Anybody living in Auckland might soon be proclaiming those words after the National Government's announcement that Auckland is to become a super city following next year's local government elections.

This new behemoth with an elected executive Mayor (who will have more power than other local mayors around the country) and 20 councillors will be in control of $30 billion worth of local authority assets now under the authority of the six existing Auckland councils. Besides, there will be 30 new community boards advising the main council on the views and perspectives of the various communities that constitute the Greater Auckland region.

This new council will overcome, proponents say, the internal and needless politicking that comes now with seperate councils covering the Auckland, Greater Auckland, Manukau, Waitakere, North Shore, Rodney, Manukau, Papakura and Franklin regions. This will also mean, as the proponents argue, that Auckland ratepayers will now get just one rates demand and one set of local authority services to cover all people within the Auckland region.

For detractors though, this is being pushed through in a very un-democratic manner and I tend to agree with them. Although there is much to merit a unitary approach to local governance within Auckland and given that many people see themselves as Aucklanders and not as North Shorites, Waitakareans, Manukauans, Franklinites or whatever, there is still a deep concern that local democracy will suffer as a result of these changes. Furthermore, public services and assets such as the port system, water, sewerage and other enterprises will be able to be sold off to any bidder far more easily as councillors, elected to represent a wider population grouping, will be more under the sway of wealthy corporate donors whom they will need to fundraise from if they're ever to resource their campaigns to get onto the new Auckland council in the first place.

To further my argument, I want to cite the experience of my city, Dunedin, since it became a 'super city' with the Fourth Labour Government's reorganisation of local authorities in 1989.

The Dunedin City Council's writ used to stretch only within the immediate metropolitan area that stretched from the suburbs of Pine Hill in North Dunedin and through to Caversham at the south end of the city. Until 1989, therefore, the Dunedin metropolitan area was bounded by five other local authority areas, namely St Kilda Borough (technically a suburb of Dunedin), Green Island Borough, Mosgiel Borough, Port Chalmers Borough and Silverpeaks County (covering the Taieri and Strath Taieri areas).

The Local Government Commission decided, in its wisdom, to merge all of the abovenamed local authorities into one Dunedin City Council as of November 1st, 1989. Admittedly, there was some logic to their rationale in that, for example, I lived in a hostel for disabled children during the school week (until I left for high school in 1984) which was located in St Kilda when it was a borough and to borrow a book from the better resourced Dunedin Public Library (confession time here) I had to list my membership to my late grandmother's address which was only a kilometre away over the boundary line in Dunedin City. This was due to the historical fact that when St Kilda was constituted as a borough in 1859, it was a town then six kilometres or so away from the then Dunedin City centre but as urbanisation progressed, its boundaries became practically continguous with those of Dunedin.

Therefore, it did make sense (and might make sense in Auckland's case) to streamline services, such as library provision, to make them more effective. As an example of how things did improve, I can go and get a library book from the Dunedin Library and if I needed a book that was on the shelf in Mosgiel, I can simply request it be interloaned.

The downside, however, was that it didn't make sense in my view to bring in rural-based communities outside of Dunedin where the interests and needs of the residents there are slightly different to those who live in the urban metropolis. This was the case as, at the time, I was living with my family on our farm on the Taieri Plains, just outside of Dunedin, and we were absorbed into Dunedin City. There was some rationale for this though in that Dunedin's airport was just a few kilometres away from our home and despite it being in a different territorial jurisdiction prior to that time, the airport had always been owned by the DCC.

Despite these rationales, I was still concerned as a young socialist (and given what I personally knew about the conservatism of rural communities) about the influence that farmer councillors might exercise in coalition with the moneyed Tory elites who had always dominated the DCC (as indeed they tend to do everywhere).

Perhaps more recent events have begun to prove my earlier fears. Now that Dunedin is a 'super city' with the largest land area of any territorial authority in the country (which will soon be surpassed by the new Auckland super city), the number of councillors has shrunk from about 20 when first established to 14 now. This has given control of the council to a coterie of Tory councillors who are so intent on building the biggest of all potential local authority white elephants in New Zealand - the proposed $198 million (and rising by the day) Forsyth Barr Stadium at University Plaza. This new albatross around the neck of Dunedin ratepayers is scheduled to replace the beloved Carisbrook ground of lore in time for the Rugby World Cup in 2011, but this will depend on the outcome of any last ditch opposition to this mammoth monument to both our current city and regional councils who have pledged to fund this piece of un-necessary infrastructure.

So, my advice to Aucklanders is, think very hard about the consequences of having a mega-city. It may have all the positives around streamlined services and one rates bill but very little democratic impulse and you could be landed with entirely un-necessary infrastructure projects (but, hey, any council is capable of putting those up, right?)

What is needed is an Auckland wide binding referendum, run by central government electoral agencies, which covers all of the population of the proposed city to seek the consent or otherwise of Aucklanders to this undertaking. When Dunedin underwent amalgamation in 1989, the Local Government Commission ran a sham referendum which produced the outcome they wanted in terms of Dunedinites supposedly agreeing to merge with their smaller neighbours. While most of the changes have been positive for the city in which I live, I have to say that we are currently experiencing the downside of this too.

That's why you should never Rodney Hide steamroll you into anything Auckland. You have the right to decide your own future and not have Superman Hide and his wealthy buddies do it for you!