No proposal carried the unanimous support of councils, meaning that going ahead would have led to difficult and politically fraught conversations with councils in the middle of the election campaign.<\/p>\n
It was therefore decided this would be a distraction.<\/p>\n
Act declined to comment except to say it supported the Government\u2019s position.<\/p>\n
New Zealand First local government spokesman and former Wellington Mayor Andy Foster would not comment on what happened in Cabinet, noting he is not part of it, but said the party had multiple concerns with the Head Start programme.<\/p>\n
Foster said the earlier deadline was \u201cunreasonably tight\u201d and he also had issues with the idea \u201cthat every council needed to have a dance partner\u201d.<\/p>\n
Wellington Mayor Andrew Little said councils in the region spent $250,000 scrambling to meet the Government\u2019s \u201ctotally unreasonable\u201d three-month deadline.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Herald today, Little speculated the \u201cparochial\u201d coalition partner NZ First may have taken issue with progressing the reforms.<\/p>\n
Little said unanimity \u201cwas never a requirement\u201d of the process.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey explicitly said in the material they issued at the time they were inviting us all to do it, they said it doesn\u2019t have to be unanimous, just put up a coherent proposal.\u201d<\/p>\n
The announcement has left some mayors \u201cfuming\u201d, while others say they\u2019re pleased to have more time.<\/p>\n
In response to Little\u2019s earlier comments, Watts dismissed the outrage as political.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d suggest that we leave the political campaigning to central government politicians and local government to focus on their core tasks of delivering services for ratepayers,\u201d Watts said when contacted by the Herald.<\/p>\n
While today\u2019s announcement does not mean Head Start is being scrapped, it is at risk with a potential Government change after the election.<\/p>\n
Ethan Manera<\/a> is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No proposal carried the unanimous support of councils, meaning that going ahead would have led to difficult and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2840,5195,4057,57408,7230,2841,14134,37435,266,65838,59778,42,440,17250,42677,43,13194,8263,1361,61,1865,40,38,41,39,140847,102],"class_list":["post-610405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-across","tag-be","tag-behind","tag-blindsided","tag-coalition","tag-country","tag-decision","tag-disagreement","tag-government","tag-halt","tag-halting","tag-headlines","tag-local","tag-mayors","tag-ministers","tag-news","tag-progress","tag-reforms","tag-that","tag-to","tag-today","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-understood","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}