Looking at that big boy and imagining giving him a pat on the head (I think a cuddle would be out of the question) I’m beginning to think that farming buffalo in New Zealand would be a lot more fun than my current business. I suppose there are people doing such, otherwise there would have been no need for the Stats Department to note it in the instructions.

Once again the season has turned and the list of crap I have to fill in for various bureaucrats that I first described here in 2022, has thankfully not expanded:

  1. NZ Statistics survey
  2. NZ Dairy Base survey
  3. The Environmental Plan.
  4. The Nitrogen Plan

In fact it’s shrunk a little as “The Overseer Report” will now simply feed off my inputs into the “Environmental Plan” – meaning I don’t need to perform that extra step, while the Council Survey never turned up.

We also had a good online session a few weeks ago in which the company talked in some detail about how the Env Plan – specifically the parts dealing with our GHG outputs, does enable them to answer questions from foreign buyers about the GHG footprint of each product.

One piece of good news I observed, arose out of a Kiwiblog post the other day on the outrageous increase in council rates over the last few years, 19 Councils have increases rates more than 40% this triennium. Some of them are almost beyond belief:

  • West Coast Regional Council – 66%
  • Greater Wellington Regional Council – 56%
  • Taranaki Regional Council – 51%
  • Queenstown-Lakes District Council – 50%
  • Hastings District Council – 49%
  • Central Otago District Council – 48%
  • Wellington City Council – 47%
  • Upper Hutt City Council – 47%
  • Gore District Council – 47%
  • Otago Regional Council – 46%

I’d better send a letter of congratulations to my local and regional councils then because they have delivered to me a combined increase of just 18% in the last five years.

That’s not an average annual increase. That’s the cumulative total over that time. Admittedly the previous was a total increase of 6% over four years so clearly the last year pushed the average – and it’s the Regional Council pushing the outside of the envelope across all these years.

The latter is yet another reflection of the accuracy of James Madison’s (Federalist No. 10) and Thomas Jefferson’s belief that smaller government that is closer to the citizens is the best defence against the tyranny of ever-more distant and centralised powers of the State.