Why does the Taxpayers’ Union ignore the elephant in the room?
Business Improvement Districts are compulsory chambers of commerce funded through council rates. The country’s self-appointed waste watchdog has spent a decade looking the other way.
The Taxpayers’ Union has never been busier. Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work landed in the middle of an election campaign, and the response has followed the script I predicted. Former Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel has gone further, arguing in Newsroom that the Taxpayers’ Union is not a union at all.
She is right, and the point is bigger than a name. The left has trade unions. The right has chambers of commerce and business associations. In New Zealand, a growing number of those business associations are funded by compulsory council rates.
They are called Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs. And the organisation that built its brand on exposing council waste has barely said a word about them.
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The tax nobody calls a tax
A BID is a chamber of commerce with a council collection agent.
Under Auckland Council’s BID Policy (2022), a business association draws a boundary, holds a ballot and, if it wins, every commercially rated property inside the line pays a targeted rate. The council collects it with the rates and hands it over in quarterly grants. The policy is blunt: there are no exemptions beyond those in rating law.
The ballot thresholds are generous. Only 25 per cent of voting forms need to be returned, and only 51 per cent of those need to say yes. Do the arithmetic. A BID can be imposed on every business in a district with the support of as few as 12.75 per cent of them.
This is no cottage industry. Auckland now has 50 BIDs covering more than 25,000 businesses, with a combined capital value of $72.7 billion. The largest, Heart of the City, is asking for a BID grant of $5.22 million for 2026/27, for “marketing efforts aimed at growth.”
If a council imposed a rate like this to fund a trade union, the Taxpayers’ Union would be outside the town hall in a pig costume.
Compulsory unionism for shopkeepers
The right has spent forty years fighting compulsory membership.
It fought compulsory trade unionism. It fought compulsory student union membership. ACT’s youth wing made voluntary student membership a cause, and in 2014 its president was Louis Houlbrooke, who went on to become David Seymour’s press secretary and later the Taxpayers’ Union’s campaign manager. He is currently Act's Communication Manager.
Yet a BID is compulsory membership by another name. The policy technically separates paying the rate from joining the association. But the money flows to the association either way, and the association speaks for the district, whether every business in it agrees or not.
The chambers sit at the top of that pyramid. The Auckland Business Chamber is now run by former National Party leader Simon Bridges. The Chamber is not a BID. But the BIDs are where the next generation of chamber people, local board members and candidates learn the trade.
The right’s answer to the union movement turns out to be a union movement — paid for by ratepayers.
From Newmarket to Warkworth
Cameron Brewer made his name in a BID.
Before he was an Auckland councillor, Brewer was chief executive of the Newmarket Business Association from 2005 to 2010 — a BID funded by a levy on business rates. After moving to Riverhead, in 2016 he helped form the Rodney First ticket with ACT candidates Beth Houlbrooke and Phelan Pirrie. Today he is the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs and the Minister for Small Business.
In Warkworth, the local business association tried three times to become a BID. The 2016 attempt proposed a flat $250 charge plus a share of capital value to raise $180,000 a year. It failed. 233 of the 317 votes cast were against it. Opponents formed their own association.
The association rebranded as One Warkworth and tried again in April 2020, in the middle of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Of 588 businesses, 253 voted and 88 per cent of those said yes. That was 222 businesses — about 37 per cent of the district. By 2020, only 23 businesses had been voluntary sponsors. Almost 600 became compulsory ones, each billed a targeted rate of $500 plus GST.
Beth Houlbrooke, then deputy chair of the Rodney Local Board and ACT’s deputy leader, supported each attempt and was appointed the board’s representative to the new BID. The association’s own financial statements show its employment costs rose from $76,000 to more than $130,000 once the council money arrived, with the same number of staff.
Her son had campaigned against compulsory membership. His employer said nothing.
The property play
The real elephant in the room is the property industry.
A BID levies commercial property. Its ballots are open to property owners and tenants alike, and its biggest beneficiaries are the people who own the land. Every promotion campaign, every festival and every new road a BID lobbies for lifts the value of the ground underneath it. When Newmarket’s business association elected its board in 2015, the nominees included representatives of Bayleys Real Estate and Scentre Group, the owner of Westfield.
Warkworth shows how it works. The man chairing One Warkworth in 2017 was Mark Macky, whose family owned every Bayleys office north of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. Today he is an executive director of Bayleys and chief executive of Bayley Corporation. The association’s current co-chair, Dave Stott, project-managed the town’s Oaks retirement development.
While Fix Hill Street Now campaigned to fix the town’s notorious intersection, One Warkworth was lobbying Auckland Transport and the NZTA. Emails released under the Official Information Act show Macky inviting an Auckland Transport official to brief Bayleys clients at the firm’s Warkworth office on “the motorway extension, Matakana Link Road, and possible future roads.” When asked at a public meeting whether he had a conflict of interest, he said he did not.
The transport agency’s own feasibility report showed the Matakana Link Road was designed to serve future urban development rather than to relieve congestion. A campaign led by the business association won four lanes. Land for the road cost about $931,000 a hectare — nearly ten times the $94,500 a hectare paid for the Puhoi to Warkworth motorway.
Macky became a director and shareholder of Bayley Corporation on 2 March 2020 and stepped down from One Warkworth before the sod-turning. By the time the road opened in 2023, Bayleys had a sales office for the Warkworth Ridge subdivision beside it and the listings for the 93-lot Warkworth Business Park at the motorway junction. Hill Street is still waiting.
