The messy concoction of local government reorganisation proposals and propaganda that is being spilt all through our letter boxes, inboxes and newspapers reminds me of the riddle made famous by Squirrel Nutkin: ‘Flour of England, Fruit of Spain, came together in a shower of rain. Put in a bag and tied round with string, if you’ll answer this riddle I’ll give you a ring’. We’ve got flour from the Wairarapa Councils, we’ve got fruit from the Wellington councils and we now have some rain thrown in from the Hawkes Bay now that the Regional Council there is proposing a giant East Coast unitary authority that encompasses the Wairarapa.
The answer to the riddle of course is a plum pudding .Which leads me to another children’s rhyme. Little Jack Horner and the plum that he pulls from a pie with his thumb (the segue is plums if you hadn’t spotted it). I looked up the meaning of the rhyme about Mr Horner and it turns out that the story is true and relates to a bloke called Jack Horner who was asked by the Bishop of Glastonbury to deliver a bribe (title deeds to land) to King Henry VIII, disguised in a pie, in an attempt to prevent the King from destroying the church’s assets.
Mr Horner was pretty clever and he removed the ‘plum’ deed from the pie before presenting the pie to the King because he suspected the King would reject the bribe, which he did. So Jack skipped off with his plum and lived happily ever after, and the bishop was dealt with in the usual way of those times.
What all this is leading to is that in this mess of flour and fruit and water that is the local government reorganisation proposals there are some juicy plums that are being keenly eyed. Exactly what the plums are, I am not clear on. In some cases I suspect the motivation for reorganisation proposals is more about preventing others from getting the plums. One thing is for sure; the Local Government Commission (the King in my analogy) is probably not going to have an evenly cooked pie placed in its hands given the mess of ingredients that is littering the kitchen bench at the moment.
But I have faith that the Commission will bake such a pie because it has a clear recipe, set out in legislation, to follow. And that is what seems to be lacking in some of the reorganisation proposals – a focus on what the Local Government Act 2002 requires of local government. The vain attempts to influence the outcome of the pie baking with propaganda and opinion statements on letterhead will, I hope, fall by the wayside as a result (but not as brutally as the Bishop of Glastonbury did).
Of course there will be one or more modern-day Jack Horners who will grab the plums they are after, but that is not so much of a concern in my eyes, as long as the rest of us get a decent feed as well.
Phillip Perc
