Rates collected have risen 14 percent when comparing December quarters 2012 to 2015.
We haven't seen our rates go up that much. Some poor sod has seen his go up by more.
But we aren't getting more for our money. Purchases and operating expenditure is up by a mere 1.7%. The big jumps are in interest and depreciation.
Well, it's local body election year. I'd be looking for candidates promising to keep rates within the margin of inflation at least. Promising some fiscal responsibility.
The $1.155 billion collected in the December quarter 2012 kept to current inflation would have been $1.183 billion in 2015
NOT $1.321
Rates up equal rents up. Again it's the poorest who bear the brunt. But it's big-spending councils who are squealing about living wages and poverty. How long will it take them to figure out what Winston Churchill did.
"Can a people tax themselves into prosperity? Can a man stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle?" 1904, Free Trade Hall, Manchester
3 comments:
Yu are lucky you don't live in Nelson.
The local bureaucrats have put my taxes up by 26% over that period. Individual years have been 10%, 10%, 4%, 2% and 9%.
There has to be something we can do. I will have a lot of sympathy for the first taxpayer who wanders in with an AK47.
We know what needs to be done: eliminate the power of general competence, eliminate the idea councils have "social service" roles, be it libraries, swimming pools, parades, street parties, fancy streetlights or whatever, hell the rubbish is already privatised so what's left for them to do other than argue about how to sleep the names of the city.
Labour's local government reforms - universal franchise, renters getting the vote, etc - have directly lead to this mess.
Get back to the way cities and towns were governed for the first 100 years before the "reforms" - private city corporations, not public local "governments" - owned and managed by the people who own the high-value properties in those cities.
I agree with anon2. It was the Lange labour government that introduced a fiscal responsibility Act that limited the power of councils and the Clarke labour government that expanded it again. It is time we went back to fiscal responsibility. The other thing that needs to change is the basis, it should be on land value. It may seem counterintuitive, but most council costs (water, sewerage roads) are driven by the land area covered rather than the value of the properties served. Capital value rates are just another way of trying to redistribute income.
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