The speed of the changes to council voting rights is sparking some concern.  

The Government is amending the Local Government Act, which would strip non-elected representatives of voting rights on council committees. 

Changes would impact iwi and youth representatives, although Treaty-based committees are exempt. 

Local Government NZ Board Member and Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell told Kerre Woodham that while they understand where Minister Simon Watts is coming from, this is substantial and unprecedented reform. 

She says it's a pretty quick change to the law, and they hope they can continue to have input so as to ensure there’s no unintended consequences.  

LISTEN ABOVE 

The speed of the changes to council voting rights is sparking some concern. &nbsp;
The Government is amending the Local Government Act, which would strip non-elected representatives of voting rights on council committees.&nbsp;
Changes would impact iwi and youth representatives, although Treaty-based committees are exempt.&nbsp;
Local Government NZ Board Member and Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell told Kerre Woodham that while they understand where Minister Simon Watts is coming from, this is substantial and unprecedented reform.&nbsp;
She says it's a pretty quick change to the law, and they hope they can continue to have input so as to ensure there’s no unintended consequences. &nbsp;
LISTEN ABOVE&nbsp;

Join Kerre Woodham one of New Zealand’s best loved personalities as she dishes up a bold, sharp and energetic show Monday to Friday 9am-12md on Newstalk ZB. News, opinion, analysis, lifestyle and entertainment – we’ve got your morning listening covered.

Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Tania Tapsell: Local Government NZ Board Member and Rotorua Mayor on the changes to council voting rights

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/f77144ee-26dc-4426-b257-b45e00117d9a/transcript

It's just so infuriating when you see criminals who are given sentences that in no way reflect the heinous nature of their crime. It would be lovely, well not lovely, but it would be admirable to have faith in a justice system, not simply have to endure a legal system. 

The Aussies know how to do it. There was a particularly ghastly pack rape of a young woman who had the misfortune to be walking home from a bus stop at the wrong place at the wrong time, and a gang of young men and one woman said, “Let's go and get ourselves a Sheila". And so this pack of homeless kids assaulted her, tortured her, gang raped her and murdered her. And they were sent to prison forever, until such time as they were physically incapacitated to no longer serve as a threat to the community or until they were dead.  

The UN came galloping in and said you simply can't do that, they were children when they did this. Yeah, no. They were man enough to cause that sort of pain, harm, and damage to an innocent woman, man enough to serve the crime. They can give somebody 36 years for rape and murder because even though they're a teenager, even though they've never done anything like this before, the severity of the crime is such that they pose a threat to society – damn right they do. 

But what do we do? Here we do it differently. We believe in the inherent goodness of all people and the redemptive power of incarceration, even when there is absolutely no basis to believe that. Around 56.5% of people with previous convictions are reconvicted within two years of release. Nearly 36% end up back in prison over the same period. Now, many people who get sent to prison are unfortunate, many people learn their lesson, but for those who commit the most serious crimes, they simply don't.  

This week we learned that Carla Cardno's rapist, torturer, and murderer is set to be released from prison and nobody is allowed to know what he looks like at all. Despite the fact a review ordered by the Parole Board in 2009 found he scored highly on the psychopathy checklist measure, he's a psychopath, and his characteristics pointed to the likelihood of serious violent and sexual recidivism. That was in 2009. They said after meeting him in 2014 it was worrying that he acknowledged he had enjoyed the event and the circumstances of his crime and the control he could exercise on the child during his dreadful offending.  

And so now apparently, he's cured. He's cured of being that sick, cruel deviant that he confessed himself to be and the Parole Board now believes he's only of average risk of offending. Oh cool. Average. Brilliant. How can you go from being that sick, that wrongly wired, to cured? You can't. At least I suppose we can run him through AI and see what he looks like now I guess, have a fair idea. 

And I guess at least we know what George Starling looks like. He's a Christchurch rapist who drugged two women with sedative laced vodka. These young women were flatmates, they returned back to their flat from a party to find Starling was already at their house, somebody else had invited him round. He offered them a drink. They thought they were having a drink of vodka. When they began suffering the effects of the drugged vodka, they took themselves off to bed. He entered first one room then the other and raped both women over the course of the night. Five months later he raped a third woman. He was found guilty of the rapes in two separate trials. In the first case he was sentenced to five years, served two. In the second he was sentenced to six years, served less than two.  

