Local Government in New Zealand is a form of Feudalism.
By this I mean that there is a ruling class who are able to do entirely as they please, and the community's wealth generators (the taxpayers and ratepayers) have to pay for it, whatever it might be. The ruling class generally has no interest whatsoever in the existing serfs, beyond the process of getting them to vote the right way from time to time. In local government, interest is always focused on new serfs, who are encouraged into the area at the expense of the existing ones, to increase the revenue base for the ruling class. The serfs have no knowledge of their power to influence events, and generally, they have no power unless they exercise it against the prevailing rule of law, which most of them are very reluctant to do. Existing populations are very carefully brainwashed to believe that their standard of living and quality of life will benefit from "growth". This is a lie, but a very successfully marketed lie.
Have the Limits been reached?
As with all feudal systems, the time comes when the serfs can bear it no more- when the load imposed by the barons becomes so great that the serfs face death or utter ruin unless the oppression is halted. Popular uprisings in the past have been met with terrible and bloody retribution, and not many of them have succeeded in their immediate quests, but in time, they have brought about change. Sadly, we live in a time when the social contract is being torn up in front of our eyes in ways that most of us cannot even see. Today the suffering of the serfs is not quite so clear cut as it was in feudal England or Czarist Russia, because they do not all suffer equally (usually starve) at the same time, and the demarcation between serf and baron has been very deliberately blurred.
Can I get out from under?
The fashionable term to describe the blurring, otherwise known as socio-economic mobility is "aspiration" and it is used by politicians to convey the idea that as long as you are patient and make no waves you too could drive around in a brougham and four (That's a V8 Cadillac Brougham, today).
You have as much chance as you do of winning Lotto
It is a fiction, and it is a carefully contrived fiction that is designed to facilitate the polarization of wealth. This has been occurring faster in New Zealand than in any other country that has a comparable standard of living to ours. (OECD statistics)
How does wealth get shifted?
One of the most powerful and successful mechanisms for transferring wealth away from the hands of the ordinary citizens in this country is the rating system. The rates are collected and they are spent in three ways- 1. they are converted into revenue for corporations (mostly overseas owned), and 2. they are converted into interest payments to banks (almost all of which are overseas owned). The balance, 3. is a criminal tax on a tax, in the form of 15% GST (some of which arguably flows back to the community, if it is not being used to bail out finance companies and other special interests).
Central Government aids and abets the Barons
Central Government (all flavours thereof) has done nothing to regulate this process, and anyone who thinks the recent bar on rates increases in Auckland is a good sign needs to look into why that was necessary, and what would have happened, politically, if it had not been imposed.
Don't hold your breath for things to get better.
The changes to Local Government Law making their way through the House at present do NOTHING whatsoever to protect the interests of the ratepayers, but they enshrine the protections (and there are many) for the banks and other lenders. Wake up Kiwis, you are being rated off your own land.
Next Instalment
You will find out how the local government and receivership legislation was written by the banking industry for its sole protection. You will read excerpts from the law of our land, and you will be reluctant to believe that this could have happened in a democracy.
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