October Revolution for Taupo?

(This is a transcript of my speech at Acacia Bay Community Hall on 17 June 2025)

Good evening everyone my name is Duncan Campbell one of the elected Councillors for Taupo Ward, and I want to thank you for turning up because sometimes that’s all that matters. Tonight I want to lay out two things: (i) Where I believe we are failing; and (ii) What I believe we need to do about it.

But if you wanted to sum it up it in a few words, I would say we have not so much a problem with Council processes, but we have a problem with truth – where information gets buried, elected members get silenced, and decisions get quietly manipulated back stage.

Before I do that though – what’s it like being a Councillor at Taupo District Council? I think pictures can speak a thousand words sometimes, and since I started penning my thoughts on Council over a year or so ago to social media, I would say these three cartoons well express some of my more notable lowlights. Not that I am trying to be discouraging, there were plenty of lighter moments than these, and I have absolutely no regrets because it has given me some interesting experiences I would otherwise not have had.

I would say Councillors can expect to spend between 10 to 20 hours a week depending on how diligent you want to be, and it is a paid position of about $40K salary before tax. But if there’s one thing I have learned: you do not make any noise for change by just blending in, and you don’t build trust by going along for the sake of harmony as I have seen so many others do. It is not a place you should expect to be making any friends.

So for the next part of my talk I will talk about three big Ivory Tower problems as I see it with this Council. And I think mine is a reasonably informed perspective, because I have spent my whole career working in and out of different Councils in some form or another and that includes dealing with the public. Like any engineer worth his salt I treat Council as a series of problem to be solved. So let’s start with the first one.

Secrecy / Withholding of Information, and so often under the guise of unsubstantiated need for confidentiality. I would say having so many workshops and committee meetings going unrecorded except for a few secretary notes, and having them all in the middle of the working day, is also a very effective way to limit public scrutiny. One elected member still makes regular snide comments about my lack of confidentiality, and it is hard to pointedly refute because just about everything said amongst elected members has been vaguely inferred as confidential, as if we were in the Secret Service during the Cold War instead of just a small town council.

One of the more extreme examples of withholding information was a recent Local Waters Done Well workshop when we had to agree to the staff direction on what is arguably the most significant shake-up of local government for decades, yet we were provided with no more than a few PowerPoint slide shows beforehand. Just as incredible was my discovery that it is was considered too radical by this Council to check up on the resume of the very well paid unelected official who is heading this very significant endeavour. On that note, in my experience it is quite unusual for a person in that position (Manager of Infrastructure) to have no technical background, which I strongly suspect may be the case here, and prior to Council amalgamations in 1989 the roughly equivalent position of Town Engineer was arguably the most important role in Council, and a big reason The Basics of Infrastructure were done without breaking the bank balance of ratepayers.

Reports are commissioned at great expense and then quietly withheld from public viewing, and I am thinking of the $300K for a single transport study which didn’t even properly address the most obvious question: Whether or not we actually need one or two new bridges across the Waikato River. That was the study I was pointedly excluded from contributing to, despite, or perhaps because, I happen to be the most experienced individual in that field, in Chambers or even on the Council payroll.

The secrecy and withholding of information to elected members and the public at this Council I find simply unconscionable, and I know for a fact that many other Councils are not as locked down as we are here in Taupo. It is absolutely contrary to the intent of the Local Government Act (which apart from a few niggles I have no great problem with), and I hope the government intervention which is going on right now will do something about this because I think we can end up with a very much dumbed down version of governance and public accountability.

Silencing of Dissent – Council talks about freedom of expression and even last month passed a policy on it, which I refused to put my name to it as I consider it an absolute fraud. I also refuse to submit items to the regular Council Connect newsletter, because of an incident last July when an editing staff member declined to publish my submission on the grounds of asserted misinformation which I could substantiate. Formal monthly Council meetings are a farce because unlike most other Councils, there is no slot where elected members can table anything new without first getting the express permission of another elected member and/or Chairperson several days in advance, and I have lost count of the times I have been shut down because the Chairperson simply did not want to hear my inconvenient point of view.

And make no doubt about it, that change last October to Council Standing Orders was exactly intended, as a means of procedural censorship, to shut up myself or anyone like me who dares to take up ten minutes of Council meeting time to voice any dissent. That procedural change was an offence to representative democracy, and is a big reason I am not on amiable terms with virtually any of the rest of elected members for stupidly going along with it – group think at its absolute worst – and now a member of the public has greater speaking rights in Chambers than elected members. “Governance is only as strong as the dissent it permits” – and I can tell you it is a very weak thing in Taupo

Inverted Chain of Command – Council is supposed to be governed by elected members who are advised by staff, but so many times:

Complex issues are negotiated in the back room by staff and perhaps a few favoured elected members before being presented to the rest of us as a fait accompli.
Elected members are treated as a formality instead as the governing body to be held accountable to. The Reserves and Roading Committee is probably the biggest example of a tickbox exercise I can think of, which I flippantly refer to as the Tree committee because although roads get scant attention in that committee, some trees have been subjected to greater deliberations than aspects of Council which involve tens of millions dollars expenditure.
Rigid and flawed adherence to the theology of cleanly diving Governance versus Operational scope of responsibilities, with elected members in this small town provincial council somehow expected to believe that staff are the experts in everything and that we are to maintain a kind of “high trust” model to always back them up. This is not legislated anywhere, but is a nonsense continually peddled at us with even its own catchphrase of “Keep Your Noses in, and Your Fingers out”.