Why would you bother going through a court case for that as a woman? I have the utmost respect for the women who went to the Police, who saw that he was charged and made accountable for what he'd done to them, presumably doing so hoping that by their courage they'd be able to prevent him doing it again. But the sentencing just bears no relation to what he did to them. Apparently, he's no longer a risk to the community because he understands he must get consent. Yeah. Drugging women with sedative laced vodka so he can rape them, George, does not count as consent. Shock you and call you confused, but there you go. How could you be confused about consent when it comes to that? Snaps for you George, personal growth. That's right, drugging women so you can rape them isn't consent.  

How can we have faith in a system? I mean this is just two – you could probably pull two stories from the paper as well. You could probably pull a couple of stories if you just Googled “rapist sentenced New Zealand", you would find farcical, farcical sentences given. At least I suppose he was sent to prison. We've had drunk drivers who've killed people who haven't been sent to prison. How can we have faith in a system where the punishment for serious crimes is so insignificant, so inconsistent with the severity of the crime and the damage that they have caused? 

It's just so infuriating when you see criminals who are given sentences that in no way reflect the heinous nature of their crime. It would be lovely, well not lovely, but it would be admirable to have faith in a justice system, not simply have to endure a legal system.&nbsp;
The Aussies know how to do it. There was a particularly ghastly pack rape of a young woman who had the misfortune to be walking home from a bus stop at the wrong place at the wrong time, and a gang of young men and one woman said, “Let's go and get ourselves a Sheila". And so this pack of homeless kids assaulted her, tortured her, gang raped her and murdered her. And they were sent to prison forever, until such time as they were physically incapacitated to no longer serve as a threat to the community or until they were dead. &nbsp;
The UN came galloping in and said you simply can't do that, they were children when they did this. Yeah, no. They were man enough to cause that sort of pain, harm, and damage to an innocent woman, man enough to serve the crime. They can give somebody 36 years for rape and murder because even though they're a teenager, even though they've never done anything like this before, the severity of the crime is such that they pose a threat to society – damn right they do.&nbsp;
But what do we do? Here we do it differently. We believe in the inherent goodness of all people and the redemptive power of incarceration, even when there is absolutely no basis to believe that. Around 56.5% of people with previous convictions are reconvicted within two years of release. Nearly 36% end up back in prison over the same period. Now, many people who get sent to prison are unfortunate, many people learn their lesson, but for those who commit the most serious crimes, they simply don't. &nbsp;
This week we learned that Carla Cardno's rapist, torturer, and murderer is set to be released from prison and nobody is allowed to know what he looks like at all. Despite the fact a review ordered by the Parole Board in 2009 found he scored highly on the psychopathy checklist measure, he's a psychopath, and his characteristics pointed to the likelihood of serious violent and sexual recidivism. That was in 2009. They said after meeting him in 2014 it was worrying that he acknowledged he had enjoyed the event and the circumstances of his crime and the control he could exercise on the child during his dreadful offending. &nbsp;
And so now apparently, he's cured. He's cured of being that sick, cruel deviant that he confessed himself to be and the Parole Board now believes he's only of average risk of offending. Oh cool. Average. Brilliant. How can you go from being that sick, that wrongly wired, to cured? You can't. At least I suppose we can run him through AI and see what he looks like now I guess, have a fair idea.&nbsp;
And I guess at least we know what George Starling looks like. He's a Christchurch rapist who drugged two women with sedative laced vodka. These young women were flatmates, they returned back to their flat from a party to find Starling was already at their house, somebody else had invited him round. He offered them a drink. They thought they were having a drink of vodka. When they began suffering the effects of the drugged vodka, they took themselves off to bed. He entered first one room then the other and raped both women over the course of the night. Five months later he raped a third woman. He was found guilty of the rapes in two separate trials. In the first case he was sentenced to five years, served two. In the second he was sentenced to six years, served less than two. &nbsp;
Why would you bother going through a court case for that as a woman? I have the utmost respect for the women who went to the Police, who saw that he was charged and made accountable for what he'd done to them, presumably doing so hoping that by their courage they'd be able to prevent him doing it again. But the sentencing just bears no relation to what he did to them. Apparently, he's no longer a risk to the community because he understands he must get consent. Yeah. Drugging women with sedative laced vodka so he can rape them, George, does not count as consent. Shock you and call you confused, but there you go. How could you be confused about consent when it comes to that? Snaps for you George, personal growth. That's right, drugging women so you can rape them isn't consent. &nbsp;
How can we have faith in a system? I mean this is just two – you could probably pull two stories from the paper as well. You could probably pull a couple of stories if you just Googled “rapist sentenced New Zealand", you would find farcical, farcical sentences given. At least I suppose he was sent to prison. We've had drunk drivers who've killed people who haven't been sent to prison. How can we have faith in a system where the punishment for serious crimes is so insignificant, so inconsistent with the severity of the crime and the damage that they have caused?&nbsp;

