Wilma Falconer Talk change. Listen, too

Environment Southland’s new chief executive talks to Michael Fallow about why all the professional expertise and passion in the world must not shoulder respect and consultation aside.

In 2012, an assailed Christchurch City Council called in private consultants Felicity Price and Wilma Falconer to report on the climate of acute public dissatisfaction with its performance.

Their findings were the sort that would ring a tuning fork of recognition for many a critic of many a government or its agency.

‘‘When a council shuts the door on most of its stakeholders, doesn’t listen, doesn’t take advice, doesn’t mingle with people . . . or community-based representatives, it loses its grip on reality and can’t be expected to know or understand what is going on in ‘the real world’,’’ Price and Falconer reported.

Now, 21⁄2-years after she joined Environment Southland (ES) as its general manager of strategy, Falconer has become its chief executive on the retirement of Rob Phillips.

She stands ready for the regional council’s performance to be scrutinised through the lens of respect for, and consultation with, the community it serves. The council, she insists, must continually work hard to understand; not just to be understood.

Yes, there are rules it must enforce, but Environment Southland is not an environmental protection agency, she says.

Like all government agencies, it’s charged with improving the social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing of its community. That’s four imperatives, not just one.

She puts it this way: here she is with a building full of enthusiastic, highly technically skilled scientists and specialists in their areas, creative in their thinking – ‘‘and that’s fantastic, but with that passion is the need to also be really respectful of the community you work with’’.

Because the community has a fair bit of know-how as well. Meaningful discussion and co-operation needs to prevail not only for the formation of good local policy, but also in coherent solutions when initiatives are applied from afar.

One example, she says, was the way the farming community and ES were able to combine to address impracticalities of winter grazing regulations in a Southland context.

She emphasises that the Government did listen. But first it needed to get a compelling message.

Falconer was a Beehive insider herself, in her younger days, working in Bill Birch’s office. By her account, he favoured a young freshperspective staff to come up with ideas, while he trusted himself to apply the testing perspective of the conservative man that he essentially was. And she learned to appreciate his frequent mantra: ‘‘Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.’’

But she returns, reliably, to the theme that solutions cannot be bestowed imperiously in advance of decent consultation. Down the decades, she’s seen mounting evidence of governmental failure in that respect.

‘‘You need to be clear that there is something impactful that requires attention. And to engage in that conversation early – well before you have cooked up backroom legislation and policy and popped it out into the public domain.’’

Falconer is a Wellingtonian, married to journalist and former Close Up producer Brett Solvander.

Also, the sister of Crawford Falconer, a New Zealander who has become a significant figure in international trade negotiations, not only on behalf of our, and British, governments, but also undertaking some chairmanship duties for the World Trade Organisation. Her former roles included directing communications for the Land Transport Safety Authority, as part of which she introduced the provocative ‘‘bloody idiot’’ series of road safety campaigns.

You can’t expect people to take action where they don’t see a need, she says. And it’s not enough simply to have information that deserves attention, not when we’re all faced with armies of companies agencies and organisations vying for everyone’s attention.

The road safety ads were framed in the knowledge that although the messages about drink-driving and seat belt wearing were cutting through, there was an alarming lack of awareness of the dangers of fatigue – and speed, which too many people were interpreting as a test of driving skill. And we had the headon collision carnage to prove it. So that’s where the focus shifted.

The issue for the association was essentially the same as for Environment Southland. Be careful to focus on the right issues. ‘‘All the things you want to achieve really have to be impactful . . . They need to be making a difference.’’

She knows most people – perhaps farmers aside – don’t generally devote an enormous part of their brain to spending time worrying about how ES runs its business, at least on a daily basis. ‘‘They’re worrying about the way they run their own lives and their own businesses.’’

Interactions with ES, especially in its role as a regulator, aren’t necessarily widely welcomed.

‘‘I think a lot of people don’t like regulatory regimes. They don’t feel there’s a particular reason why we do things the way we do.

‘‘We need to be clearer in our conversations, so people understand why. But also we have to be looking, ourselves, at whether what we’re doing is impactful.’’

As a regional council, ES has only so much resource to allocate to its tasks, so must ensure these are devoted to the most important areas.

‘‘It’s not for us to hector the public and it’s not for us to bring every issue before them that we think might be useful.’’

After all, regulation follows community expectations, rather than preceding them.

Falconer’s background was such that by the time the Christchurch council called in her company, her own area of expertise was described as change management.

Still the case. Each of the four wellbeings that ES is required to focus on is either changing or seen through changing understandings. The economy demands change. Society changes. Culture changes. And people’s expectations around the environment, and what we understand about it, certainly change.

An example, she says, is there in the issue of the Tiwai smelter site contamination levels. Rules applied at the time need to be addressed, now, in light of contemporary

expectations.

In the here-andnow, Falconer welcomes the extent to which

New Zealand’s Aluminium Smelter

(NZAS) has taken a collaborative approach. She highlights that the information that the company had recently released was its own information, passed on ‘‘from their experts to allow ours to have a look at it. It gave us a real sense of what more we need to be doing’’.

Not to get too finickety, there’s also the teeny tiny matter of resourcing its work. ES is responsible for the second largest geographical region in the country and it has the second smallest rating base of 49,000 ratepayers.

It’s hardly as though the issues here are constrained by our population – they are the same suite of issues that much larger regional councils like Auckland and Canterbury have. Some Government resourcing does have an equalising effect, and the council has its shareholding in SouthPort and (not so much recently) the cruise ship fee income which goes to help fund its responsibilities for a massive coastline.

Falconer doesn’t pretend to have answers to all the funding challenges, but does hope they’re to the fore when the review of the future for local government goes out for consultation. She says it emphatically. The core issue to be resolved is not really one of governance. It’s finance.

Personal question. How does she relax? Does she relax? ‘‘It’s a hard for my brain ever to be off,’’ she says. ‘‘But . . . getting out into Southland is incredibly regenerative. Te Anau blows your mind. Lake Monowai in silence is stunning.’’

She’ll be cajoled back into choral singing – used to be one of Christchurch’s cathedral singers – and has a passion for design knitwear. She was a 2001 winner in Alexandra’s WoolOn awards for her collections entry. Had a bit much else going on to feel ready to enter the Hokonui Fashion Awards, but won’t pretend she wasn’t tempted.

When Environment Southland announced her appointment as chief executive, chairperson Nicol Horrell called the chief executive’s job complex and demanding. Falconer doesn’t want to get pugnacious about this, but since we ask she zips past that wording as too negative to encapsulate her own perspective.

Dynamic, she decides. Dynamic and challenging.

‘‘I think a lot of people don’t like regulatory regimes.’’