Alex Swney: Small-minded hayseeds need to see big picture

COMMENT

All this posturing over the Auckland Regional Council rates reminds me of what a small town Auckland really is. We talk about being an international city and aspiring to be the first city of the Pacific. It breaks my heart to say it but the reality is that when we behave like this, Auckland should be compared with cities more like Mobile, Alabama - small, provincial backwaters.

Cities are about people, and Auckland is never going to be a city while its citizens behave little better than small-minded hayseeds.

Here we are trying to be a city, trying to answer our single biggest challenge - transport - in a meaningful way, and all we do is bitch about someone else paying.

OK, the ARC has itself to blame in many ways. I would sack its public relations firm for doing a lousy job. You must also look at the politicians for the rather unimaginative and crude way in which they foisted this new and increased cost on ratepayers.

But no one should be scrutinising themselves more critically than those thousands of Aucklanders who have signed the petitions that now sit on every second shop counter or street corner. Railing against the rates increase is cheap, is late and is, at best, small-minded. It is certainly not befitting of a place that wants to move ahead and be an exciting and well-managed international city.

A large part of the problem must be sheeted back to long-running anti-business practices of local councils. For far too long they have sheltered the residential sector from the true cost of running their cities by loading rating differentials on to the business sector.

If they had not created this unfair expectation, the average increase would have been 34 per cent. In itself this is bad enough, but nothing like the 600 per cent hike of which some complain.

Heart of the City, with many other people and organisations, made a submission to the ARC more than two months ago. We slammed the ARC for the extent of its proposed rate increase; we, too, thought it a clumsy way to catch up on its own historic underspending on transport.

This supposed one-off catch-up charges citizens today for outcomes that should benefit future generations. It is unfair and unnecessary. Prudent borrowing and subsequent debt servicing could have mitigated such an increase.

There is nothing like a bit of debt to focus an organisation on its core business. ARC officers are renowned for their conservatism. Until this year they had been sheltered from the withering scrutiny of the public because their rates demands were delivered by, and appeared to many to be part of, the local council's rate demand.

Under new legislation, they now have to stand up and be counted in their own right. It is not something they are used to. They are widely despised by most other councils in the area for their narrow-minded view of the Auckland region and their inability to deliver any meaningful outcomes. They are besotted by process.

Considering this archaic ethic and the ARC's historic and infamously poor record, we are right to question the level of this increase. The ARC could not have begun to imagine, even in its wildest dreams, that its justification of such an increase would have been questioned to such an extent.

However, we do applaud the fact that the ARC has elected not to apply any differentials. Differentials are a tax on a tax. Rates are, in effect, property taxes that ensure valuable property owners pay more, irrespective of the services they receive. In this way they are inherently unfair.

Heart of the City's membership represents the single largest ratepaying sector in the Auckland region - estimated at 11 per cent. It certainly does not receive anything like 11 per cent of the total services that the ARC supplies.

A case can easily be made that says commercial ratepayers should pay less because it is the residential sector that uses most of the public transport, park and environmental services that the ARC provides. Why should the commercial sector make a contribution to regional parks or pay a biosecurity levy?

We made our submission in time and are satisfied, as corporate citizens, to pay our share - as it has turned out, perhaps even a little more. To those complaining as they receive their rate demands, we say: "Where were you when we were offering constructive recommendations and alternatives through the due process?"

Complaining after the horse has bolted is no good to any of us. We wanted your support at the right time. Your retrospective and unbalanced reaction is petty. The "everybody else should pay but not me" attitude is parochial and unhelpful.

To those luddites wanting someone else to pay their bill, we say: "Go discover Alabama, or somewhere else - anywhere but here."

To the ARC we say: "It is a far from perfect plan but it is more right than wrong - hang tough."

* Alex Swney is the chief executive of inner-city business association Heart of the City.


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