Dropping into my letterbox last week was an important looking letter from my local Council. I am not sure how you view the arrival of letters these days, but just about all of mine contain some sort of request/demand for money. Consequently, I am not happy to see the mail person stopping by my box.
This time was no exception. The official looking letter contained my latest rates demand (I use that word instead of “bill” for obvious reasons), and it included a glossy brochure announcing that from 1 July 2026, I would be receiving two rates related charges for me to pay or face all sorts of penalties and headaches.
It appears that every rate paying household in the Greater Wellington area will now be receiving a “Water Charges Bill”, as well as the normal rates bill. Apparently a new “Council owned entity” titled “Taiki Wai” is now collecting oodles of cash from homeowners to manage the region’s water supplies. The information went on to say that the part of our current rates payment that is set aside for the water part of services, will be deducted from our future rates bill and will now be this new separate second account.
They provided a website for me to go and look at which grandly described the attributes of the new entity’s Directors and Chief Executive, as well as its reason for creation. I could also look under “billing” and find out what sort of estimated annual amount I was likely to pay. It seems that just about every household in the Greater Wellington area will be paying around $2500 annually for this supposed reorganisation of the region’s water management and funding structure.
It all sounded pretty impressive if I had known about it, rather than receiving a letter telling me it was all underway, but I put that down to any media reports about it all being lost in the usual noise that assails us continually through the beloved media in this country. I was also stunned to realise that my rates payments had not been sufficient over the many years to address the infrastructure costs associated with maintaining and improving it all. In fact, it would be pretty reasonable to say that the water infrastructure in this region is tottering on a knife edge of disaster. Years of mismanagement, underfunding and general New Zealand political apathy means we now have to do something or become the Haiti of the South Pacific.
Is setting up some new entity that will be pulling in half a billion dollars every year going to address this? Well once they pay all the eye watering salaries of everyone running this new entity, plus the consultants fees to get “studies and analysis done” to pinpoint the issues, there might not be too much left to do any actual fixing.
The other aspect of this which I could put a week of Elon Musk’s salary on, will be that the deduction in the normal rates amount will NOT be the same as the increased bill for us to pay Taiki Wai’s accounts. My money is on the water bill being higher than the reduced amount in rates. Oh that would be a surprise wouldn’t it.
So we have a central Government that famously campaigned on no new taxes, but promotes this sort of added revenue raising by flicking it off to local councils and renaming it all. Basically it is a new tax but we can’t call it that can we.
Look I understand that the water supply infrastructure has costs: yes I get that. That is why I pay my rates locally and I pay my taxes nationally. But instead of ringfencing that tax money for the things we need, it gets siphoned off for other stunningly useless and high expense projects that we dont want or ask for. I don’t have enough space to list them all here, but I am sure you know the things I am talking about: the $4 million of taxpayers money spent on a Kauri and whale singing project comes to mind. It’s very like me using the week’s grocery money from the jar and spending it on a new tyre for the car, or a night at the pub.
A final delightful note included in the new information about Taiki Wai was that future annual charges are expected to rise. It will probably be very similar to the rise in the number of New Zealanders up and leaving these shores, and taking their hard earned possessions with them before they have to sell them all to fund another consultant fee at the local council.