Kerre Woodham: How can you have faith in a system in which the punishment never matches the crime?

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/b89d29cb-fbb4-457e-a55a-b460000c8a28/transcript

I wanted to start today with a landmark study from Monash University. It's found that a routine arming of police officers does not lead to a spike in trigger happy coppers. In fact, after Aussie coppers were armed in the early 1990s, there was a downward trend in shooting rates. The research, which investigated 50 years of officer-involved shootings in Australia between 1970 and 2020, challenges the prevailing assumption that increased firearm availability among police inevitably results in higher rates of lethal force. And I think that assumption exists here.  

You think that by routinely arming officers, there will be more shootings. That doesn't appear to be borne out across the ditch. Police in most countries are routinely armed, but they're not in England, New Zealand, Norway, and Scotland. Guns are available, but they're not worn as of the standard uniform. And this is often due to concerns that arming officers could damage their relationship with the public or lead to a more authoritarian style of policing. The lead researcher of the study at Monash, Dr Ross Hendy, said the findings provide crucial real-world evidence for countries currently debating whether or not their police should carry guns. It was not followed by an increase in shootings. 

I find that interesting because you would imagine if it's there, you'd use it. But not necessarily so. And I think you've seen where you are going to see a damaging of the relationship between police and the public is when you have officers who are completely brainwashed and unwilling and or unable to use their own discernment, as we saw in the appalling case of Henry Nowak. An utterly appalling case. I haven't been able to watch the full video of that poor young man being handcuffed as he lay dying because once you see something, you cannot unsee it.  

American History X is a case in point. I could not – I started to watch it and then I just could not. But this is what happens when police are too intimidated, too brainwashed, too fearful to use their own critical thinking and instead rely on doctrinaire and tutelage and sitting through endless re-education classes, going from black bad, white good to white bad, black good. You cannot reduce humans to that kind of binary, primitive calculation. And that seems to be what's happened in an attempt to try and rid the British police force of any kind of racism towards minority communities. They have completely flipped it and now you have racism in reverse, which is just as damaging, just as bad. And this is the result. So that's what's going to damage relations between police and the public when police aren't able to use their own discernment and police accordingly. 

How many times do you think the police fired their guns in New Zealand? They're not routinely available, you can access them, so I would have thought maybe 100 – I don't know why. I mean, we're seeing increasingly violent crime, I would have thought maybe 100 times. No. Police discharged their firearms in just three separate events in 2024 Three! Three times! It averages about 5.5 times a year over the past 10 years. That is a phenomenally small number of times that police actually fire their weapons. When they fire them, they tend to fire them for a reason, and the result tends to be terminal. You could hardly accuse our police force of being trigger happy. The police say they're very glad that their de-escalation training is working. The presentation of firearms, sponge bullets, tasers, and batons is far more often than that. But they don't use them, they just show the offender, the person, what they've got, but they don't just pull them out and use them. That shows that they're thinking, they're discerning.  

