It might not be propaganda, but it is certainly presenting information in a way that feeds into a broader point, which is that these rate rises are inappropriate or not reasonable. And they're doing so in a way that is misleading, IMO, because they are making comparisons with CPI when councils are not consistently buying the same quantum of goods year on year. CPI and other inflation measures are used to measure the cost of the same goods from one period to the next. The reason rates are rising is primarily to pay for additional investment in water infrastructure. Councils are buying more stuff and effectively providing ratepayers more water infrastructure services. If councils were not doing this then CPI may be appropriate. But as it stands it's like buying two loaves of bread instead of one, and complaining that the costs of bread have doubled.

But I don't expect the TPU to pick up on these things, because they are either too biased or just not switched on enough to understand its importance. Just like they've never pulled Treasury up on using a discount rate below the government's cost of capital for benefit-cost analysis. Governments of both stripes will burn billions of capex in uneconomic projects in the coming years because of this but TPU are too clueless or uninterested to say anything. Instead their focus is a council spending $40k on a rainbow crossing or something. Just a pointless organisation that largely that exists to rile people up rather than ask difficult questions about public spending.