Why Local Elections Matter for our Communities

It’s local body election season, with smiling faces and abstract aspirations coming to a billboard near you. With apologies to the French: ‘Honesty! Transparency! Accountability!’

When candidates offer you so little to work with, it can be hard to motivate yourself (or encourage others) to engage in the election process. Especially so in the community sector, when so little of what’s up for discussion includes the important work that we do.

It’s not always immediately obvious how important your local council is to the strength of your community. They’re one of the most important enablers of connection, belonging, and community-led action. So many of the services and facilities that we take for granted are managed by the much-maligned servants of local government.

Swimming pools, libraries, community halls, museums, parks, playgrounds, sports fields, walking tracks – these low or no cost options are incredibly important opportunities for connection and community building.

Through Creative New Zealand they also fund community arts projects, and many will support events large and small for the benefit of residents and visitors alike.

Particularly in larger cities, they can also support things like safety patrols, outreach services for whānau experiencing homelessness, or building inspectors to make sure that rental properties are up to code.

In Dunedin we even got the council to directly fund the operations of our local community-led development network, Ōtepoti Community Builders, a collaborative hub that connects local groups, residents and organisations to share resources and ideas, so communities are leading their own solutions.

Council funding hasn’t just covered the basics, it’s supported neighbourhood projects, opened spaces for people to connect and built stronger links between communities and decision-makers. It’s a living example of what’s possible when councils choose to invest in people and local leadership, rather than just infrastructure.

And while that kind of investment in people is crucial, it sits alongside the big-ticket stuff: long overdue efforts to bring our water services up to scratch; maintaining and modernising our transport networks; responding to, and recovering from, increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

Local councils aren’t immune to things getting more expensive – in fact they’re feeling the pinch precisely because more of what they spend money on (things like roads and construction) are getting more expensive than the things you might spend money on (groceries and electricity).

Because of the political pressure our government is under, over household cost pressures, they’ve been sending pretty strong signals that they want councils to do less. In practice, that means focusing on things like roads, rubbish and water services and cutting back on the community-facing services that keep us connected and supported.

They can’t or won’t intervene to reduce the cost of food, electricity, rent, interest rates, insurance or medicine. So instead add their weight to pushing down the cost of rates.

One method they’ve proposed is rates capping, limiting the percentage increases that councils can charge in rates, which has been tried (to disastrous effect) in parts of the UK and Australia. More importantly, it takes the power away from communities to decide for themselves what they collectively value and want to invest in.

This is welcome news to sitting councilors and prospective candidates who don’t value the broader wellbeing benefits of the council’s work. Up and down the motu, perhaps more than ever before, we see candidates pledging no / much lower rates increases.

When pressed on how that might be achieved, they might talk about ‘finding efficiencies’, no more ‘nice-to-haves’ or the dreaded ‘cycleways’. They might exploit the lack of understanding around how council finances work and tell you that cancelling capital projects that are years away will reduce your rates bill now (it won’t).

But they’re either naïve or disingenuous about the fact that making good on their fiscal conservatism would result in deep cuts to council budgets, and with that the levels of service that are offered.

We should expect them to be upfront about what their intentions are. Reduced operating hours for swimming pools and libraries? Less funding for community events? Cancelling plans for accessible public toilets?

I’m not pretending that another increasing utility bill, on top of all the others, is easy for people to absorb. But we need to be clear about how inequitable these approaches can be in reality.

Austerity politics are counter-productive in the long run, deferred costs now that come back to bite you later, but at a community level their effects are real and disproportionate now.

Despite the fact they are often invoked as a justification for these decisions, those who have the least are usually the ones most adversely affected. Cutting access to swimming pools and libraries doesn’t matter so much if you have your own, but we can’t all be so lucky.

There are no prizes for guessing which group is better represented around the country’s council tables.

Which is why this election cycle is so important to our work in building stronger communities. It’s our chance to back people who believe in local voice, shared leadership, and putting resources into the things that make communities stronger.

And while I appreciate that none of us are looking for more work to do, it’s in all of our interests to generate some in the local body elections.

Ask your candidates how they feel about rates increases, and if they think they’re too high, where exactly they want to cut services to bring them down.

Ask them how they feel about the pressure from government to restrict their capacity to respond to community need, and if they don’t support that, what they’re going to do to push back against it.

Because while their jobs as governors is primarily to approve budgets, plans and policies relevant to their day-to-day operations, they also play a significant role as your community’s champion and cheerleader.

They should be expected to fight your corner when decisions are being made that aren’t in your best interests.

With everything else going on in the world right now, it’s more important than ever to know which of our prospective representatives are up for it. And more importantly, who’s willing to stand with their community and actually get stuck in to make things better.

— Aaron Hawkins, Director, Inspiring Communities

Local body elections run from 9 September to 11 October 2025. Vote for the people ready to stand with your community and do the mahi. More info: vote.nz/local-elections/about/local-elections-2025