While the Police Association has advocated for routine arming in recent times, for a long time they did not. But as policing has changed, as policemen have been shot and killed, they have called for routine arming. Politicians have been more cautious. A routine arming trial was carried out in 2019 and 2020 but not continued because the Police Commissioner of the time, Andrew Coster, said they created fear in communities. So that that didn't happen. The low rate of police firing their weapons is incredible when you consider that the firearms were pointed at police in 19 incidents over 2024 – eight times they were fired at. So they've fired at fewer criminals than criminals have fired at police.

I think if the police want to be armed, I think the stats show they have the self-restraint, they have the discernment to be able to use them. The Monash study says when it came to Aussie police, routinely arming them did not lead to an increase in use of firearms. In fact, there was a de-escalation of them. So the studies from Monash, our own statistics from New Zealand, say to me that if the police want to be armed, they’ve earned the right to bear sidearms, if that’s what they think they need to do. 

I wanted to start today with a landmark study from Monash University. It's found that a routine arming of police officers does not lead to a spike in trigger happy coppers. In fact, after Aussie coppers were armed in the early 1990s, there was a downward trend in shooting rates. The research, which investigated 50 years of officer-involved shootings in Australia between 1970 and 2020, challenges the prevailing assumption that increased firearm availability among police inevitably results in higher rates of lethal force. And I think that assumption exists here. &nbsp;
You think that by routinely arming officers, there will be more shootings. That doesn't appear to be borne out across the ditch. Police in most countries are routinely armed, but they're not in England, New Zealand, Norway, and Scotland. Guns are available, but they're not worn as of the standard uniform. And this is often due to concerns that arming officers could damage their relationship with the public or lead to a more authoritarian style of policing. The lead researcher of the study at Monash, Dr Ross Hendy, said the findings provide crucial real-world evidence for countries currently debating whether or not their police should carry guns. It was not followed by an increase in shootings.&nbsp;
I find that interesting because you would imagine if it's there, you'd use it. But not necessarily so. And I think you've seen where you are going to see a damaging of the relationship between police and the public is when you have officers who are completely brainwashed and unwilling and or unable to use their own discernment, as we saw in the appalling case of Henry Nowak. An utterly appalling case. I haven't been able to watch the full video of that poor young man being handcuffed as he lay dying because once you see something, you cannot unsee it. &nbsp;
American History X is a case in point. I could not – I started to watch it and then I just could not. But this is what happens when police are too intimidated, too brainwashed, too fearful to use their own critical thinking and instead rely on doctrinaire and tutelage and sitting through endless re-education classes, going from black bad, white good to white bad, black good. You cannot reduce humans to that kind of binary, primitive calculation. And that seems to be what's happened in an attempt to try and rid the British police force of any kind of racism towards minority communities. They have completely flipped it and now you have racism in reverse, which is just as damaging, just as bad. And this is the result. So that's what's going to damage relations between police and the public when police aren't able to use their own discernment and police accordingly.&nbsp;
How many times do you think the police fired their guns in New Zealand? They're not routinely available, you can access them, so I would have thought maybe 100 – I don't know why. I mean, we're seeing increasingly violent crime, I would have thought maybe 100 times. No. Police discharged their firearms in just three separate events in 2024 Three! Three times! It averages about 5.5 times a year over the past 10 years. That is a phenomenally small number of times that police actually fire their weapons. When they fire them, they tend to fire them for a reason, and the result tends to be terminal. You could hardly accuse our police force of being trigger happy. The police say they're very glad that their de-escalation training is working. The presentation of firearms, sponge bullets, tasers, and batons is far more often than that. But they don't use them, they just show the offender, the person, what they've got, but they don't just pull them out and use them. That shows that they're thinking, they're discerning. &nbsp;
While the Police Association has advocated for routine arming in recent times, for a long time they did not. But as policing has changed, as policemen have been shot and killed, they have called for routine arming. Politicians have been more cautious. A routine arming trial was carried out in 2019 and 2020 but not continued because the Police Commissioner of the time, Andrew Coster, said they created fear in communities. So that that didn't happen. The low rate of police firing their weapons is incredible when you consider that the firearms were pointed at police in 19 incidents over 2024 – eight times they were fired at. So they've fired at fewer criminals than criminals have fired at police.
I think if the police want to be armed, I think the stats show they have the self-restraint, they have the discernment to be able to use them. The Monash study says when it came to Aussie police, routinely arming them did not lead to an increase in use of firearms. In fact, there was a de-escalation of them. So the studies from Monash, our own statistics from New Zealand, say to me that if the police want to be armed, they’ve earned the right to bear sidearms, if that’s what they think they need to do.&nbsp;