Ratepayers funded the lobby. Motorists paid for the road. Bayleys had the listings.
The North West nursery
The North West Country Business Association shows how the model breeds careers.
It joined Auckland’s BID programme after a 2013 ballot. Phelan Pirrie, ACT’s 2014 Helensville candidate, went on to chair both the Rodney Local Board and the association. He drew two salaries: $87,750 from the board and $92,979 from the association, according to its 2019 financial statements.
The pattern did not end with him. The association’s 2025 annual report names Danielle Hancock — a former Rodney First local board member for Kumeu — as its BID manager. Its 2024 AGM minutes record current Rodney First board member Mark Dennis as a board member. Its council grant for 2025/26 is $206,010.
The BID Policy says grant money cannot be used for any political purpose. It does not need to be. The salaries, the profiles, the mailing lists and the networks do the work.
BIDs are not just a tax. They are incubators for emerging right-wing politicians.
The money stays out of politics. The people do not.
An arms race of advertising
The economics of a BID are zero-sum.
Each BID exists to pull customers from somewhere else. When one district rebrands, hires an events manager or buys advertising, its neighbours must follow or fall behind. Every new BID raises the stakes for the next. The spending spirals upwards on logos, festivals, campaigns and staff — all of it funded by a rate that businesses cannot opt out of. And the rising value of a district flows, above all, to whoever owns it.
A voluntary chamber of commerce has to justify its subscription every year. A BID only has to survive a ballot every few years, on thresholds that favour the incumbents.
The Taxpayers’ Union understands place-promotion waste perfectly well. At its 2025 Jonesie Awards, it nominated Auckland Unlimited for a $737,000 promotional video and gave the local government prize to Hastings District Council for a rebrand costing more than $70,000.
Yet Hastings’ own rates resolution lists targeted rates for “Hastings City Marketing” and “Havelock North Promotion” on commercial properties, year after year.
A $70,000 rebrand is a scandal. A permanent marketing levy is apparently business as usual.
The watchdog that didn’t bark
The Taxpayers’ Union knows exactly what a BID is.
In June this year it organised an emergency business rates meeting in Hastings. Its own release stated: “The Business Associations are public bodies, funded by targeted rates on commercial ratepayers.” It then said it would attend on behalf of members “who are also members of the Associations.” Rather than question the levy, it stood beside it.
The same organisation calls Wellington’s commercial rates “anti-growth, anti-business”. It wants business rates cut. It campaigned for the rates cap that Simon Watts — whom I have called the Manchurian Minister — announced in August. But I could find no Taxpayers’ Union or Ratepayers’ Alliance release criticising a single BID levy. The Government’s cap announcement does not mention them either.
It is not for lack of tips. Rodney residents nominated the Rodney Local Board for a Jonesie in 2020 with at least a dozen examples of waste. Louis Houlbrooke presented the awards. Rodney did not rate a mention. The prize went to Wellington mayor Andy Foster for a $30,000 leadership course.
This year Heart of the City, which receives nearly $6 million a year in council money, imploded. Its chief executive, on a reported salary of almost $300,000, was suspended, then reinstated by the Employment Relations Authority. Six of its seven board members resigned and asked the council to audit the organisation and freeze its funding, citing a membership register so deficient the society could not know how many members it had. I could find no Ratepayers’ Alliance release on it.
The watchdog chases every $30,000 course. It has never chased a compulsory levy run by its friends.
Elsewhere, people noticed
Overseas, BIDs have been questioned for decades.
The first BID was set up in Toronto in 1970. Since then, academics and civic groups in the United States and Britain have asked who BIDs answer to. A comparative study by Jonathan Justice and Chris Skelcher in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research found BIDs are designed like private membership organisations, and warned that British BIDs could strengthen business influence at the expense of democratic performance.
In London, Griff Rhys Jones, president of Civic Voice, called a proposed Fitzrovia BID an “undemocratic attempt” to remake the neighbourhood, because residents and small businesses had no vote. Critics elsewhere have argued BIDs push up rents, squeeze out small traders and hand control of public streets to a handful of property interests.
None of this is obscure. It just doesn’t suit the people who run the BIDs.
Follow the membership
Dirty Work is about money and influence. BIDs are both.
The Taxpayers’ Union says only about 3 per cent of its funding comes from corporates. Perhaps so. But its most useful allies do not need to donate. They already have a ratepayer-funded base: compulsory business associations whose managers, board members and representatives move between local boards, party lists, lobby groups and Parliament.
The money runs both ways. Paula Bennett, who held Upper Harbour until 2020, left Parliament to become a strategic adviser at Bayleys and went on to run National’s fundraising. Bayleys gave National $164,600 between July 2021 and November 2022. An RNZ analysis found the property industry was the country’s biggest political donor, with more than $2.5 million since 2021 going almost entirely to National, ACT and NZ First. In 2023, Upper Harbour returned to National — with the former Newmarket BID boss, Cameron Brewer, as its MP.
I have documented that revolving door in Unleashed, in “Astroturfs”, in my piece on ACT’s local government hypocrisy, and in “The octopus that turned on National”. BIDs are where the tentacles are fed.
The questions are simple. Why does an organisation opposed to compulsory membership never question compulsory business associations? Why does it describe them as public bodies, then campaign alongside them? And why do so many of the people running them share its politics — or sell the land their lobbying makes more valuable?
The Taxpayers’ Union is against compulsory membership of everything — except the clubs its friends run.
