What a big surprise yesterday to find we had featured in a controversial story on The Post.
What a huge surprise we got yesterday (12th November) to find an online story on The Post which featured quite a bit about the NP Ratepayers Alliance. Like many of our supporters we can’t get past the paywall for The Post, so we had a bit of a mission trying to find a hard copy of the Daily News to find out more about this story.
For those who haven’t seen the story, Murray Chong was in charge of the Mayor’s Office for 40 minutes last Monday morning as Max Brough was out of town.
The Mayor’s Office is an official communication channel for the new Mayor. It has been set up so people can e-mail questions at any time to the Mayor, and these will be answered with a video reply at times through the week. The intention has been for the Deputy Mayor’s to also take turns in answering questions sent in from the public.
The whole idea behind this question system is to offer more access to the Council and get more transparency with what they are doing. The Alliance fully supports any new systems which give the community the opportunity to ask questions and have things clarified.
Topics in Murray Chong’s question session last Monday morning included pulling out of LGNZ, rates capping, the future of Venture Taranaki and – completely to our surprise – donations to the legal fund for the NP Ratepayers Alliance.
Murray answered all of the questions, but rather than what would be the NPDC official line on these topics, it appears the answers were more of his own personal view. This terms Elected Officials have had just one meeting, which was mostly officially signing in as a Councillor, so the team have had absolutely no discussions on where they all stand on any NPDC issues they may deal with in the future.
As would be fully expected, some of the Councillors have written to complain to Max about how these questions were handled by Murray. Through an official communication channel it appeared Murray was giving official responses on behalf of the NPDC elected officials. They raised they have not had any input about the topics brought up, and they have had no input in to what the NPDC official stance is. It is completely understandable for these concerns to have been raised.
We weren’t unhappy the front page of The Daily News covered that we are seeking funds for a legal challenge with the set up of the new Water CCO (and we ARE welcoming all donations), but we totally agree with the Councillors who were concerned with the official response from Murray last Monday morning about our legal campaign . Murray seemed to reply with his personal view, rather than a Deputy Mayor viewpoint.
There has been virtually no transparency at the NPDC for the last 6+ years. We are still doing OIA’s now, with no transparency as recently as this week. So, with less than 2 weeks in to the official new term, being as transparent as possible was always going to have teething issues. No one expected it to be quite to this extent though.
Max Brough has called a meeting of all the Councillors today – Thursday 13th November – to work through this situation.
A new team doesn’t gel and work perfectly overnight. It takes time for a group of people who hardly know each other to figure out how to work well together. This new team has started off with a bit of a bang as of last Monday.
We really hope the meeting today is an opportunity for everyone to air their concerns, but also for each person to have an opportunity to talk about where they stand on the big challenges ahead of us all, so they can work out what common ground they have.
We hope they can use the meeting today to work out what they all agree on for the official NPDC stance.
This error this week gives an opportunity to head into the second meeting of this term with some frank discussions out of the way and a much better understanding of how they can work with each other going forward.
And we hope the Mayor’s Office question system is fine tuned, so it works well going forward, so all of the community still has the opportunity to ask questions at any time.
Posted: Thu 13 Nov 2025