Petitioners keen to have say about being 'rated out of home'

By JULIE MIDDLETON

It's viral marketing at its most catching. The Regional Ratepayer Rebellion petition against Auckland Regional Council rates increases has split itself into hundreds of little cells, latching themselves on to people in libraries, vegie shops, meat markets, shopping malls, hardware stores, dairies and the like.

Spread around the Auckland region by email, photocopiers, enthusiasm and annoyance, this virus - not to be confused with the smaller Rodney version doing the rounds - has apparently attracted well over 10,000 signatures, with the final count due around the August 21 closing day.

A small piece of this petition virus has spun off to the counter of Cockle Bay's Mags 'n Movies shop, set in contented east Auckland suburbia.

A sheaf of stapled A4 pages alongside the whirring Lotto machine, it quietly expands with nearly every local - today, mainly young mums and retirees - who arrive to buy magazines, stamps and scratchies.

It has a name: "Petition to stop the ARC unfair rate system".

The text demands rates be reset, taking into account services provided, ability to pay, and the previous year's rates.

It also asks that the council seek other methods of striking rates rather than land value, and, evoking some sort of bank account-munching Big Brother, "disputes" the ARC's refusal to allow deferred payment in any other way than direct debit.

Few are bothering to read it before signing names and addresses in one of 15 spaces on each page. "I know what it's about," husks retired builder Bill Atherfold, in to "make a donation" (he means buy Lotto).

The rates for his $315,000, three-bedroom home have risen from $170 to $270; he reckons he will pay $170 and claim hardship on the rest. "I don't think we're getting a fair go."

And not just from the ARC. Alex Swney, the chief executive of inner-Auckland business association Heart of the City, has roasted the ARC in the Herald for poor planning - and dubbed petition-signers "small-minded hayseeds" who couldn't see the big picture.

"He needs to see the big picture," snorts 61-year-old June Walker. "He needs to live on what we live on."

Rates on the home she has shared with her husband for 28 years have risen to $190; they live on $320 a week and worry about being "rated out of our home".

Others are irritable about paying for services unavailable in east Auckland, such as trains and tracks. Several want to withhold payment until they see what happens.

Angela, a 40-something part-time worker who doesn't give her surname, is acid about the way the new rates have been handled but thinks a petition too tame a response.

"If they'd done this in Australia there'd be a coup. It'd make the Queen St riots [in 1984] look like a picnic." But she signs anyway.

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