Joe Bennett: Councils well-versed in rate rises

Joe Bennett blames part of his rates rise on his council's hiring of a poet. Photo / 123rf

Like you, I look forward to the arrival of every rates bill. And to heighten the pleasure yet further I play a little game. You might like to try it yourself.

Before the bill arrives I try to predict the figure by which the annual increase in rates will exceed the rate of inflation.

So if inflation is at 4%, say, and my rates increase by 7%, that figure is three. I always write the prediction down so no one can accuse me of being wise after the event.

Yet never once have I got it right. Though I have written down numbers I considered absurd, believing no council would have the effrontery to demand such an increase, I have always underestimated their rapacity.

How could they do this with a straight face? How could they spend so much and still always come back for more?

I’ve had my theories. One is the talent the council has for undertaking projects of spectacular needlessness. Such as the renewal of a perfectly good footpath at the top of the street on which I live, a street so steep that nobody goes on foot.

Months of work and disruption and several hundred thousand dollars went to creating a sparkling replacement footpath that in the first year of its existence has hardly found itself beneath a living foot.

Then there’s cost blow-out amnesia. When the council declares that it will build an aquacentre, say, at a cost of so many million dollars, everyone knows that by the time the thing takes physical form those millions will have doubled.

Everyone, that is, except the council, which lives in a state of perpetual economic astonishment.

But now I believe I have discovered a third reason that the council always wants more lashings of cash.

It’s the philanthropic fostering of the literary arts. For my local council, I am proud to say, has employed a poet. They have lifted him up, this poet, from the broken pavement of despair and they have filled his pockets with your money and mine and said to him that he too is worthy, that he too has value in this society.

And the poet has responded. He has sat at his brand-new council desk, licked his pencil, felt the winds of inspiration rustle, heard the muse whisper and he has written. And the staff assigned to him have snatched the sheets from underneath his pencil, read his honeyed words and found them good - so good that they have had a million copies printed and shipped out with the latest rates demand.

The result is that I, the delighted ratepayer, have a copy of the poet’s work in front of me now, a copy that I am proud to have made a contribution to, however small, by way of my ever-spiralling rates.

He writes on the traditional poetic theme of water. One thinks immediately of Masefield’s “I must go down to the seas again” or Shakespeare’s “Full fathom five thy father lies” or Eliot’s “current under sea that picked his bones in whispers”, and the council poet loses nothing by comparison. Here’s how he opens:

Let’s use water

like we oughta.

Here is a writer who is unashamedly for and of the people. Note the use of “let’s’” to embrace the whole happy family of ratepayers. Note the disdain for conventional grammar and orthography. He writes as the masses speak, and he does not back down.

Compounding his startling and courageous use of the vernacular, he urges each of us to go to a website to discover “what sorta water user” we are. The phrase rings in the skull like a bell and just begs to be remembered. And he’s only just started.

“Hold your hoses,” he urges us, fearlessly reaching for a pun that would bring groans from a 6-year-old.

This man is his own man. “Seek the leak,” he continues, distilling in three memorable words the radical notion that water dripping from a faulty tap is water wasted.

But he can be subtle, too, and modernist in style. “Morning time? Watering the garden is fine.” See how he is not bound by any notion of metrical regularity, nor yet of accuracy of rhyme. This is not what one expects to find in a prosaic rates demand.

Of course there will always be those who say that councils should stick to the basics, performing their essential yet unglamorous services, keeping a strict control of budgets and staying out of things that they know nothing about.

But I for one am proud to contribute to an organisation that can spend with such creative abandon the money that I might otherwise have frittered on, say, food.