Canterbury's amalgamation debate has ignited.

First up, Christchurch city councillor Sam MacDonald put the cat amongst the pigeons arguing that Selwyn and Waimakariri residents should be made to pay for Christchurch-funded facilities. And that if their councils declined to merge into a Canterbury super city, the option of tolling commuters and visitors at the city limits should be on the table.

Waimakariri's MP Matt Doocey called the proposal "Trumpian". Selwyn councillor Samuel Wilshire said Christchurch "would be hungry, sober and naked" without the surrounding districts.

The merge-or-pay framing belongs to a tradition in New Zealand local government that says scale solves problems. The evidence has not been kind to that tradition. The Infrastructure Commission's 2022 research found no relationship between council size and cost efficiency. Auckland Council's per capita spending has risen around 34 percent in real terms since the 2010 amalgamation.

That does not mean councillor MacDonald's underlying concern is wrong. Selwyn and Waimakariri have been the fastest-growing districts in New Zealand for three censuses, and the asymmetry between rate-paying and facility-using populations is real. But the right answer is not a binary choice between amalgamation versus tolls. It is to be smart with funding mechanisms.

Next came from the People's Choice grouping on Christchurch City Council. They reject the super city idea on localism grounds, and councillor Pauline Cotter put the point sharply: how could an amalgamated council do justice to a place like Arthur's Pass? Their intuition is right. Larger councils are, on the international evidence, less democratically engaging. Auckland Council's metropolitan governing body represents a city of 1.8 million through twenty councillors and a mayor. Over seventy percent of Aucklanders did not vote in the last local election.

The People's Choice's substantive concern, however, is asset protection: Lyttelton Port, Christchurch Airport, Orion. The implication is that a super city might sell strategic public assets. That is a separate argument from the localism one. A super city governed by an empowered elected council with a strong subsidiarity ethic could keep its assets perfectly well. Equally, three independent councils could choose to sell theirs. The case for keeping councils close to their communities does not depend on which commercial assets the councils happen to own.

And then there is perspective of the threatened districts themselves. Waimakariri District Council is formally testing merger options through its own consultation. Selwyn is surveying residents on four choices: combine with neighbours, take on Environment Canterbury functions, both, or neither. The Mayor of Waimakariri Dan Gordon has said publicly that the council intends to protect the district's identity.

There is nothing stopping Christchurch City Council from charging non-residents using its facilities more than it does residents. But what about facilities where direct user charging is not sufficient or considered inappropriate?

The Canterbury Museum provides a model. It sits in Christchurch but draws visitors from across the region. General admission has been free for over a hundred and fifty years and remains so. Rightly or wrongly, it has been decided that user charges cannot do the funding work. Costs need to be shared between contributing councils. How to do this was answered thirty years ago.

Canterbury Museum has been funded since 1993 by Christchurch City, Selwyn, Waimakariri and Hurunui councils under the Canterbury Museum Trust Board Act, on a formula combining population and distance from the museum. The arrangement has run for thirty years. The councils contribute in proportion to the benefit their residents derive, the museum is governed by a board with representation from each contributing council, and the arrangement has produced no calls for amalgamation and no calls for tolls.

The same model could extend to the wider set of facilities Christchurch ratepayers currently fund alone. The art gallery, the central library, the major sport and event venues, and the regional transport corridors that serve commuter populations are obvious candidates. The Greater Christchurch Partnership already exists as a coordinating body across the four councils. Giving it the authority to levy regional charges, with consent of ratepayers, would address the spillover problem MacDonald raised at substantially lower political cost than amalgamation.

The cross-boundary benefit flows run in both directions. Christchurch ratepayers use Lake Coleridge and Lake Ellesmere/Waihora, the Canterbury beaches, the ski fields and tramping routes that sit in Selwyn and Waimakariri. A serious accounting exercise would probably show a net Christchurch creditor position, but the gap is smaller than councillor MacDonald’s merge-or-pay framing implies.

Councils preparing Head Start proposals by 9 August have a choice. They can produce one large unitary covering Christchurch, Selwyn and Waimakariri, and accept the bureaucratic bloat and democratic costs the international evidence predicts.

Or they can dig in against the pathway and risk the government merging them against their will.

Or the councils can put forward proposals that uses the Canterbury Museum funding model as a working precedent for the spillover problem and remain much closer to their residents than a metropolitan governing body can ever manage.

That is the best way to go.

To read the article on The Post website, click here.