Kerre Woodham: The police have earned the right to bear arms

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/c4f135a1-1eee-4ba5-a37b-b45f00036d83/transcript

The Government will stop unelected individuals from voting on council committees, a move an Act MP has described as closing an anti-democratic loophole. It seems like a no brainer. Why should unelected individuals have the right to vote on council committees? Of course people who have never been elected to a council or a government shouldn't be given voting rights. You can certainly ask people for their opinion, their informed comment, but voting rights?  

The issue of unelected New Zealanders being appointed to council committees and then having voting rights has been in the news recently, predominantly around the Far North where hapū representatives were confirmed to be put on a committee tasked with shaping Māori strategic relationships and embedding Te Tiriti based partnership in council decision making. Fair enough, getting their opinions. Absolutely. You would imagine that hapū representatives are the best people to talk about how to shape Māori strategic relationships and how they see Te Tiriti being enacted through council decision making. Totally fair enough.  

Where it gets a bit murky is that they have full speaking and voting rights alongside elected representatives. They're also paid the daily rate. They don't have to accept it, but they are paid a daily rate of around about 250 bucks plus travel costs plus any childcare, just as elected representatives can ask for. They can volunteer their time and their knowledge, but if they want to be paid, they will be. They wouldn't make final decisions, but they would vote on the issues that would be heard at full council.  

ACT leader David Seymour said anyone voting on council decisions should be accountable, including facing elections, and the party lodged a member's bill to prohibit voting rights for unelected appointees. But Simon Watts, Local Government Minister, has basically cut their lunch and announced that non-elected individuals can be appointed to offer their professional advice, they can represent communities, but they will not be able to vote or count towards a quorum. The statutory committees and appointments, including those agreed as part of a treaty settlement though, will be excluded. 

WATTS: This is a specific board set up for Auckland Council. Short answer is, is that for the Independent Māori Statutory Board, those members will only be able to vote on council committees where the law specifically enables it, and what that means is, is that that committee's set up under a different act. 

HDPA: So they retain their voting rights? 

WATTS: If it's related to the specific act. So it relates to where they're doing the management of natural and physical resources. If they're on a subcommittee doing that, then they're able to vote. Anything else, they're not able to. 

So, does that clear it up? I would be really interested to hear from a range of interests as to how council decisions will impact, and some will vary more than others. If you're in Wellington right now, for example, and you're in council, you would want to hear from businesses as to how decisions made by the council have impacted upon them. The cycle lanes, the development of, or the neglect really, the lack of development around the bridge, the Paremata Bridge and the library, the reopening of the library, the cost of that, the redevelopment of the Michael Fowler Centre. You would want representatives from business to say, look, this is our experience, this is what's happening, make your decisions perhaps based on that. If you're Māori in the Far North and you're dealing with issues around Māori land or the rating of Māori land, the re-rating of Māori land, or water, tourism perhaps, you would definitely want a Māori lens, a Māori perspective.  

But if you're going to be making decisions so that some issues don't make it to full council, elected members might not even know that there was an issue because it's been dealt with by these unelected representatives and they have voted on what the elected members of the council will actually see, I think it's a different story. Imagine if the Government asked a panel of Newstalk ZB hosts for their reckons to shape policy and then vote on it as to what would get to Parliament. You know, basically act as a select committee. I don't think so. You wouldn't stand for that. And if we want to have our reckons represented at a council level or government level, then we stand. We stand as councillors, mayors, we stand as MPs. There are 33 Māori across all parties in Parliament, representing a huge range of views and lived experiences, which is fantastic. We have councillors, chief executives, highly regarded mayors, all Māori. And I'd be really interested to hear the views of Māori, particularly in how it relates to land and water management. But if you're not elected, I don't think you should have a vote. Have a reckon by all means, but not a vote. 

