Peter Minten

In her letter (Beacon, May 16), Mawera Karetai’s summing up of the ideal relationships within the council and with council management is pretty accurate.

I can admit, after sitting in several committee and council meetings and briefings, I didn’t notice any obvious “bridge building” activities to get controversial decisions made in unison to the benefit of our community.

Her letter is missing one important aspect: Councillors need to exercise a prudent financial management.

At the end, the elected members are responsible to the ratepayers how their money has been spent on all their plans and wishes.

And as proven by Philip Jacobs of the Whakatāne Action Group on several occasions, that prudent management of ratepayers’ money is fully absent.

Over the past six years, this council had to increase borrowing every year to fund operational deficits and those deficits have nothing to do with replacements projects like Three Waters and road maintenance.

Money for those activities should be saved up by the council over many years until now, but they didn’t because our operational spending absorbed all the ratepayer money and even that was not enough.

Hence, the additional borrowing. Yes, I agree we should show some forgiveness over 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, but otherwise 2023 and 2024 should have had no budget deficits.

The Pekatahi Bridge, the Equal Pay amendment law (under urgency) and the issues at our hospital are showing our Government doesn’t have the money to make the right choices (or is not willing to make other choices, but they were voted in and that is our responsibility).

The lack of money for public investments is the common root cause behind all those issues and I assure you under Labour/Greens, it wouldn’t be different. Borrowing money has been too easy during the last decade(s)and yes, it is created out of thin air, but the whole world forgot that servicing all those debts comes from the real economy.

The money for that needs to be earned through hard work. On top of that, last week’s data on April consumer spending per capita showed it has dropped back to 2013 in real terms. This is supported by our economic growth as measured by GDP.

In 2024, our population growth was 2 percent and inflation was 2.8 percent, GDP growth should be at same volumes at least 4.86 percent, but in real it was 0.1 percent. This means everybody within our society has far less money in their pocket left to spend. This means that whatever money still available needs to be managed very carefully.

And yes, I hear some councillors (and even mayoral candidates) say we need a vibrant community to attract people and therefore we need to invest beyond our means. But, if the consumer doesn’t have the money, what will be then left of your vibrant township if your business owners vote to leave.