Arthur
OK, do I have your attention now? Also, apologies for the clickbait headline (not really).
As a born and bred Wellingtonian, I have come to this conclusion after enduring over a decade of destructive left-leaning councillors and mayors that have undertaken every wet, woke cause and social-engineering trend available, from fake Maori wonderfulness through to Orwellian communist social engineering, all the while raising rates to home-owning-prohibitive levels. Those on fixed incomes are financially punished and driven out of their family homes into hovels, or gulags (so-called rest homes they hate) or to cheaper areas on the margins.
The reason we continually have these destructive councils in Wellington, where 80 per cent of the councillors are indoctrinated, incapable cretins and the mayors range from the struggling and inept Andy Foster through to the grinning vacuity of Justin Lester to the banal and effete socialist Celia Wade Brown, is simple. Most Wellingtonians are stupid. With a voting turnout percentage in the low 30s, many are too stupid to realise how important voting is and actually vote. As it’s mail in, no real effort is required. Many are too stupid to understand the STV voting system. Many are too stupid to realise that the openly communist/socialist candidates hiding behind greenwash bull effluent are destructive idiots, so they vote for them.
This brings me to the present council, which is dominated by Mayor Tory Whanau, engineered into place by the Green Party. That party is full of the openly vicious, like the vile Tamatha Paul, and a raft of foul far-left harpy councillors who treat ratepayers as cash-cow scum to be exploited and socially engineered. Many stupid Wellingtonians enabled this disaster.
Now, only a short time into the new year, their red colours are showing. This is in the form of a rating review, which, when the hogwash and verbal excrescences such as “ensuring we have a robust, fair and transparent system on how rates are collected” are pared back, is an attack on landowners, referred to in the deliberate and pejorative term of “land bankers”.
This was declared on left propaganda site Stuff on Friday, 17 March. The link is here:
We have the usual spin and socialist nudging emotive words (my emphasis):
The Wellington City Council is planning to launch a major investigation into the fairness of rating and whether rates could be used as incentives to address the housing crisis in Wellington, by discouraging land-banking and encouraging development of affordable housing.
Let’s translate that.
Fairness – engineering rates hikes on hard-working successful people to finance losers.
Discouraging land banking – bullying and taxing property owners with a backyard bigger than a square metre.
Affordable housing – Developing cookie cutter ghettoes with not a blade of grass that, seemingly, always end up expensive.
Note how they put it:
Rebecca Matthews said the rating policy review gave the council the opportunity to consider how rates could “drive what the council wants to see in the city”.
Note their thinking. They don’t work as elected servants of the ratepayer. Oh no, they are there to drive ratepayers into a socialist vision of what the commissars of the council want.
It gets even more ominous:
The proposals which Wellington is considering go further than vacant lots, looking at how under-utilised land, low-density land use and land banking could be addressed through rates.
In effect “under-utilised land, low-density land use and land-banking” is Orwellian newspeak for punishing anyone with a front and back yard and who doesn’t want to live in a bleak ghetto townhouse development with no land or live like a termite in a termite mound.
The vile term “addressed through rates” is the old saw they love to trot out, wealth taxes, which essentially means anyone who owns a house with a back yard for the kids to safely play in is wealthy and they must be robbed of what they have earned to subsidise losers, welfare bludgers and shifty ne’er-do-wells into housing.
Of course it’s all justified with the nonsense of the fictional housing crisis and described as “incentives to address the housing crisis in Wellington”.
This is patently absurd as all this push for more housing in the past few years has been about a projected and therefore theoretical 80,000 population increase by 2050. This is laughable because council policies and high rates are driving people out of Wellington, if conversations and anecdotal evidence are any indicator, and indeed central Wellington businesses are closing doors because of the council lunacy of closing city roads to traffic.
No matter how it’s spun, rates are being used as a weapon against Wellingtonians.
Rates were “just another lever” that could encourage efficient use of land, alongside planning rules.
Translated, another lever means a bludgeon, a club to bash ratepayers into submission to the regime’s ideological whims.
Of course, every woke idiot’s favourite group gets a free ride:
“The review would also look into the fairness of rating, rates remissions for Maori land.”
I resent having to say John Key was right about something, but he was right when he said Wellington was a dying city. It’s dying all right, rotting from the inside out, because most Wellingtonians, not all, through a combination of voting inertia, ignorance and susceptibility to socialist leanings are just plain stupid and allow morons on to the council to progressively destroy the place.
