Building workforce capability across the breadth of local government's legislated responsibilities in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia
Local government responsibilities are distributed across many small, autonomous councils, each legally required to deliver an enormous breadth of distinct professional services, from roading and the three waters to building control, planning and civil defence, on a workforce that is often thin, ageing and stretched. It takes eighteen professional frameworks to cover the sector in New Zealand and around four hundred occupations in Australia. This paper explores how Territorial Authorities can rein in this complexity.
For council and sector workforce, people and capability leaders · Aotearoa New Zealand & Australia · 2026
THE SHORT VERSION
Local government is not central government in miniature. Where central government is built from large, specialised agencies, local government is the opposite: many small, autonomous councils, each legally required to deliver an enormous breadth of distinct professional services with a workforce that is often thin, ageing and stretched. A single council must lawfully provide roading, the three waters, building control, planning and resource consenting, environmental health, animal control, civil defence and emergency management, harbourmaster duties, food and alcohol licensing, parks, libraries and rates, and many more besides. Each is its own profession, with its own competencies, and many carry statutory warrants and personal or organisational liability. In New Zealand it takes eighteen discrete professional frameworks to cover the sector's full legislated responsibilities; in Australia the sector spans around four hundred occupations.
That inverts the capability problem. The central-government task is depth and the insourcing of core work within a single Public Service. The local-government task is breadth under statutory obligation, carried by a thin and fragmented workforce, in a sector with no single system steward to pool or move capability. No small council can specialise across its full mandate, no council can manage eighteen frameworks in eighteen spreadsheets, and when one person holds a critical statutory competence, the function is one resignation from a gap.
This paper argues that the answer is a capability model that does two things. It holds all the frameworks a council's responsibilities require in one picture, mapping statutory competence, warrants and currency and exposing the single points of failure. And it makes capability comparable across councils, so the sector can finally share, move and plan capability, and manage the reforms now reshaping the workforce. The argument is platform-agnostic, and many tools support parts of it. We illustrate it with TalentJam because our platform was built for the local-government context, statute-first and authority-type aware, but the model matters more than the tool, and any platform, including ours, should be tested against it.
PART ONE · THE PROBLEM
This paper explores four features make local-government capability a different problem from the one central agencies face.
The defining fact is breadth. A council's responsibilities are set by statute and span dozens of distinct professions, and the mix varies by the type of authority: territorial authorities run roading, building control, water and local services; regional councils lead environmental management, resource consenting, transport and civil defence; unitary authorities carry both. No other employer of comparable size is asked to be expert across so wide a range. The table below illustrates the breadth and how it falls across authority types; it is indicative, not the full legislated set.
| Service domain (illustrative) | Typically delivered by | The competence dimension |
|---|---|---|
| Roading and transport | Territorial and unitary authorities | Engineering and asset-management competence; road-safety obligations |
| Three waters: drinking water, wastewater, stormwater | Territorial and unitary authorities, increasingly water organisations | Treatment and network competence, now under quality and economic regulation |
| Building control and consenting | Territorial and unitary authorities | Warranted building control officers; building consent authority accreditation |
| Planning and resource consenting | Regional, territorial and unitary authorities | Certified planners and decision-makers under resource-management law |
| Environmental health | Territorial and unitary authorities | Warranted officers; food and public-health obligations |
| Animal and bylaw control | Territorial and unitary authorities | Warranted enforcement officers |
| Civil defence and emergency management | Regional leadership, all authorities | Trained and credentialled emergency-management staff |
| Harbourmaster and maritime | Regional and unitary authorities | Statutory harbourmaster competence |
| Food and alcohol licensing | Territorial and unitary authorities | Licensing inspectors and statutory roles |
| Parks, reserves and libraries | Territorial and unitary authorities | Professional and trade competence across many disciplines |
| Rates, finance and governance | All authorities | Financial, statutory and democratic-process competence |
Illustrative only. New Zealand's full legislated responsibilities are covered by eighteen discrete professional frameworks; Australia's sector spans around four hundred occupations.
