Excise tax return & payment (Customs Dept., $1.75 per bottle); ALAC levy return & payment; GST return & payment (by definition paid on top of Excise and ALAC levy – a tax on a tax); PAYE return & payment; Property Rates (both RDC & ARC); Wastewater Discharge Record Keeping & Inspection (ARC); Sale of Liquor off licence (RDC); Sale of Liquor on licence (RDC); Certificate of Registration for food premises (RDC); Bar/Restaurant Manager Licensing (RDC); Licence Controller Qual., (Hospitality Standards Inst., NZ); ACC return & payment; APRA Levy - so we can play recorded music in a public place; NZ Wine Institute (a statutory body), annual levy; NZ Wine Institute - harvest statistics; NZ Wine Institute - acreage and varieties planted statistics; NZ Wine Institute - volume of wine sold statistics; NZ Food Safety Authority - annual audit of record keeping for exporting wine; NZ Food Safety Authority – separate audit and certificate of compliance for every wine exported; Sustainable Winegrowing (part of NZ Wine Institute), provision of comprehensive vineyard & winery operational data plus audit and levy payment; Growsafe agrichemical licensing (NZAET); Firearms licensing (NZ Police).
I am bound to have omitted something here, but this list involves time and effort in data collation and calculations, and in some cases having to undertake training courses or being audited, on something like 80 different occasions over the course of a year – an average of one and a half times per week, and payment of almost 60 cheques. There are of course a completely different set of bureaucratic requirements if you want to build, or change buildings or wastewater provisions, which in Rodney District has in my experience always involved nightmarish processes ad infinitum, until you are ready to tear your hair out.
I can report however, a recent instance of the small guys winning. During the course of preparing for the wine and food event at the recent Kowhai Festival we were required by RDC to get both a resource consent and a building permit, at a cost of $270, so we could erect a marquee for a few hours. I happened to mention this to Penny Webster in her capacity as a Northern Councillor. She responded as any normal person would, with a mixture of astonishment and exasperation, and vowed that the money would be refunded. She was as good as her word, and had sorted the matter out to our satisfaction the very next day.
Let’s hope this bodes well for the new Council’s attitude to the very vexed issue of the huge time and costs we are faced with in coping with local authority bureaucracy.
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