Citizen pain

A broken funding system is delivering record local-body rates all over New Zealand. Is there a way around the financial potholes?

- GREG DIXON

There is no missing Nifo Tauiliili's place on Featherston's main drag. Tucked behind a white picket fence on State Highway 2, her 19th-century cottage is as green as a $20 bill.

There's no missing the irony that it's the colour of money, either. Her Wairarapa home of over 30 years is now costing her and her family more than ever before. In late July, she and her partner, Marc Van de Loo, learnt the combined district and regional rates on their cottage, already $3700 a year, were set to soar by another $1100. It heaped insult upon injury. The family's rates had risen by about 16% last year pushing their bill up a whopping 49% in two years.

"It's not just rates. All our expenses are going up," Tauiliili tells the Listener, her voice rising in anger. "Are these people on the council not awake or something? Don't they know there's a recession? Why would you do this to people?" 

Tauiliili and her family are not alone. Across South Wairarapa, a handsome rural district of four small communities - Featherston, Lake Ferry and the tourist towns of Martinborough and Greytown - rates have risen nearly 20% this year.

And South Wairarapa is not alone. Although it has seen this year's highest rates rise, other local authorities have inflicted double-digit hikes on ratepayers too. In New Plymouth, for example, the council voted for a 12.4% increase; in Tararua district it was 13.17%.

It hasn't just been city and district councils sticking it to ratepayers. Some regional authorities have too, like Otago (18.8%) and the West Coast (16.42%).

These are the extremes. But even if the majority of local authorities kept this year's increases under 10 %, many, not least those in the six major centres, failed to keep rises under inflation, still running hot at 6% in the year to June.