By Ian Powell
For many years I’ve believed that the struggle to achieve an outcome or outcomes trumps the outcome itself. This is because in the kind of world and country we live in, outcomes often have to be achieved by struggle, even when supported by strong evidence. Usually it is an incremental process in which, at some point, a series of quantitative changes can become qualitative.
Struggle can be pursued by several means. There is a spectrum from constructive engagement (including debate) to militant protests (even popular uprisings the like of which we have not before seen in Aotearoa New Zealand, but we do occasionally see around the globe such as recently in Sri Lanka). The place of struggle on this spectrum depends on the extent to which power relationships (as the airport’s future may be) and vested (sometimes venal) interests come into play.
Achieving an outcome is invariably a step towards another outcome and more after this. This is the history of all social and other progressive movements. They are too many to mention but let me just cite union and worker rights, women’s rights, sexual orientation rights, disability rights, tobacco control, and environmental protection and promotion. They all require and continue to require some form of struggle.
This is a rather long lead in to the just concluded Kāpiti Coast District Council elections. As one of nine candidates for the three districtwide councillor positions. I was stunned by my failure not so much to be elected (although that would have been nice) but to be strongly competitive. This was based on the feedback of many I interacted with and at the candidates meetings, all of which I participated in.
Reflection is a good thing even when painful. Although there were things I could have done differently and better in the campaign, these were not the main causes of this outcome. Instead, there were two main causes.
First, almost all the other candidates had a much greater profile in active community engagement than me. I have lived on the Coast for nearly 40 years but my community engagement has been largely confined to school governance many years ago. Instead my profile was national in the context of the health system.
In local government, local trumps national more often than not. All the three elected districtwide councillors (the ‘3 Ks’ as some are now calling them referring to their surnames, Koh, Kofoed and Kirby – a potential singing group in the making?) have extensive quality community involvement in different but important ways. When I first learnt that Liz Koh was standing I privately said that she was already a dead cert to top the poll and she did (deservedly so in my view).
She and the other two ‘Ks’ had, in effect rather than by design, already done the heavy lifting of campaigning before the campaign started. The campaign served to differentiate their respective relevant attributes from the other candidates who also had longstanding community involvement.
As an aside, I want to give a shout-out for another unsuccessful candidate who was in a more difficult position than me due to her relative newness to the Coast. I had not met her before but, as the campaign progressed, I came to increasingly respect Maria McMillan.
She’s principled, values-based, progressive and intelligent. She would have made a great contribution to the Council table. I hope the new Council will consider involving her in activities relevant to her experience and expertise, which include the role of local government. Just saying!
I also wish to commend all those elected to the different positions (well done) and also, but no less so, to those who didn’t get across the line. Overwhelmingly the unelected gave it their best shot. Local democracy and the legitimacy of the elected are better as a result of them.
But back to my second main reason (and probably the more decisive of the two). The main thrust of my campaign was that the Council needed, as part of its legal core local government function of wellbeing, to advocate for increased access to central government funded and provided healthcare services.
The problem of healthcare access in Kāpiti is longstanding and getting worse. But what was new is that the restructuring which took effect in July now means that we have a health system which is more centralised, more vertical and less transparent than before. This includes a lack of statutory voice for representation at the level of healthcare delivery.
My argument was that KCDC should step in and fill this advocacy vacuum. District health boards did this. But DHBs were restricted to doing it behind closed doors. KCDC should do it both behind closed doors and publicly. I failed to get this message sufficiently. Perhaps this was because of the newness of the restructuring.
Many, I suspect, did not make the link between the Council’s core function of wellbeing and increasing access to health services because, until July, that had been the core responsibility of another form of local government – DHBs.
Be that as it may, the struggle should go on (again, just saying).
Ian Powell stood as a Districtwide candidate for Kāpiti Council