What protects Councillor Andrew Bydder after an expletive-laden rant

Wednesday, 26 June 2024

Hamilton City Councillor Andrew Bydder sent a sweary and abusive submission to a neighbouring council’s consultation.

Neil Holdom is the mayor of New Plymouth District and is part of the Local Government NZ National Council.

OPINION: The fact that Hamilton city councillor Andrew Bydder cannot be immediately suspended following his offensive and abusive comments directed at Waipā Mayor Susan O’Regan and her colleagues is a sign the Local Government Act needs to be changed, and urgently.

Bydder sent an expletive laden submission to the neighbouring council related to proposed roading changes and chose to personally target the mayor.

In any professional working environment behaviour like this would generally result in immediate suspension, an investigation and likely thereafter justified dismissal.

Hamilton city councillor Andrew Bydder says it's fine if ratepayers swear at him to make him do his job. (Video first published June 26 2024.)

But Bydder is an elected official, appointed by voters in his community and enjoys a level of protection which has created ongoing headaches for councils across the country for years.

As an elected official Bydder has no terms or conditions of employment, no employment contract and no legally enforceable obligations apart from having to turn up to meetings occasionally.

Councils have their own codes of conduct and Hamilton Mayor Paula Southgate has appropriately initiated a code of conduct complaint against her peer and articulated the collective disgust the local government sector feels towards Bydder’s behaviour.

But the reality for Mayor Southgate is that even when the process has been completed and Bydder’s abhorrent actions are found to be a clear breach of multiple requirements of the council Code of Conduct he swore to uphold, Hamilton City Council has no ability to take any punitive actions. His peers will merely be able to publicly censure him.

So let’s reflect on the various breaches of good human resources policies:

Obscene language

Though councils have a code of conduct, they can’t take punitive action on breaches, New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom writes.

Written aggression towards others
Targeted and repeated abuse of an individual and a group
Bullying behaviour

New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom, pictured, says Bydder couldn’t effectively communicate his views so used ‘profanity and abuse of public officials to make a political point and garner attention’.

Premeditated and ongoing repetition of the behaviours outlined above.

What we are dealing with here is a person who has been unable to communicate his political views regarding a bridge location effectively and so has chosen to resort to profanity and abuse of public officials to make a political point and garner attention.

This is an individual who has demonstrated he has no honour and one can only wonder at how he might feel if someone treated a member of his family the way he has treated Mayor O’Regan.

Local Government Minister Simeon Brown will be looking on in bewilderment, wondering how a system designed out of Wellington which he presides over permits behaviour like this to go unpunished in a modern world.

Waipā Mayor Susan O'Regan was named in Bydder’s submission, and Holdom says this kind of behaviour risks turning people like her off public roles.

Councils have long campaigned for some sort of independent process to allow poor behaviour in the extreme to be dealt with. And the reality is it would not be that hard to fix. Some minor tweaks to the Local Government Act could make this all go away fairly easily.

Currently New Zealand has a Local Government Commission (LGC). The Commission is the independent statutory body established to make decisions on the structure of local government and to report on local government matters to the minister of local government.

A simple solution would be for the minister to modify the Local Government Act to broaden the LGC’s remit to deal with disciplinary matters which councils feel they need to escalate.

Empowering the LGC to operate in much the same way as the Employment Tribunal does, but focused on elected members, would be a good start. Providing a range of measures available for those found to have breached council codes of conduct, from suspension without pay to removal from office would be a sign of material progress.

Some people may ask why does all this matter? Well the reality is all around us but put yourself in the position of Mayor O’Regan and members of her family.

How do you think she feels?

Trying to move her community forward, and becoming the subject to ongoing and unprecedented levels of personal abuse. A talented professional with plenty of options, nobody would criticise the mayor if she simply walked away from council. Others have from different councils in the past.

The current settings and escalating poor behaviour are driving good people away from this critically important public governance work, creating opportunities for less capable or credible individuals like Bydder to get elected and start articulating their influence.

Is this the future we want for New Zealand, where good people won’t put their hands up to lead the future of local communities and the job gets left to people like Bydder?

Our new Government campaigned heavily on localism and getting things done. Let’s hope Minister Brown can find time in his busy schedule to make some tidy-ups to the legislation which facilitates this atrocious behaviour and create the opportunity for local government to remove people who behave so poorly towards others and undermine the credibility of a sector that holds our communities together.