Much of this work cannot lawfully be done by someone who is merely capable; it must be done by someone who is formally competent. Building control officers and enforcement officers hold warrants. Planners and decision-makers are certified under resource-management law. Building consent authorities must hold accreditation, and losing it is existential for a council. Behind these sit personal and organisational legal accountability. In local government, competence is not a development nicety that can wait for a better budget year; it is the precondition for delivering the service at all, and for doing so lawfully. The argument that the record you build to develop people is the same record you need to prove competence to a regulator is sharper here than anywhere else in government.
The workforce that must carry this breadth is under acute strain. In Australia more than nine in ten councils reported workforce shortages in recent surveys, up from around seven in ten four years earlier, with some carrying vacancies equal to a large share of their workforce. The hardest roles to fill are precisely the statutory ones, planners, engineers, building surveyors, environmental health officers and emergency-management staff, with recruitment cycles stretching past four months, turnover around fifteen per cent nationally and closer to twenty in rural areas. New Zealand's picture echoes this, with councils competing for the same scarce professionals against each other, central government, consultancies and the private sector. In a small or rural council, a single individual frequently holds one or more critical statutory competence, so the workforce risk is concentrated and personal: not a percentage on a dashboard, but a named person whose departure stops a function.
Central government has a system steward in the Public Service Commission. Local government has nothing equivalent. There are around sixty-seven councils in New Zealand and over five hundred in Australia, each an autonomous employer. The bodies that serve the sector, Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), Taituarā and the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) in New Zealand, and the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), LG Professionals Australia (LGPA) and Public Skills Australia (PSA) across the Tasman, are membership, professional and skills organisations, not employers or formal regulators. The fragmentation is real enough that Auckland left Local Government New Zealand in 2023. The consequence is duplicated effort, no shared view of where capability sits, and mobility left to chance, even though breadth and thinness make shared capability the obvious answer the sector cannot easily organise. That absence is the central structural difference from central government, and, handled well, the largest opportunity.
Over the top of these structural features sits a period of unusual change, and while it is one pressure among several rather than the whole story, it sharpens the case for seeing capability clearly, because each reform is, at root, a workforce-transition problem.
Water. In New Zealand, Local Water Done Well is moving the three-waters workforce out of councils and into new water organisations, many of them council-controlled organisations formed jointly across several councils. Hundreds of specialist staff are transferring in individual cases, against a thirty-year national investment need estimated in the order of $121B to $185B, and a new economic regulator. Standing up a water entity, and reshaping the council that remains, is a capability-mapping and workforce-transition exercise before it is anything else.
Resource management and planning. The reform of resource-management law is reshaping the planning and consenting workforce that councils have long struggled to recruit, changing the competencies required and the way decisions are made.
Amalgamation and financial sustainability. In Australia, rate capping, cost-shifting from other tiers of government and the long decline in Financial Assistance Grants have driven councils into financial-sustainability inquiries and, in places, amalgamation, while a national local-government skills audit runs across 2025 and 2026. The common thread is doing more, and changing shape, with less, which is impossible to do well without seeing the capability your people hold.
PART TWO · THE SOLUTION
The same capability value chain that serves central government applies here, but its weight shifts. The front of the chain, holding the many frameworks a council needs and proving statutory competence, warrants and currency, is the acute, immediate pain for an individual council. The back of the chain, aggregating capability across councils, is the prize that fragmentation has so far blocked, and the thing that would let the sector share scarce specialists, plan training, and manage reform transitions.
| Stage | What it does | Who leads in local government |
|---|---|---|
| Stewardship of frameworks | Maintain the many frameworks a council's responsibilities require, and the local and custom content that fills their gaps | The council, supported by sector and professional bodies |
| Standardised role descriptions | Define statutory and professional roles consistently, within and between councils | Councils and professional bodies |
| Assessment against frameworks | Evaluate competence, warrants and currency against the standard | The council |
| Aggregating skills data | Build a current capability picture per council, and one that is comparable across councils | Councils and the sector |
| Aggregating workforce-planning data | Connect capability to service demand, assets, budget and reform transitions | Councils, shared services and the sector |
| Forecasting long-term skills demand | Plan recruitment, development, mobility and sector training provision | The sector, with the training system |
Two design principles hold here as they do anywhere in government. The model should complement, not replace, the systems a council already runs, its human-resources, asset-management and regulatory systems, rather than displacing them. And it should aim for the most incremental benefit for the least effort, beginning with the statutory capability a council most needs to see and sequencing the rest by value.
