It could be the headline of the year: “Hot price for parking,” trumpeted the front page lead of our local paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age. “As if people needed another reason to live in Wairarapa,” the story below it began, “we have some of the most reasonable parking rates in New Zealand.”
It went on to say that leaving your car in downtown Masterton is as “cheap as chips with metered parking costing $1 an hour”, though the story points out that if one is spritely enough to walk, one could find free parking as well, providing, of course, someone hasn’t beaten one to it.
“Hot price for parking” joins the pantheon of classic headlines from the Times-Age and its sister publication Wairarapa Midweek such as “Big stink explained”, “Try this corned beef and sauerkraut pizza”, and my personal favourite, “Singing vicar in Carterton”.
However, first prize in the mad headline competition must always go to a newspaper stand poster – the advertising sheets outside newsagents and dairies – that the US-born travel writer Bill Bryson once spotted in a small English town. It read something like “Women, 83, dies”.
I cast no aspersions on the Times-Age. It is doing an excellent job for its readers, particularly under its current editor, which is why it was a finalist for regional newspaper of the year at the annual Voyager Media Awards in May, a category the paper won as recently as 2022.
But even for an award-winning regional paper, there is no escaping the inescapable: small town news is small town news. Still, you have to take your wins where you find them, I suppose, so hooray for us.
To be completely honest, I was a bit mystified to read that the Masterton District Council was still charging for parking in much of the central business area. When we have used on-street parking in town, we have found a number of the council’s meters – all crappy old coin-operated numbers – out of order and, thus, actually offering parking for free.
Evidently, this bonus won’t last. New meters are on the way, according to the Times-Age. The good news is that despite the new equipment, the hourly cost is to remain the same.
If only the council extended the same generosity to its ratepayers. Just a day after the paper ran its front page on the council’s “hot” parking charges, it published the far less cheery news – on an inside page – that 2025-26 property rates are going up significantly for those of us outside the town boundaries, with rural rates jumping an outrageous 13.6% on average.
Lush Places’ hike will be a little less overall. The council’s website indicates we will be paying 10% more in the next financial year, some of it due to the equally rapacious charges of the regional council.
The astounding number, however, is that in just eight years our property rates have risen 125%. By comparison, the cumulative inflation increase for New Zealand for that period was about 30%.
And each year, as the goddamn rates rise, we ask ourselves, what is it that we get for these thousands of dollars, again? What we don’t get is water, rubbish collection, roadside recycling or sewerage. What we have definitely paid for is eight councillors and a mayor who have put up our rates an average 15% a year. As if people needed a reason to leave Wairarapa.
The biggest proportion of our district council rates seems to go to what’s reportedly driving this year’s disgraceful increase: rural roading – though given we live just three minutes from town, we use rural roads barely at all. Not so much user pays but non-user pays.
Are we being screwed by poor decision-making or a broken system? I note it’s taken nearly a decade of dithering by the council to decide to flatten its quake-prone town hall and municipal buildings. The budget for the demolition and replacement – though history teaches us blowouts are inevitable – has been set at $25 million. The district has fewer than 12,000 ratepayers. Make of that what you will.
Another recent headline, this not at all amusing, from the Stuff website: “Public losing faith in local councils’ value and sustainability, poll finds”.