The Government will stop unelected individuals from voting on council committees, a move an Act MP has described as closing an anti-democratic loophole. It seems like a no brainer. Why should unelected individuals have the right to vote on council committees? Of course people who have never been elected to a council or a government shouldn't be given voting rights. You can certainly ask people for their opinion, their informed comment, but voting rights? &nbsp;
The issue of unelected New Zealanders being appointed to council committees and then having voting rights has been in the news recently, predominantly around the Far North where hapū representatives were confirmed to be put on a committee tasked with shaping Māori strategic relationships and embedding Te Tiriti based partnership in council decision making. Fair enough, getting their opinions. Absolutely. You would imagine that hapū representatives are the best people to talk about how to shape Māori strategic relationships and how they see Te Tiriti being enacted through council decision making. Totally fair enough. &nbsp;
Where it gets a bit murky is that they have full speaking and voting rights alongside elected representatives. They're also paid the daily rate. They don't have to accept it, but they are paid a daily rate of around about 250 bucks plus travel costs plus any childcare, just as elected representatives can ask for. They can volunteer their time and their knowledge, but if they want to be paid, they will be. They wouldn't make final decisions, but they would vote on the issues that would be heard at full council. &nbsp;
ACT leader David Seymour said anyone voting on council decisions should be accountable, including facing elections, and the party lodged a member's bill to prohibit voting rights for unelected appointees. But Simon Watts, Local Government Minister, has basically cut their lunch and announced that non-elected individuals can be appointed to offer their professional advice, they can represent communities, but they will not be able to vote or count towards a quorum. The statutory committees and appointments, including those agreed as part of a treaty settlement though, will be excluded.&nbsp;
WATTS: This is a specific board set up for Auckland Council. Short answer is, is that for the Independent Māori Statutory Board, those members will only be able to vote on council committees where the law specifically enables it, and what that means is, is that that committee's set up under a different act.&nbsp;
HDPA: So they retain their voting rights?&nbsp;
WATTS: If it's related to the specific act. So it relates to where they're doing the management of natural and physical resources. If they're on a subcommittee doing that, then they're able to vote. Anything else, they're not able to.&nbsp;
So, does that clear it up? I would be really interested to hear from a range of interests as to how council decisions will impact, and some will vary more than others. If you're in Wellington right now, for example, and you're in council, you would want to hear from businesses as to how decisions made by the council have impacted upon them. The cycle lanes, the development of, or the neglect really, the lack of development around the bridge, the Paremata Bridge and the library, the reopening of the library, the cost of that, the redevelopment of the Michael Fowler Centre. You would want representatives from business to say, look, this is our experience, this is what's happening, make your decisions perhaps based on that. If you're Māori in the Far North and you're dealing with issues around Māori land or the rating of Māori land, the re-rating of Māori land, or water, tourism perhaps, you would definitely want a Māori lens, a Māori perspective. &nbsp;
But if you're going to be making decisions so that some issues don't make it to full council, elected members might not even know that there was an issue because it's been dealt with by these unelected representatives and they have voted on what the elected members of the council will actually see, I think it's a different story. Imagine if the Government asked a panel of Newstalk ZB hosts for their reckons to shape policy and then vote on it as to what would get to Parliament. You know, basically act as a select committee. I don't think so. You wouldn't stand for that. And if we want to have our reckons represented at a council level or government level, then we stand. We stand as councillors, mayors, we stand as MPs. There are 33 Māori across all parties in Parliament, representing a huge range of views and lived experiences, which is fantastic. We have councillors, chief executives, highly regarded mayors, all Māori. And I'd be really interested to hear the views of Māori, particularly in how it relates to land and water management. But if you're not elected, I don't think you should have a vote. Have a reckon by all means, but not a vote.&nbsp;

Kerre Woodham: Have a reckon, but not a vote

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/acecd1d7-2359-4736-afed-b45e000c38ff/transcript

Tania Tapsell: Local Government NZ Board Member and Rotorua Mayor on the changes to council voting rights

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