New Zealand Parliamentary Debate

Local Government (Rating Cap) Amendment Bill [4477]

bet-and I will lay money on this-that at a later stage in its process National will vote against it, because it knows that this bill is not workable in the real world. We believe that the only way the myriad of complexities surrounding the issue of rates will be unravelled in a truly independent fashion and the voice of the people will be allowed to be heard across the full range of issues-rather than playing silly political games that raise false hopes and have no possibility of satisfactory outcomes-will, in fact, be to have a fully fledged commission of inquiry into all the issues in terms of local body charges. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

METIRIA TUREI( Green):

The Green Party is opposing the Local Government ( Rating Cap) Amendment Bill. We have received a large number of letters and emails about it and have given the issue very serious thought, because the matters raised by members of the community have been really serious. We understand that rates are increasing massively in some places. We know of areas where rates have increased by 300 percent and of cases where properties worth 22, 000 are being rated as if they were worth 800, 000. We certainly know, and have known for a very long time, that Maori have been increasingly forced off their land as a result of rates increases that make it simply impossible for them to continue living in their papakainga areas. They are being rated highly and the increases are happening very quickly.

But we think we have to be very, very careful if we are to restrict the power of local government to raise the income it needs to manage the local infrastructure it is fundamentally responsible for managing. With a lower rating base, many crucial infrastructural projects, such as public transport, water, and waste management simply would not be affordable. And if that were to happen, the next step would be local government coming to central government to ask for more money to provide for those services, thereby driving up the general tax demand by central government. It is not a mechanism for finding the solution to the problems.

One really important issue for the Green Party is that the bill-and I think to some extent, though not entirely, the campaign behind it-is a diversion from the real causes of increasing land prices and the subsequent rates rises. I think if the ACT party were not so ideologically bound, as it is, to the whole mantra of economic growth above all else, its members might consider dealing with some of these underlying causes. One of those significant causes, a few steps back from local government, is the uncontrolled increase in foreign investment in land in this country, built on the relentless pursuit of unsustainable economic growth, which is helping to drive up land prices, particularly in coastal land and in Maori land. It is not even productive job-creating investment, it is just investment in purchase of land.

In 2004 the Overseas Investment Commission approved the sale of nearly 200, 000 hectares of rural land to foreign investors. Foreign-owned land now covers more than one million hectares of New Zealand. Even the Financial Stability Report of May 2006 recognised that significant proportions of foreign capital are being invested and used for the banking sector in residential mortgage lending. So there are steps behind the rates rises that are helping to cause those increases and we need to be able to deal with those background issues rather than try to put band-aids on the problem. The fact is that there is no monitoring of this investment in New Zealand, nor any real monitoring of its impacts on New Zealand communities, such as those impacted by the issues that the ACT party is trying to resolve.

I recently went to a showing of a New Zealand- made film in Mahia called The Last Resort, and it is currently on at the film festival. It describes these processes and the background to them in great detail. It uses the example of the sale of the Blue Bay camp ground in Opoutama in Mahia. The council sold that camp ground-it was 60 years old-to the lessee who then sold it on to a developer. The developer has turned it into