|
📌 View
Online | 🚀 Share
on Facebook
Hi Friend,
The silly
season is well underway. It's the time for Christmas shopping, summer
planning, last minute errands, and when Governments tend to 'take out
the trash' – hoping bad news stories are buried in the Christmas rush.
So while Christmas is right around the corner Santa's naughty list is
growing.
This week,
we learned of some sneaky (unannounced) tax changes from Wellington,
that rates capping has been delayed until 2029, the bureaucrat golden
goodbye bonanza continues, and a record high rates hike in the
pipeline for Aucklanders.
Oh, and you
might have noticed a bit of media attention the last few days on a new
campaign we've not even launched yet! Some comments about that
below...
So grab a
cuppa. This end of week wrap up is stacked.
Rates Cap
Now ✅ or Rates Cap Later ❌
On Monday
we learned the good news is that the capping of crippling council
rates is coming. The bad news is that the Government has pushed back
implementation until 2029.
That means
that councils now have three full years to make massive rate hikes
before the cap kicks in. And does anyone have faith that they
won't?
Most
councils are currently working on their Long Term Plans – which are
required to be done every three years to set out rates and spending
parameters for the following 10 years (yes, I know how that
reads).
That means the window of opportunity to force
councils to live within their means (and what ratepayers can afford)
is narrow. The Government’s delay is an invitation for local
councils to hike everything now, bake it into the baseline, and shrug
later.
Obviously,
we
had a lot to say on this issue, with Tory
on Three News making the case for ratepayers and why we need to Cap
Rates *Now*.
James was
also busy. His
excellent op-ed for The Post also points out that councils
will rush to push rates up while they still can, because once the cap
arrives, they’re locked in. I just love the last line of
this:
Continue
reading over on The Post's website.
Yours truly
had
a longer discussion with current Otago Regional Councillor (and host
on The Platform) Michael Laws.
I also
spoke with Duncan
Garner for his Editor in Chief podcast.
TVNZ bias:
even AI is noticing 📺
Strangely,
we didn't hear a whisper from TVNZ's One News, despite your
humble Taxpayers' Union both proposing the rates capping
policy, and driving the campaign to get the Government to adopt
it!
Just like
One News strived to ignore ratepayers during the whole two
years of coverage of the last Government's Three Waters effort, they'd
rather stick to "insiders" like Local Government NZ and others who are
using ratepayer money to oppose our Cap Rates Now
campaign.
And we are
not alone.
New
AI analysis of the framing of political stories by One News suggests
that something is going seriously awry at the taxpayer-owned
broadcaster...
NEW Rates
Cap Dashboard: how much have you already been fleeced? 💳🐑
As you
know, we track council rates across the country closely. Earlier in
the year we exposed that cumulatively, over the last three years, the
average rates hike by councils was an incredible 35
percent.
So
on Friday we launched the Rates
Cap Dashboard – a new tool revealing what the average household in
every council district would
have saved if the Government's rates cap had been in place over
the past three years.
James and
his team found:
- Across the
country, the average household would be between $670 and $864 better
off right now had the proposed 2-4 percent cap been in place over the
last three years.
- The
average household in 21 council areas would have saved more than
$1,000 each
- Queenstown-Lakes District ratepayers would have saved the
most: an incredible $1,706 lost per household.
- Even in
councils with the smallest numbers, a rates cap would still have left
hundreds of dollars in the pockets of every local
ratepayer.
The
campaign isn't over: we've got Cabinet over the line on the Cap Rates
bit, now we just need them to do it NOW.
To
back the Cap Rates
Now campaign and chip-in to the fighting fund, click
here.
Mayor
Brown’s Rates Cap Backflip 💥🛑
Wayne Brown
campaigned as the guy who’d rein in Auckland Council waste. But fast
forward to today, and Auckland Council’s operating spending continues
to balloon right under Mr Brown's nose.
Despite the rhetoric, Wayne Brown has hiked
Council spending by more than 20.5% in just three years. Cumulative
inflation over the same timeframe has been seven
percent.
During the
election campaign just been, Brown committed to keep rates no more
than 1.5 percent above inflation – which is bang on the midpoint for
where the Government has set its cap! But now, just three months
later, Wayne Brown has changed his tune.
Now
the Mayor says a rates cap “won’t work” – announcing a 7.9 percent
rates hike within an hour of the Government announcing its
policy.
If
Wayne Brown gets his way, next year's rates hike will be the highest
ever for the Super City!
Brown is
blaming the City Rail Link which he claimed will add $1 million a day
to ratepayers’ costs. But our friends at the Auckland
Ratepayers' Alliance checked the numbers: the actual cost is $26
million a year, or roughly equivalent to 1 percent on rates.
Not
nothing, but nowhere near the eight percent figure Wayne Brown is
pushing.
Brown isn’t
levelling with Aucklanders — and that’s exactly why we need a legally
enforceable cap.