And when tough questions get asked, as I have often done, the response is not always answers but discomfort, evasion or silence. For example, I have in the past pointed out transport line items costing 10 to 20 times what I know is necessary – but the distain to elected members at this Council is such that it did not even elicit a response. I say that elected members here are house trained to behave like ten year olds with no understanding of the outside world at all. The Chief Executive even advised me once to forget I am an engineer now that I am in governance.

The end result of this is that rates keep on going up and up, and it is simply unsustainable to plan on retiring here and staying in your own home without exponential increases in income. Staff will always find some excuse for the latest rates hike, and we are continually fed the line that things will settle down in a few of years which they inevitably do not. Another line is that we simply have to build new things for the sake of development, but the problem is that this is can be expected to come at the expense of those of us who live here already.

Now to a few of my suggested solutions to all of this, I hesitate to call it a literal Revolution but relatively speaking that is what we are talking about for Taupo. To put into some context, my Aunty is a retired local body Councillor in the UK who has being keeping an eye on my exploits, and I will directly quote a couple of her recent quips:

“Is this even a proper Council, or is it like what we call over here a Parish Council with all the major decisions made by others? Your Council is made up of pygmies and I think that is an insult to pygmies”.

So I am kind of feeling the pressure now even from the other side of the world to try and do something about it, or at least think about doing something else.

1️⃣ Open the Doors

All Council workshops and meetings of elected members be audio-visual recorded and made public, unless legally determined as confidential. This includes public forums to avoid member of the public contributions also disappearing into the ether.
Staff reports funded by ratepayers be made fully available to elected members, and the public in a sharable format, unless legally defined as confidential.

2️⃣ Fix Governance

Get rid of the obstructive and rigidly applied Governance versus Operational theology. It has least of all any place in a small town as this.
Restore elected authority over policy and also its practical application when appropriate. What happens on the ground should matter to elected members, and they should not get flipped off when they ask.
Staff to advise elected members in adequate timeframes to allow for questions and answers before the day decisions have to be made. This can help prevent fait accompli decisions.

3️⃣ Financial Accountability

Rates increases should be tied to inflation, and outside that should automatically trigger public consultation or referendum. Put a Cap on Rates in other words, and if central government aren’t going to impose them then they need to become an expectation and a demand of voters. I don’t see any other way of keeping a lid on things.

4️⃣ Restore Representation

Amend Standing Orders to the previous setting so that elected members get an uninhibited voice at the Council Chambers, and don’t have to cosy up with each other like kids in the primary school playground just to get heard.
Stop the staff censoring of elected members in Council media outlets.
Do random surveys of constituents for any major decisions of Council
Nurture a Council Chambers culture which listens to dissenting views rather than squashing them.

5️⃣ Stop Pretending

No more performance meetings staged to give the appearance of transparency when decisions have already effectively been made.
Start doing what virtually no Council does anywhere and start acknowledging past mistakes to actually learn from them so they won’t happen again. I would count as expensive mistakes: (i) demolition of a perfectly repairable Council staff building; (ii) stuffing up Taupo town centre traffic with the town centre revitalisation project; and (iii) mandating perfectly competent people out of a job on unjust and unjustified H & S concerns during the Covid 19 pandemic.

What is to be done this coming October? In the context of where Taupo District Council has been the past decade or so, and for my Aunty to start thinking of us as an actual Council worth being part of, and in order to bring down those Towers I mentioned – we are talking about a Revolution of sorts, and make no mistake – if the current batch of elected members remain, that just ain’t gonna happen.

So you do need to cast a vote in the right direction, or if you are more motivated to even stand in the elections yourself. You don’t need to be someone that pleases everyone, only someone willing to risk being unpopular for the sake of doing what’s right for Taupo and for it to be a district we can all afford to keep living in.

I will leave you with my last statement because I believe it absolutely applies: “The only limit to the audacity of the bureaucrats is the tolerance of voters at election time”. For too long the bureaucrats have had their way and I think the people of Taupo have for too long been brow beaten into a grumbling acceptance. It is high time we took back the reigns.

You’ll be hearing next from others who are standing up under the Let’s Go Taupo banner. Each of them in their own way have recognized the rot and decided to step forward. Please support them.