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be a tension between the two. The autonomy should never be at the expense of the other
members. 19
Local authorities wanted the government to devolve authority and money so that
they could perform governance tasks appropriate to their size and skills. Some
councils were already performing functions beyond their mandate. Wellington,
Christchurch and Manukau councils, for example, had a strong role in housing,
and in Wairoa, where there was a high unemployment rate, the local authority
had been active in the area of employment. So although it was technically not
their role, local authorities had taken up certain functions because their
communities demanded it.
With the advance of corporate globalisation, combined with an attitude that just
paid lip service to the importance of subnational economies and a government
that provided no direct funding for gathering local economic statistics, power
was concentrated in the big cities, big governments and big corporations. While
many cite the merits of regional development, this cannot really be achieved
using only one currency, the national currency. Regional development requires
regional currencies.
In New Zealand as elsewhere, we have been preoccupied with national
economies and national currencies. As Jane Jacobs, author of Cities and the Wealth
of Nations, says, there is a common unacknowledged, inaccurate and unexamined
assumption that ‘national economies are the salient entity for understanding
economic life’. 20 So preoccupied have we been in defining our national
boundaries (and almost no nation states have been created without some
bloodshed), that we have virtually ignored the role of our major cities and our