The 2025 local government election silly season is well and truly on us. A new grouping of candidates, going by the oxymoronic name of “Independent Together”, are pledging to Wellington City voters that they’ll somehow deliver zero rates increases for the next three years and only at the rate of inflation thereafter, all while somehow still maintaining core infrastructure and somehow borrowing less.
I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is a deeply unserious proposition.
It would be very funny if not for the fact that several of Independent Together’s candidates are claiming to have extensive financial management experience in their profiles listed on their website.
As someone who’s been a district councillor, there are two approaches which Wellington City Council could theoretically use a mixture of to achieve a zero rates increase:
Cut tens of millions in expenditure (largely through operating expenses and to a lesser extend capital expenditure), and/or…
Run a deficit and borrow more to cover the shortfall (though councils can only do this in exceptional circumstances as they’re required by the Local Government Act to run a balanced budget)
Noting that Independent Together have committed to zero rates increases along with borrowing less, that pretty much rules option 2 out entirely, let alone a mixture of cuts and more borrowing.
So the question is how are they proposing to cut tens of millions from Wellington City’s budget to achieve zero rates increases all while absorbing costs that are increasing at least by inflation, if not significantly higher as they are with insurance.
Their website doesn’t offer any specifics on how they’d achieve this other than the typically nebulous phrasing that is common in such policies as scrapping what they label as “unnecessary” or “wasteful” projects without naming anything specific. There’s also the usual platitudes of auditing council spending and spending “smarter” - which I’m sure one of their candidates will at least once refer to with the old hackneyed expression as going line-by-line through council’s expenses.
Candidates promising zero rates increases while borrowing less - especially over multiple years - need to be grilled over whether they have a credible plan to achieve this.
What are the specific cuts to services and infrastructure that they’re going to make? How will they absorb inflationary pressures while still somehow managing to maintain “core infrastructure” of “pipes, roads, parks, and public facilities” to their required levels let alone catch up on decades of under-investment? What are the “unnecessary” and “wasteful” projects that they’re going to swing the axe at and what’s the actual impact of ending these on rates increases? How much are they intending to find to trim from their “audit” and “smarter” spending claims?
Unless they can provide credible answers to these - because they should have done their numbers before making such a bold policy promise - they deserve to be laughed out of town.
Of course, none of this means that there’s not opportunities for councils to be more effective and efficient with what they do as is true of any public or private entity. It’s just whether the quantum of what they’d need to find to achieve a zero rates increase while still delivering adequate levels of maintenance on public infrastructure and absorbing inflation is realistic to achieve. Hell, even achieving rates increases at the rate of inflation is difficult unless you essentially want to stand still and tread water every year.
Unfortunately the public sector, across both central and local government, are easy targets for this type of electoral rhetoric even at the best of times.
Wellington City Council in particular has been caught in the headlines for all the wrong reasons even if some of the major issues (for example the Town Hall and Wellington Water) are longer-term problems that were largely inherited by most of the current governing body (some of the members who have been around for a few terms have some explaining to do though). But that in of itself shouldn’t excuse candidates making financially implausible pledges like this from being subject to scrutiny over how they intend to achieve their fanciful fiscal figures.
Just as we would expect candidates pledging to build things like stadiums to be able to account for how they’d be able to afford such things, we should demand likewise of those who claim to want to cut spending.
Between the biting impacts on frontline services from the National-led Coalition Government’s own spending cuts, through to the slash and burn behaviour of DOGE in Trump’s increasingly dystopian American, if we don’t hold candidates to high standards and levels of accountability before we elect them then we’ll get what we deserve in terms of governance quality afterwards.
To some extent, this type of blatantly unrealistic policy pledge reminds me of a passage in Quintus Tullius Cicero’s advice to his much more famous brother Marcus Tullius Cicero (yes, that Cicero) on how to win an election. Quintus recounts to Marcus the story of Cotta:
“Remember Cotta, that master of campaigning, who said that he would promise everything to anyone, unless some clear obligation prevented him, but only lived up to those promises that benefited him. He seldom refused anyone…. After all, if a politician made only promises he was sure he could keep, he wouldn’t have many friends. Events are always happening that you didn’t expect or not happening that you did expect. Broken promises are often lost in a cloud of changing circumstances so that anger against you will be minimal.
“If you break a promise, the outcome is uncertain and the number of people affected is small. But if you refuse to make a promise, the result is certain and produces immediate anger in a larger number of voters. Most of those who ask for your help will never actually need it. Thus it is better to have a few people in the Forum disappointed when you let them down than have a mob outside your home when you refuse to promise them what they want. People will by nature be much angrier with a man who has turned them down outright than with someone who has backed out of his obligation claiming that he would love to help them if only he could.”
Basically Quintus advises Marcus to pretty much promise anything to anyone because you’ll be able to get out of it later - which is exactly what Independent Together is doing in this case. I don’t think they genuinely believe they can deliver zero rates increases for three years.
This entire episode also brought back an amusing anecdote from my own campaign for council and the mayoralty here in Kāpiti in 2019.
At one of the mayoral candidate debates, an attendee asked us four candidates how we were going to cut rates. Much to his chagrin, none of us committed to cutting rates. Instead we generally focused on responsible financial management and wanting to ensure that council was being effective and efficient with what it did.
As part of my response, I turned the question around and asked him what services he’d cut or facilities he’d close in order to achieve rates cuts.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get a response to that question.
Instead there was a gruff “I know how you can cut rates.”
So I asked him to share his solution as I was all ears.
“I’m not telling you lot,” he snapped back as he then stormed out of the meeting never to be seen or heard from again.
So I guess we’ll never know what his secret recipe for cutting rates was.