How Does This Affect Me?
How Does This Affect Me?
What your council is actually doing — and what it means in plain English.
Councils across New Zealand are facing a perfect storm of deferred infrastructure, three-waters fallout, and inflation. Here's the honest version of what's going on.
A factual side-by-side of the two live councils' 2026/27 plans: Far North's flat ~$140 universal targeted rates against Auckland's 9.53% rises layered across three separate bills, plus where consent fees and accountability gaps differ.
A 9.53% general rates rise, a $10,045 targeted rate on one Rodney street, $16 million in race-based spending with no outcome measures, and leisure fee increases of up to 60% in South Auckland.
Resource consent fees rising up to 393%, four universal rates regardless of connection, $9.7 million in spending with no targets, and an 86% dividend collapse with no explanation.
The government stripped the “four well-beings” from the Local Government Act. Here’s what councils were spending on and what the essential/non-essential line actually means.
They're long. They're dense. Here's the two-page section that actually tells you what you'll pay.
Pipes, roads, and pipes again. How decades of underinvestment is landing on ratepayers right now.
Tauranga. Kaipara. Wellington. Environment Canterbury. What the interventions have in common and what ratepayers end up carrying.
The process behind every impact card — which adopted council documents we ingest, what we leave out, and how each number traces back to verbatim source text and a human review before it goes live.