Like its central-government counterpart, the value chain serves two readers, but the second one looks very different. The first is the council, a territorial, regional or unitary authority managing its own statutory capability. The second is the sector and shared-services level, and here is the difference that matters: there is no single steward. The second reader is a federation, the professional and sector bodies, LGNZ, Taituarā and ALGIM in New Zealand, and the ALGA, LGPA,and PSA in Australia, together with shared-services groupings and the new water organisations. They are the closest thing the sector has to stewards, and a shared capability standard is something they could lead together.
| Dimension | The council | The sector and shared-services level |
|---|---|---|
| Primary question | Can we prove the competence our legislated services lawfully require, and where are we one resignation from a gap? | Where does scarce capability sit across councils, and how do we share, move and grow it? |
| Core uses | Holding many frameworks, statutory warrants and currency, single-point-of-failure visibility, succession | Standardisation, cross-council benchmarking, mobility, shared services, sector workforce and training-demand planning |
| Who holds the role | Territorial, regional and unitary authorities | Sector and professional bodies (LGNZ, Taituarā, ALGIM; ALGA, LG Professionals Australia, Public Skills Australia), shared-services groupings and water organisations |
| The structural gap | Too small to specialise across the full mandate | No single system steward to pool capability, unlike central government |
The two scales are the same capability data read at different altitudes. A council's standardised roles and competence records, made comparable, become a regional or sector view of where scarce specialists sit, which is what would let a building surveyor, a drinking-water assessor or an emergency-management specialist be shared across councils that could never each justify a full-time post. The shared-services dimension is already real in the sector, in regional groupings, in joint information-management and cybersecurity arrangements, and now in the water organisations, and each of those depends on seeing capability across organisational boundaries.
A credible model does not ask a council to choose between its frameworks; it holds all of them and fills their gaps. A single role frequently spans several, a consenting role may need planning, environmental and cultural competence at once, and many roles carry warrants and certifications with expiry dates that must be tracked, because an out-of-date warrant is not a development issue but a legal one. The model must therefore hold the eighteen frameworks New Zealand's responsibilities require, and the equivalent breadth in Australia, in one picture per council, cross-reference them, track statutory currency, and fill the gaps that every framework leaves: the new, in emerging practice and technology; the local, in specific legislative and cultural requirements; and the old, in legacy process and integration. For a small council especially, the value is consolidation, one trustworthy view in place of many disconnected registers and a few people's memories.
At this scale, a capability picture cannot be built from the bottom up. Eighteen frameworks and several hundred roles contain many thousands of individual competencies, and assessing against all of them produces an unreadable inventory, not a view. A long list of competencies cannot tell a council what matters, what the law requires, or where it is exposed. To be meaningful, the picture has to be organised the other way around, starting from the service the council is legally required to deliver, and working down to the roles, the skills and the legislation behind them.
That is the job of a statute-first service catalogue. It is the connective artefact that ties four layers together: the legislated service, the roles that deliver it, the skills and competencies those roles require, and the legislation that mandates the service and, in many cases, the competence itself. Built once, it turns a scattered set of frameworks and registers into a single, traceable picture in which every competency has a reason to be there.
| Legislated service | Roles that deliver it | Skills and competencies | Anchoring legislation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building control and consenting | Building control officers; processing and inspection staff | Consent assessment, inspection, statutory decision-making | Building and accreditation legislation |
| Resource consenting | Planners; consents officers; hearings commissioners | Planning analysis and certified decision-making | Resource-management legislation |
| Drinking-water supply | Treatment operators; drinking-water assessors | Treatment, monitoring and water-quality assurance | Water-services and drinking-water legislation |
| Civil defence and emergency management | Emergency-management officers and controllers | Credentialled response and coordination competence | Emergency-management legislation |
Illustrative. The catalogue maps each legislated service to its roles, the skills they require, and the statute behind them.
