How Does This Affect Me?
How Does This Affect Me?
We read the rates rises, the fee changes, the new bylaws and the buried line items — and turn them into plain English, filtered to your situation. No spin. No jargon. No agenda.
Every year your council publishes thousands of pages — annual plans, long-term plans, fees and charges schedules, district plans. The information that decides what you pay and what you're allowed to do is all in there. Almost nobody reads it, because it isn't written to be read.
That's the gap this service exists to close. The documents are public, but public is not the same as accessible. A 400-page plan that takes a specialist a week to digest is technically transparent and practically invisible. The decisions still land on your rates bill, your building consent, your dog registration, your water connection — whether or not you ever saw them coming.
We run every council document through a single test:
Each impact card on this site answers that question for one concrete change: the fee that rose, the new targeted rate, the consent process that changed, the service that's being cut. We pull it from the source document, write it in plain language, and tag it so it only shows up for the people it actually touches. Uncheck "I own a car" and the parking changes disappear. Tick "I run a short-stay rental" and the rules that reclassify your property surface to the top.
Longer context — why rates keep rising, how to read a long-term plan, what's unusual in a particular annual plan — lives in The Brief, our writing section. We keep analysis and opinion there, deliberately, so the cards stay clean: facts about your situation, not commentary on it.
A card earns its place only if it changes something for a real reader. Strategy, vision statements and council direction become blog material, not cards.
Every card traces back to an adopted council document — annual plans, fees schedules, district plans. We don't ingest submissions, consultant reports, or backward-looking annual reports.
We report what the document says and, where relevant, what it doesn't say. We let the numbers carry the weight. We're independent and not affiliated with any council or political party.
You choose your council, your area, and the facets that matter to you. The feed reshapes around your circumstances — no account required, nothing tracked back to you.
Council documents are read by AI, which extracts the concrete impacts and drafts each card in plain English. Those drafts pass through deterministic filters and human review before they're published — so the cheap, fast work is automated and the judgment stays accountable. AI summaries can contain errors; every card links to its source so you can check the original, and you always should before acting on it.
Far North District Council and Auckland Council — annual plans, fees and charges, and rating changes for 2026/27.
More councils, the same way: figure out which documents matter, verify them, and only publish once they're checked.
This service is a project of PARALLAX. The name comes from astronomy: parallax is the shift in position that reveals what's actually there — you measure true distance not by looking harder from one spot, but by looking from two. A council plan looks like a budget to the council, a cost to the ratepayer, and a risk to the auditor. Hold those views at once and the thing that actually matters to you comes into focus.
That's the discipline PARALLAX brings to its work with organizations adopting AI, and it's the same discipline behind this site: