Elections Are So Inconvenient

When unelected commissioners replace councils and when ministers are filtered from the truth, democracy isn’t broken - it’s being quietly redesigned.

It is one of the curiosities of modern New Zealand that we still like to pretend we are a country immune from the temptations of quiet power. We polish our anti-corruption medals, boast about our transparency rankings, and tell ourselves that the machinery of government ticks along like a Swiss watch, perfectly aligned and forever accountable. But the truth, stubborn, unfashionable, is that the system is only as good as the people who run it. And lately, the people seem to have discovered how remarkably easy it is to divert power into the hands of those nobody elected, nobody can sack, and nobody gets to question until long after the damage is done.

Take Tauranga. A city of more than 160,000 people woke up one morning of 2021 to find the Minister had swept aside their mayor and councillors and replaced them with four well-connected appointees called “Commissioners.” Not elected. Not answerable to voters. Perfectly insulated from ratepayer fury. And endowed with every power an elected council would usually hold: rating authority, long-term planning, debt setting, land-use decisions, executive appointments, even the right to reshape the civic identity of the city. The astonishing part is how simple it was. Under the Local Government Act (an Act that reads more like a handbook for benevolent coups than a democratic safeguard) the threshold for pushing aside elected representatives is a loose accusation of “governance dysfunction.” Nobody knows what that actually means, because the law never bothered to define it. It is the kind of term that lets a Minister point at a council chamber, say “they look messy,” and roll in the constitutional bulldozers.

Once Tauranga was under Crown rule, the Commissioners settled in like tenants in a rent-controlled flat. Their term was extended. Their governance rebranded as “essential.” Elections postponed. Local democracy parked like a broken tractor. And when the second extension approached, the Commissioners even wrote to the Minister arguing they should be allowed to keep going: ideally in some hybrid council where unelected appointees would sit comfortably beside elected members like guardians overseeing the toddlers. It was audacious, yes, but also perfectly predictable. Give unelected people real power with no democratic cost, and they will ask for more.

And before anyone says this is an isolated experiment in an out-of-the-way council, look at the Police Commissioner saga. Jevon McSkimming’s office and the Department of Internal Affairs were caught filtering and withholding communications going to the Minister: “inappropriate interference,” they called it. In Muldoon’s day, that kind of stunt would have ended careers before lunchtime. Ministers ran their portfolios; Commissioners executed them. But now, the Police Commissioner can carve out his own interpretive bubble, deciding which emails matter and which should be hidden.

That is not mere administrative tidying. It is a power move. It tells us that the line between elected authority and bureaucratic authority is thinner than anyone wants to admit. And it proves something far more uncomfortable: that a determined unelected official can tilt the balance of power simply by keeping the Minister in the dark.

The Tauranga Commission and the Police Commissioner’s email filtering are two branches of the same creeping vine. One grows downward from the Minister; the other grows upward from the bureaucracy. But both squeeze the same trunk: democratic authority. In Tauranga, an elected council was dismissed with the stroke of a pen. In Wellington, a Minister was deprived of information by officials who apparently believed they knew better. In both cases, the public had no say, and the people wielding the real power had nobody to fear except possibly the Auditor-General months or years later.

There is a phrase officials like to use when they expand their reach: “operational independence.” It’s a respectable term, like a pressed suit on a Sunday morning. But operational independence decays easily into operational impunity, especially when Ministers are distracted, weak, or surrounded by chief executives who imagine themselves as shadow ministers. If a Police Commissioner can withhold emails because he thinks the Minister might react politically; if Commissioners can run a city for years without an election because the Minister finds it convenient; then the real question is not whether power can be diverted. It is how often it is already happening.

We tell ourselves that these are temporary aberrations. Tauranga’s democracy has now been restored, they say. The email incident has been “dealt with,” they say. But temporary measures in government have a habit of becoming permanent behaviour. Once you show officials they can act without electoral consequence, the gravitational pull toward centralised, unelected authority becomes irresistible. And once Ministers discover they can govern through appointed fixers instead of elected councillors, the temptation to use that shortcut again grows stronger each year.

Muldoon was many things - blunt, abrasive, occasionally tyrannical - but he understood one very important rule: if the people cannot remove you, you are not governing; you are ruling. Commissioners in Tauranga ruled. Officials in Police HQ who filtered Ministerial emails ruled. And every time one of these quiet usurpations succeeds, the democratic muscle of the country weakens a little more.

New Zealand prides itself on being corruption-free. But corruption does not begin with brown envelopes under the table. It begins with unaccountable power. It begins with decisions made by those who cannot be thrown out by voters. It begins when Ministers accept filtered information as normal, and when cities accept being run by appointees as necessary.

And so, through this all, the real genius is this: no laws were broken. No tanks rolled in. Everything happened inside the margins of legality. The usurpation wore a cardigan. The commissioners smiled. The email gatekeepers nodded.

The most dangerous form of power is the one that does not announce itself. It simply replaces you. Quietly. Efficiently. Forever, if you let it.

But don’t worry. You can still vote for dog control policies and celebrate Matariki in the town square. Just don’t ask who really runs the city. Or what the Minister was never allowed to see. Or how many more Taurangas we’ll stomach before we admit that the Commission was never the exception. It was the prototype.