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Speaker 1: Yep. So the rate gaps are being announced at the moment.

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Speaker 1: The government's just unveiled the details on this. Councils will

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Speaker 1: be capped at four percent, They will not be able

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Speaker 1: to raise their rates by more than four percent, and

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Speaker 1: the plan will start being implemented in a couple of

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Speaker 1: years time, sort of mid twenty seven, and then will

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Speaker 1: be fully in placed by mid twenty twenty nine. There

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Speaker 1: will be exemptions to the rate cap. The high growth

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Speaker 1: councils will be exempt from the cap. Councils that experience

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Speaker 1: a natural disaster to something like bad weather, equake, whatever,

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Speaker 1: they will be exempt. Councils that need to catch up

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Speaker 1: on infrastructure under investment, which I thought would have been

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Speaker 1: most councils, they will be exempt. They will have to apply.

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Speaker 1: The exempt will not be automatic. They will have to

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Speaker 1: apply for an exemption, but those are the grounds they

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Speaker 1: can apply on, which I think sounds like potentially a

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Speaker 1: lot of councils who will be able to get around

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Speaker 1: the four percent cap. Now, on the politics of it,

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Speaker 1: it is incredibly smart to announce this. It is incredibly popular.

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Speaker 1: One poll found that about seventy five percent to people

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Speaker 1: want to see this happen, and I really want this

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Speaker 1: to work. I really want this to force councils to

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Speaker 1: show up in their pencils and start cutting out the

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Speaker 1: nice to haves like the disco toilets and the bus

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Speaker 1: stops with the gardens spouting from the top. And I

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Speaker 1: want them to be to be going through their staff

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Speaker 1: list and maybe discover, like Wellington has in the last week,

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Speaker 1: about three hundred and thirty people who probably don't need

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Speaker 1: to be paid for by the rate payer. And this

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Speaker 1: will definitely, I think, do that it will force a

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Speaker 1: bit of discipline. But what does worry me is that

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Speaker 1: this isn't dealing with the actual problem that we've got

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Speaker 1: in local government, which is that we have a bunch

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Speaker 1: of numpty sitting around the council tables making bad financial decisions.

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Speaker 1: After this, we will still have numpty sitting around the

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Speaker 1: council table, and those numpties will still make bad financial decisions.

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Speaker 1: And if there's one thing that we've learned from recent

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Speaker 1: experience with Wellington City Council, it's that when numpties cut spending,

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Speaker 1: they cut spending on important things like pipes, and for

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Speaker 1: some weird reason, they keep on spending on the dumb

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Speaker 1: stuff like disco toilets, and I worry that that will

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Speaker 1: happen around the country and we will simply end up

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Speaker 1: with another crisis like we're having at the moment of

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Speaker 1: deferred maintenance. Having said that, it is obviously a much

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Speaker 1: better situation if the numpties have less money to waste

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Speaker 1: rather than more money to waste. So on balance, the

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Speaker 1: rates cap is probably an improvement on the status quo,

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Speaker 1: isn't it, even if only for the certainty it gives

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Speaker 1: the rest of us that our rates bill next year

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Speaker 1: will not force us out of our homes. In that respect,

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Speaker 1: this has got to be good news. For more from

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Speaker 1: Heather Duplessy Allen Drive, Listen live to news talks it'd

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Speaker 1: be from four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.