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Speaker 1: Listen. I am more and more convinced that we need

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Speaker 1: to cut the number of councils we have across the country.

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Speaker 1: I mean that voter turnout that we've seen at the

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Speaker 1: weekend was abysmal. Last count I've seen is that nationally

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Speaker 1: only thirty eight percent of us voted, worse in Auckland

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Speaker 1: only around twenty nine percent, So not even one in

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Speaker 1: three of us. Now, I think anyone who thinks that

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Speaker 1: we can fix local government by ditching the postal voting

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Speaker 1: system and going hard with the orange guy and his

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Speaker 1: dog is dreaming. That is not the problem. The problem

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Speaker 1: is not how you vote. The problem is who you

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Speaker 1: vote for. I think we have a complete breakdown in

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Speaker 1: the trust between the voter and the people that we

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Speaker 1: are voting for and the authority in general. I mean,

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Speaker 1: you've opened your booklet, right, surely you had a look

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Speaker 1: at who you had to vote for. It's over populated

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Speaker 1: by people you wouldn't trust to mind your pet, never

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Speaker 1: mind run the council. You don't actually believe that these

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Speaker 1: people are going to make smart decisions, do you or

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Speaker 1: do what they say they're going to do. You wouldn't

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Speaker 1: even know if they do what they say they're going

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Speaker 1: to do because there's hardly any media coverage nowadays, and

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Speaker 1: holding and holding people to account. I think it fundament

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Speaker 1: comes down to us simply having too many local body

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Speaker 1: politicians in New Zealand right, Auckland alone has one hundred

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Speaker 1: and seventy of these people. That is more than Parliament

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Speaker 1: has for the entire country. Now run that one seventy

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Speaker 1: in Auckland across the entire country, it's like one thousand.

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Speaker 1: We don't have enough media to cover everything, grill them

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Speaker 1: when they break promises. We don't have enough attention spans

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Speaker 1: ourselves to absorb that much information on top of everything

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Speaker 1: we're already absorbing with central government. And so what we

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Speaker 1: do is we just tap out and we give up

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Speaker 1: and only what forty percent of us vote. I reckon

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Speaker 1: what we need to do is we need to take

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Speaker 1: our sixty seven territorial authorities and just cut it down.

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Speaker 1: Some commentators reckon we need to go as low as thirteen.

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Speaker 1: I don't mind. That's a good starting point, certainly a

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Speaker 1: better starting point than sixty seven, which equals a what

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Speaker 1: thirty eight percent turnout? For more from Heather Duplessy, Allen

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