has to be one of the reasons Local Government administrators have become so powerful. Now in contrast to the elected representatives the management are cleaver people. Often very cleaver, highly qualified, and very influential.

But both the governance( that is the councillors) and Management have one very serious short coming, and that is they lack practical experience in the real world. They live in a feather bedded environment where the consequences of getting things wrong are not especially onerous.

Whether previous experience is important or not probably depends on what else you have done in the past. For some, previous council experience is probably the only relevant qualifications they have. Often you can pick these people because they reappear election after election hoping for the certainty of another 3 years guaranteed employment.

Now councils are huge enterprises. Here in Hawke's Bay the Napier, Hastings and Regional Councils all have a turn over in excess of 50 million dollars a year. That puts each of them in the league of big business.

Ask you self would you feel confident of our councillors running some major business? I know I wouldn't.

As many of you will know I am one of the candidates seeking public office, and I am often asked about my lack of previous local body experience. Frankly I think it is my experience outside of council that makes me qualified.

I don't want to go through all the details though I have had some senior positions in very large companies. Along the way I have picked up some very useful skills, but is as a small business owner that I have acquired the survival skills that cannot be learnt working in local government, or even in big business.
When I make a mistake, fixing the problem comes out of my pocket. So I have got quite good at learning from anything that goes wrong, and I go to great efforts to not making the same mistake twice.

In a small business you are in charge of production, marketing, finance, human resources and everything else.

Small business owners often work for very little , sometimes for quite a long time before starting to enjoy the fruits of their endeavours

In the real world making a mistake can be catastrophic. No ratepayers to pick up the bill. Get it wrong and you're bust – kaput- bankrupt. No income, no business perhaps no house

This is a world most council employees and many councillors simply can't imagine. For them getting it wrong simply passes the cost on to ratepayers. Most councillors and many staff would struggle to get an equivalent job in the private sector.

Remember the disaster when the Auckland Regional Council bought the LA Galaxy and star David Becham to New Zealand. A seven figure loss paid for not by those responsible for the disaster, but by ratepayers who had no choice in the first place, and none when it came to paying.

In Australia a number of councils were caught out by the sub prime mortgage fiasco collectively loosing several hundred million in the process.

So what is my point.

You can normally judge the suitability of people by their past performance. Those representatives with a history of association with bad decisions will probably continue to make make bad choices.

If you don't vote, or make your choices for very superficial reasons then you will likely get the sort of representatives that will eventually make you very unhappy.

People that are very enthusiastic, very persuasive, and have lots of ideas, may lack a sense of realism and that may cost you dearly.

Pushing idealism over realism is often why councils get it so wrong so often, when they stray from the things they do well like roads, water, sewerage, rubbish and other basics.

Everyone makes mistakes but not every one learns from them.

Remember vote for those people you actually want or you will likely end up with people you don't want.

Vote carefully my friends. There is no 90 day probation period. It takes 3 years to correct bad choices.