One lone councillor argued for others (eg farmers) to join iwi in shaping Horizons water strategy

Horizons regional councillors were applauded in a Stuff editorial  when they decided to conduct a two-months trial to live-stream their meetings.

The editorial agreed with Cr John Barrow, who said Horizons covers a wide Manawatu-Whanganui area area and live-streaming would get more people involved.

“The more scrutiny we get, the better”.  

Editorial writer Jimmy Ellingham said it’s easy to argue that anyone can come along to watch a council meeting, but the realities of modern life make that difficult, especially for daytime meetings.

Horizons has 5500 followers on Facebook and even a tiny fraction of that number choosing to watch a live-stream of a council meeting would be a positive.

While the council voted to enhance democracy with live-streaming in its region, the same can’t be said of plans to give a privileged position to iwi to involve them more in managing Manawatū waterways.  This issue was covered in another Stuff report.

As part of the changes, the council would create a committee councillors and iwi leaders would sit on to come up with strategies for different catchments.

Final decisions on what to do would still sit with the full council. Other regional councils, including Greater Wellington Regional Council, have similar models.