The Institute’s response to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Urban Development Authorities proposal is now available online. In this submission we discuss our concern that the proposal is an attempt to solve problems by further complicating already complex systems. We also share our finding from the TacklingPovertyNZ 2016 workshops that local communities are incredibly diverse and this needs to be acknowledged in order for their challenges and opportunities to be addressed. We thank the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for the opportunity to share observations from our work in this area.
We considered this submission to be relevant to our work programme because we see this proposal as part of a trend of centralised control and the undermining of local government that has worried us in the New Zealand King Salmon case study and throughout our TacklingPovertyNZ work.
Background to TacklingPovertyNZ
Project TacklingPovertyNZ aims to contribute to a national conversation on how to reduce poverty in New Zealand. At the December 2015 TacklingPovertyNZ workshop, participants made the observation that poverty in New Zealand is too complex an issue to be overcome with a blanket solution. Instead, solutions must be sought at a local level to acknowledge that poverty has vastly differing consequences for people in different areas of New Zealand. In 2016 this acknowledgement took the form of a series of regional workshops held throughout New Zealand to provide a platform for local perspectives and solutions to to be heard. Subscribe to the four-monthly TacklingPovertyNZ newsletter here.