Politics
Spend it like Beckham
by Jane Clifton
The timing of the capital’s row over the council’s decision to pay for the gazillionaire soccer star to play in Wellington is perfect.
Spot the difference: David Beckham; a blocked storm-water drain. Unless you want to make mean-spirited observations about intellectual capacity, they don’t appear to have much to do with each other. But apparently there’s one quite salient commonality. We are expected to pay for both of them, if we happen to be Wellington ratepayers. The timing of the capital’s row over the council’s decision to pay for the gazillionaire soccer star to play in Wellington – when feverish ticket sales might have covered the fees nicely – is perfect.
Simultaneously, the Shand report on local body rates landed. It told us a whole lot of different ways councils could raise more rates, levying more broadly across more sectors of society, creating new charges and revenue devices. It also told us that, in a few years, the rates burden would take home ownership beyond the pockets of many New Zealanders. And it told us that councils needed to curtail their spending and their rating.
Talk about ignoring the elephant in the room. Because of its limited terms of reference, the report was not allowed to consider the quality and quantity of council spending.
Until we get to grips with what councils are spending the money on, including their own bureaucracy, and whether we consider it value for money, we are faffing about with deck-chairs on doomed ocean liners when we talk about rating policies.
Governments understandably get the collywobbles about taking too comprehensive a stock of local bodies’ activities. It’s not manners for central government to meddle in what local government spends its money on. And if it does, local government is apt to say, “Okay, smartarse – you pay for it.”
Governments quietly devolve millions of dollars’ worth of extra responsibility onto councils every year, and don’t relish this great one-way deal being prodded about. The expanding of building inspection standards and the new regulations on energy standards are the most tremendous new money-go-rounds, which must all come out of rates and charges.
There is a problem with equity of rating. But the far greater problem is quantum.
There seem to be two issues here for ratepayers. The first, and most immediately blood-boiling, is the rampancy of events-mania. Councils, and citizens, seem to have abandoned the distinction between “need to have” and “nice to have”. It has never been nationally debated whether councils should spend our dosh on David Beckham in Wellington, a Rugby World Cup stadium in Auckland, a film studio in West Auckland, or V8 motor racing anywhere at all.
There is always vituperative local debate for and against these things, but in the end councils tend to do what they like. The line between providing sensible tourism infrastructure and behaving like crazed set dressers on a Busby Berkeley movie seems to have been crossed some years ago.
The second issue is that some councils run cities of a size too small to generate the revenue they need to provide even the most basic infrastructure. Thus the rates-rise burden falls most nastily on smaller, poorer districts.
If they don’t raise the rates and provide the goods, they fear they’ll lose population. If they do provide it, they have to sock existing ratepayers between the eyes. An especially painful example is the Buller District Council, which is hiking rates 23 percent in one year, causing terrible hardship in what is not by any stretch a comfortably off community of home owners. Why? It had to upgrade its sewerage system, and went for a pretty fancy one at $8.9 million, and decided its people needed a $15 million sports facility as well. Needless to say, the district is in uproar.
But in the wider picture, the language that councils like Buller use to justify their actions is instructive. They say they need to “compete” with neighbouring cities, to attract much-needed workers like doctors, teachers and engineers. Actually, anyone will do, just to keep the population up.
Thus it’s pretty hard to separate out what is essential infrastructural spending and what is a frivolity. Councils now feel they have to wave their knickers at people who don’t live in their city, to persuade them to come, to ensure the survival of the city.
Alas, the price of that survival may not in itself be survivable. When rates hit the $2000 mark, as is now so common even in lower-house-price places like Westport, folk on small or fixed incomes are sunk. To get the shiny new people, you have to ravage the boring old locals. It’s for their own long-term good, of course. But the process can feel a bit like burning the village in order to save it.
All of which leads inexorably to central government. The Beehive may have to come to grips with the structural non-viability of smaller councils. Maybe the next Buller-sized district that needs a new sewerage plant will have to get a hand from the Crown. Central government politicians come out in rashes over this. Give Buller a new sewage pond, and they’ll all be wanting one.
And, inevitably, the path through decision-making on such issues is strewn with bureaucratic and other ticket-clippers.
However, at least there’s a bottom line here. No government could allow infrastructural ghettos to develop.
Page 1 2 
