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Choosing the council
How to enrol, how to vote, and how to stand for a range of local elected positions

Māori constituencies
Environment Bay of Plenty is the only local authority in New Zealand to institute Māori constituencies. Read about their reasons and their process.

Kids voting
Auckland City Council provides schools in its area with a resource to help them understand how elections work.

STV
What Single transferrable voting is, and how it works.

What a mayor does
The ways the role is interpreted is as individual as the people – read on to see how some mayors work.

What councillors do

What standing committees do

What community board members do

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What district health
board members do

What licensing trust members do

Māori constituencies

In a region where 25 percent of the population identify as Māori, Environment Bay of Plenty, the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, is to have three Māori constituencies from October 2004. That is, Māori in the region on the Māori roll will be able to vote for their own representatives.

In 1989, when Environment Bay of Plenty was formed, it established three regional representational committees to link Māori and council. Instead of pakeha council members picking Māori, the iwi were asked to put forward their own choices. Over the last five years, the three committees have worked together, usually acting as one advisory body except where an issue applied to one particular area. It was these three Māori committees who initiated the move to have Māori seats established for the Bay of Plenty Regional Council.

“ We currently have Māori councillors elected from the general roll,” says chief executive Jeff Jones, “so some people have asked why we need Māori constituencies.” However, the Māori representative committees suggested that councillors elected on the general roll – whether Māori or pakeha – were likely to represent the general view. They thought it important to bring a Māori cultural view onto the council. “Someone who stands emphasising a strong cultural line is unlikely to be elected by the population as a whole,” Jeff Jones suggests.

The council followed a thorough consultative process on the initiative, retaining Peter Trapsky, the retired chief district court judge, to conduct hearings in a number of venues on submissions received. His report recommended that Environment Bay of Plenty proceeded with the proposal. As a result, a local Bill was drawn up and presented to Parliament. There were numerous objections from other local government bodies (and others) but it was passed into law.

In the middle of 2003, Environment Bay of Plenty reviewed its membership and constituency boundaries. It determined that there should be two Māori constituencies with one member each. There were objections, which were overruled. In the end, the Local Government Commission, which had to determine those appeals, decided there should be three constituencies and three members. They defined the boundaries of those constituencies.

Environment Bay of Plenty serves an area where one in four people identify as Māori.