You know how the number of sheep in New Zealand is down? That’s according to stats which came out a month or so ago which, of course, prompted a fresh round of sheep jokes - especially across the Tasman.

Well, they are - and even though we might still have a fair number of sheep, I reckon there’s another breed that we’re being outnumbered by - and that’s local councillors.

Maybe not as many as once had when we had all those borough councils around the place. But even without them, we just have so many councils.

All of them with their mayors running around in the mayoral chains, all of them with top-earning chief executives, all of them struggling to pay the bills, and all of them pretty much charging as much as they possibly can get away with in rates to cover all the costs.

Which is why I am delighted by this new government report which has come out saying the time has well-and-truly come for us to have a re-think about how many councils and councillors we have running things.

I’ve long been an advocate for having less councils in the immediate Christchurch area.

This hasn’t been me saying I think the city council is absolutely brilliant and the other Greater Christchurch councils aren’t. In fact, going by what people tell me, it’s probably the complete opposite.

Christchurch council has shown itself to be a bit of a basket case on a number of occasions - and I know people in the likes of Selwyn and Waimakariri have looked sideways a bit and come to the conclusion that the last thing they’d want would to be lumped in with the crowd on Hereford Street.

And that has actually tested my resolve when it comes to my support for amalgamation to create a Greater Christchurch super city structure.

But I’ve always come back to the fact that the greater Christchurch area has more mayors and councillors than the whole of Auckland. Nutbar.

And that’s not even counting the ECAN regional council.

Amalgamation of councils isn’t the only thing recommended in this report by the Panel for the Review into the Future of Local Government. Which, as an aside, is a refreshingly boring title for something like this.

Often these sorts of things have names with a little bit more pizazz but, at the same time, are totally meaningless. They could’ve called this thing something like Democracy 2050 - A Pathway for All of Us. Thankfully, they didn’t.

And it’s not just amalgamation of councils that’s covered in it. The panel’s report also recommends four-year terms for councils (I like that idea too). It thinks the voting age for local body elections should be 16 (that gets the tick from me). It also says there should be more of what it calls “Treaty-based appointments” to local councils.

That’s the sort of thing we’ve seen with Environment Canterbury, where it’s introduced unelected iwi representatives with full voting rights. That’d really get the anti co-governance crew all excited.

Bit I think, if we could pull it off, it would be if the current councils in the Canterbury region were amalgamated into one. But you’d keep some of the service structures in place in the different areas - things like building consents, all the day-to-day council stuff.

But you’d have one mayor and one set of councillors. That would get my vote.