With
my Ratepayers' Alliance hat on I joined Newstalk ZB to call out Mayor
Brown's 'absolute nonsense' 👇
IRD's
sneaky pre-Christmas surprise 🎄⚠️
While no one was paying attention, the IRD
quietly dropped one of the most destructive tax changes we’ve seen in
decades.
Here’s the
gist:
- Many small
businesses pay owners through a running loan account during the
year.
- At
year-end, they clear it with dividends or salary — standard
practice.
- Under the
new rule, if the loan isn’t cleared within 12 months, IRD will now
treat the whole loan
as taxable income…
- …and the owner still has to repay the loan later
using more taxable income.
Yes, taxed
twice. Yes, retrospective, covering the current tax year (in fact, IRD
say the law will be backdated to come into effect as of Thursday). And
no, there was no press conference, no speech, no debate. Just a quiet
upload to the IRD website.
Our tax
experts say that these changes will have a far greater impact on New
Zealand's SMEs and farmers than Labour's proposed Capital Gains
Tax. No wonder the Government is mum!
And nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a
backdated tax bill.
Sneaking a
policy of this magnitude through without fanfare over summer is bad
form. You
can read our full comments here.
Submissions close on 5 February (more
info here) – rest assured that the Taxpayers' Union will be back
to work well before then!
Golden
Handshakes: More than $837,000 in a single week (and that's just those
we know about!) 🤦♀️💰
If you
thought we’d hit peak golden handshake insanity with Adrian Orr's
$416,120 "golden goodbye", think again. This week alone, we already
know taxpayers are on the hook for:
- Andrew
Coster (disgraced former head of the Social Investment Agency who was
allowed to resign and therefore collect a garden leave/three-month's
pay windfall) – $130,000
- Diana
Sarfati (former head of the Ministry of Health)– $350,000
- Sarah Fitt
(former Pharmac boss) – $357,000
Tory spoke to
Newstalk ZB on Andrew Coster's golden handshake and the scale of his
payout, which you can listen to here.
We’ve also
seen another resignation as the Coster fallout continues to
reverberate through Wellington.
This time a former Deputy Police Commissioner now
at the Civil Aviation Authority, was rewarded with a payout – and one
that the CAA chief refused to even declare when asked by MPs during
Parliament's scrutiny week.
That’s a) a
middle finger to transparency and b) likely to push the total north of
$1 million this week
alone.
This is why we’re pushing for a hard cap on exit
payouts, zero payouts for anyone paid more than an MP, and full
transparency in public servants receiving such
payouts.
Until
then, the golden handshake conveyor belt rolls on.
Labour
using taxpayer funded staff to make Party propaganda 📹🚫
At Labour’s
conference, their social media adviser — funded by Parliamentary
Service — was producing
political content on the taxpayer dollar.
The
rules are clear: Parliamentary staff support MPs’ official
duties, not partisan content creation for the party
machine.
I don’t
think it’s complicated, Friend. If parties want political videos, they
should use party funds, not raid the taxpayer wallet.
And
yes, this all happened during Scrutiny Week. You couldn’t write it
better.
Health NZ
spending $3.5 million this year on “non-jobs” 🧘♂️🌀
The year
might be nearly over, but everyone’s favourite Investigations
Coordinator Rhys is still hard at work digging into waste across local
and national government.
On
Friday, Rhys
revealed Health NZ employs 13.7 FTE staff dedicated exclusively to
DEI, sustainability, climate, and non-clinical “culture”
work.
The total
salary bill is a jaw-dropping $3,475,054.
Back of the envelope, that's an average salary of
$253,654!
As is
usual, Rhys has linked to all the source material on the website,
so you can judge for yourself whether these Health NZ salaries
are justified...
As you can
see, while Health NZ only give us the salary information in bands, we
can work out from the total that most of the roles are paid at the
very upper end!
Meanwhile:
- Emergency
departments are overflowing
- Waitlists
are blowing out
- Surgical
backlogs are growing
This is the problem in a nutshell: We’re
funding everything except actual
healthcare.
One more
thing...
Finally,
we’ve had a lot of good
publicity for our campaign launching very soon, and now it is our
turn to say what it is all about.
The
campaign is about Nicola Willis becoming our best ever finance
minister. No one wants her to succeed more than than Taxpayers’ Union
to cut wasteful spending, balance the books, and keep out a
Labour-TPM-Green high tax, high deficit, 'addicted to spending'
disaster.
Our
pressure campaign is about pointing out the fiscal elephants in the
room and her having the incentives from voters to become our best ever
finance minister and get New Zealand off the
disastrous fiscal track it has been on for so long.
Watch this
space...
 |
Jordan
Williams
Executive Director
New Zealand
Taxpayers’ Union.
|
Ps. As
well as the last Taxpayers' Union-Curia Poll of 2025, it's looking
likely the Government's replacement to the Resource Management Act is
going to be released early next week. This is likely to be the biggest
(regulatory) tax relief any government has delivered under MMP. As
soon as we have worked through the details, we'll get them to you. A
big week ahead!
|