Organised this way, the picture does four things a list of competencies never could. It lets a council prioritise by statutory obligation, seeing at a glance which services it is, and is not, lawfully required and/or resourced to deliver. It makes the picture defensible, because every competency can be traced back through the role to the service and the law that require it, which is exactly what an auditor or an accreditation body asks for. It makes aggregation meaningful, because a shared, statute-first catalogue is the common taxonomy that finally lets capability be compared across councils, the missing ingredient behind the fragmentation described earlier. And it makes the picture resilient to change, because when a service moves to a water organisation, or legislation is reformed, the roles, skills and people affected are already mapped to that service and that statute.
This artefact is not hypothetical. We already have a statute-first service catalogue for New Zealand local government, mapping the sector's legislated services to the roles and skills that deliver them and to the legislation behind them, and the same approach maps each Australian jurisdiction's legislated functions. This service catalogue is the foundation on which the rest of this paper depends: the single picture, the comparability across councils, and the reform-transition planning all rest on first knowing, service by service, what the law requires and who can lawfully deliver it.
Capability data is sensitive, and councils hold particular obligations. Two commitments are non-negotiable.
Data sovereignty, and Māori data as taonga. Local government works closely with iwi and hapū, and co-governance is now embedded in arrangements such as water, so the treatment of Māori data is not peripheral. Māori data is a taonga requiring culturally grounded protection and care, and the Māori Data Governance Model developed by Te Kāhui Raraunga, consistent with the Crown's obligations under te Tiriti o Waitangi, is the reference point for values-led governance, consented use and appropriate boundaries. In Australia, Indigenous data governance and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance provide the parallel basis.
Security and interoperability. Capability data must sit within the security expectations councils already work to, including New Zealand's Protective Security Requirements, Australia's Protective Security Policy Framework, and the local-government cybersecurity practice that bodies such as ALGIM support, with security-by-design, integration with council identity systems, and transparency about data residency. And it must complement, not replace, the human-resources, asset-management and regulatory systems a council already runs.
Capability data earns its place when it informs decisions, and in local government the decisions are distinctive.
The first step should be small and focused on statutory compliance. A fixed-price, defined-scope skills baseline, beginning from a council's legislated services and the roles and competencies they require, produces a concrete capability picture and a map of any single points of failure, and should be within ordinary council procurement authorities. From there the chain is sequenced by value: consolidate the frameworks a council most needs to improve, then add cross-council comparability, shared capability and reform-transition planning as the data and the appetite grow.
Because local government has no single steward, the sector-level steps are best led together, by the professional and sector bodies and the shared-services and water organisations already collaborating. A shared, statute-first service and role taxonomy, adopted across willing councils, is the foundation that makes everything above the council level possible, and much of it can be achieved in months rather than years, because it complements the systems councils already run rather than replacing them.
TalentJam's local-government capability suite is built for this context rather than adapted from a generic product. It is statute-first, starting from a council's legislated services, and authority-type aware, distinguishing territorial, regional and unitary responsibilities. It holds the many frameworks a council needs in one picture, tracks statutory warrants and currency, surfaces the single points of failure, and supports the cross-council comparability and shared capability the sector lacks. It is designed to work alongside existing council systems, with data-sovereignty and security treated as architecture, and it engages with the sector through bodies such as LGNZ and ALGIM. A fixed-price skills baseline is the low-risk way to begin.
None of that displaces the core argument of this paper. Many tools support parts of the capability value chain, and a council, or a sector body, should hold any platform, TalentJam included, against the model: does it complement rather than replace, hold the many frameworks rather than impose one, serve both the council and the sector, honour data sovereignty and security, and turn assessment into competence assurance, succession and shared capability. The model is the point. The chosen platform is just how the sector delivers it.
This paper draws on publicly available material current as at mid-2026. Figures and policy settings change, and readers should confirm the latest position with the relevant body.