Council rates are the tax we love to hate – Editorial

Boom Boom the dinosaur cost the good people of Taupō $200,000.

Editorial

The only certainties in life are death and taxes – and both are expensive.

Government taxes are an integral part of daily life and we pay most of them without thought, particularly GST and income tax. They are numbers on a receipt, a payslip or a bill and are usually paid automatically with no further thought needed.

They are predictable and calculable.

Council rates, on the other hand, are different. They are the tax we love to hate.

Rates bills change in amount every year – inevitably in an upward trajectory – and fluctuate depending on the choices of the handful of people, quite possibly with no managerial or city planning experience, sitting in a council chambers with tea and Tim Tams.

Those people are responsible for the nitty-gritty of our neighbourhoods and the major infrastructure of our city centres. Things that directly impact the way we live our lives.

And that means ratepayers care deeply about the decisions councillors make.

Rates are a cold, hard number that we can see in front of us, showing us exactly how much it costs to use the roads we drive on, the pools we swim in, the parks we play in and the books we borrow.

Furthermore, that cold, hard number shows exactly how much it costs us for the things we don’t want.

Things like a giant metal sculpture of a dinosaur named Boom Boom with a $200,000 price tag erected in Taupō‘s Riverside Park.

Or the $743,029 Hemo Gorge sculpture in Rotorua, described by the Taxpayers’ Union in 2020 as "symbolis[ing] government waste“.

Or the millions of dollars councils in Northland have paid towards the construction – and bailouts – of Whangārei’s Hundertwasser Art Centre.

Each of these projects created controversy in their communities because of how much they cost versus their perceived benefit to the community – and who can measure the intangible benefit of public art?

Art is in the eye of the beholder. A statue of a dinosaur that looks like a child’s glossy helium balloon will bring joy to some, particularly the whimsical among us, but it’s not for everyone.

And for people who want to keep their rates bills as low as possible, a fun sculpture can feel like a kick in the teeth.

A $200,000 sculpture paid with our rates can feel more expensive to us, personally, than a $2 billion highway across the country paid for with our income taxes, because that sculpture is right in front of us.

In reality, that’s a drop in the bucket of council spending. But those drops add up.

Times are tough, and as Average Joe tightens his belt, he looks to his elected representatives to do the same.

Voting forms will be in the mail in just a few short months – and councillors who don’t rein in the spending now may not like the results in October.

Sign up to the Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.