About 300 people walked from Frank Kitts Park to Parliament on Thursday to protest at the size of the Wellington region’s first separate water bills, and at forecasts showing those bills close to tripling within a decade.
The march was organised by a residents’ group calling itself Stop Tiaki Wai, named after the water company that took over the region’s pipes, treatment plants and reservoirs on 1 July. RNZ reported that protesters gathered on the waterfront before walking up to Parliament grounds, where organisers addressed the crowd.
Tiaki Wai replaced Wellington Water and is owned by five councils, being Wellington City, Hutt City, Upper Hutt City, Porirua City and Greater Wellington Regional Council, with Ngāti Toa Rangatira and Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika as partners. It was set up under the Government’s Local Water Done Well policy and looks after drinking water, wastewater and piped stormwater for roughly 432,000 people. We covered the switchover on the day it happened.
The change households actually notice is the bill. Water used to sit inside council rates. Now about 155,000 homes and businesses get a separate invoice every quarter. The first round arrived in late July, with Wellington City invoices running from about $380 to more than $700 for the quarter and payment due by 1 September. Across a full year the averages work out at roughly $2,417 in Wellington City, $2,300 in Lower Hutt, $2,254 in Porirua and $1,951 in Upper Hutt.
Those numbers landed badly, partly because a lot of people read them as a brand new cost. They are not, or at least not entirely. The typical household was already paying about $2,100 a year for water inside its rates bill. That money has been lifted out of rates and moved onto the new invoice, then increased by an average of 13.3 percent across the region. Tiaki Wai told residents back in May that “people will get two bills – one for water services and one for council rates. People are not being charged twice.”
That message clearly did not travel far enough. Wellington Mayor Andrew Little acknowledged as much when the first invoices went out, telling RNZ that “it is a little bit confusing”, and pointing out that rates had also gone up by an average of 5.9 percent. Deputy Mayor Ben McNulty put the combined increase for an average Wellington household at around 9 percent. So the water bill is not an extra charge bolted on top of an unchanged rates bill, but the total is still higher than last year, in a year when very little else in the household budget has gone backwards.
The people who marched on Thursday were less interested in the accounting than the affordability. A Lower Hutt resident who gave her name as AJ told RNZ her first quarterly bill was about $500. “The people are fed up, you can’t get blood out of a stone can you?” she said. Upper Hutt pensioner Mary Head objected to the way the charge is worked out, saying there are only two people in her house yet she pays the same as or more than a household of six or eight.
She has a point about the method. Most charges are still calculated from a fixed component plus the capital value of the property, a system Tiaki Wai inherited from four different councils that each did it slightly differently. Capital value has nothing to do with how much water comes out of the tap. It has produced some odd results, including separate bills for basement car parks and granny flats. Tiaki Wai has said it wants to move to charging by volume and roll out meters, but the estimated cost of that rollout has climbed from $144 million to $590 million and is being reviewed.
What really drives the anger is the forecast. Tiaki Wai plans to spend about $25 billion over 30 years catching up on decades of underinvestment in pipes, and its own projections have the average annual household water charge passing $6,200 within ten years. That is the figure on the protest placards, and it is the reason a bill dispute has turned into a campaign.
In a statement issued before the march, Stop Tiaki Wai set out what it wants. Future increases capped to the rate at which superannuation rises. An independently audited and fully costed ten year financial plan. Real consultation with households before big projects are locked in. And the existing problems fixed before any more borrowing. “Households demand the restoration of their right to have a meaningful say before they are locked into decades of higher charges and debt,” the group said.
Tiaki Wai chief executive Michael Brewster was not moved by suggestions from the crowd that people might simply refuse to pay. “If nobody pays their bill we’ve got no money to fix the system,” he told RNZ, adding that support is available for customers in genuine hardship. The company’s chief customer officer Liza Gunn made a similar argument when the first invoices went out, saying that “every burst pipe or wastewater overflow reminds us that after decades of underinvestment, we need to fix our ageing water networks.”
Protest organiser Guy Nunns conceded he cannot actually stop Tiaki Wai, which exists because of national legislation rather than a council vote. He said he would pay his own bill this year, but would encourage others not to pay if the costs do not come down. Wellington city councillor Karl Tiefenbacher has floated applying a cap to water company charges similar to the one that applies to council rates. Andy Foster, an NZ First MP and a former Wellington mayor, told the crowd that councils had under-invested in infrastructure for years while defending his own record.
None of that changes the immediate deadline. The first quarterly bills fall due on 1 September. Longer term, the Commerce Commission has an oversight role in how water companies set their charges, and Tiaki Wai has promised public consultation before it changes the pricing formula. Whether that arrives before or after the next round of invoices is the question a lot of Wellington households will be asking.
Have your water bills gone up more than you expected, and does the way the charge is calculated seem fair to you? Leave a comment below and tell us what landed in your letterbox.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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