Super City soft-sell sells

I've been critical in the past of the government's handling of the Super City issue but, believe it or not, its soft-sell routine seems to be working.

The way these things are supposed to work is the government spends ages softening up public opinion and then it cranks up its PR machine to sell the concept (usually at huge cost to the taxpayer who is forced to subsidise ads and public information campaigns).

However, the approach to the Super City move is quite different. It's successfully quarantined all the tricky controversial stuff within the select committee that's having its everlasting hearings in Auckland, leaving the Auckland Transition Agency to quietly toddle on designing how the new council will work.

Day after day we are getting extensive media coverage of the hearings as every man and his dog voices an opinion on the number of wards, their powers, Maori seats, the voting system and everything else.

This will go on for weeks, the public will be saturated with information and the impression left that there has been exhaustive consultation. Which, I guess, has happened at last.

At that point the government will probably do what it wanted to do in the first place, with a few tweaks here and there but as a tactic it will probably work.

The biggest victory for Rodney Hide in all this has been that the argument is about the nature of the Super City, not whether we should have one or not. Labour's calls for a referendum fell flat and it doesn't seem feasible to argue to turn the clock back and stick with what we've had.

The Select Committee moves on, I think, to Papakura on Monday and from there to every corner of the region. As it goes around Auckland a lot of the sting seems to be going out of the argument.

I wonder how long editors will continue to run the submissions and whether its news prominence will fade but by the time the committee reports back I suspect the public will have heard all it wants to hear about the Super City.

I doubt the fact that Winston Peters is attempting to resurrect himself on the back of opposition to the plan will cause the government any problem.

What's Winston's position? Keep things as they are? The current system of local government in the Auckland region has been a farce and a failure for decades.

Frankly criticism from Peters, if anything, is likely to strengthen support for the government's plan.

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Field Marshal   #1   11:46 am Jul 17 2009

Auckland should crank up its own pr machine -ignore Bluffington and make it irrelevant-its indecisive and forever inexperienced. Just concern ourselves in other provincial matters -and offer objective and practical acknowledgement of there concerns. Bluffington will be left with 'shape up or shut up'. Socialist talk has been putting the brakes on every matter- since Lange/Douglas split- 25 years ago.

David   #2   02:01 pm Jul 17 2009

Winston wont run for Mayor simply because he would have to do some work if he won!

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