From the beginning for me, 3 Waters needed to do 3 things.
1 – Provide fresh clean water to everyone in NZ.
2 – Ensure water can never be privatised.
3 – Stop foreign company water bottling.
It’s questionable 3 Waters can do the first, it’s moot if it can do the 3rd, yet it seems to ensure water could be privatised!
Queenstown Lakes District councillor, Niki Gladding, has given a brutal assessment of how the technical changes in the legislation are open to an interpretation where our water could be privatised.
I urge the Government’s immediate attention to this.
Because there’s no way we can allow any mechanism that makes potentially privatising our water a possibility!
In my thinking, we should just Nationalise the Water and see Co-Governance as a brake peddle to any future privatisation.
I don’t see the Co-Governance issue as the great bogeyman that the Right do. I see it as a simple extension of the Waitangi Tribunal ruling into water rights that was sparked by Key selling 49% of our Hydro assets.
That ruling said Māori water rights existed and that it was up to the Crown and Māori to negotiate that.
Using the existing co-governance infrastructure developed by ACT and National, 3 Waters is the expression of that entire process.
If ACT, the Taxpayers Union and National all dog whistle long enough on this and win the election, they’ll cancel 3 Waters which will lead to an immediate challenge in the Waitangi Tribunal where Māoridom will argue they negotiated a deal, as the Court had stated and then the Crown dumped it. The Court will rule in Māoridom;’s favour and Luxon will face his own Helen Clark moment and just try to confiscate the water legally.
This of course will spark one hell of a violent protest response.
So before we get there, how about we get this right and entrench Public ownership around our water. Seize it under the Public Works Act if you need, but just get it done, because we can’t in good faith accept an outcome where privatisation is easier.
Explain the need for co-governance to provide the essential hand break to stop white rich people selling our water off to corporations.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
The only hope for Labour to win, is to get rid of 3 waters,
the so called hate speech laws (do the opposite, make freedom of speech a priority instead – especially when NZ’s defamation laws are allowing corruption, power imbalance and bullying to workers, to increase here instead),
get rid of their proposed stupid employment insurance and replace it with compulsory redundancy payments (so the offenders are the ones paying, not the bad employers!)
and stop pushing in a central management structure instead of solving problems. They just do not work – especially in NZ when neoliberals, seat warmers and poor managers and culture are everywhere.
Polytech reform not working, Supercity, not working, endless centralisation and task forces, not working!
Janet Wilson: Polytech merger’s ills a harbinger for Government’s other reforms
https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/129281573/janet-wilson-polytech-mergers-ills-a-harbinger-for-governments-other-reforms
“Several arresting stories this week revealed that Te Pūkenga is in a huge financial hole while failing to deliver, with its leader missing in action.
Te Pūkenga announced on July 8 that its CEO, Stephen Town, was on “personal leave” for an unspecified timeframe. The term, which has morphed into a crutch of crisis management (think TVNZ’s ham-fisted attempt to cover up the Kamahl Santamaria debacle), has now become a red-flag phrase.
The fact that Town, who’s paid somewhere north of $670,000 a year, has gone on leave two months after a damning report from the Tertiary Education Commission and just a week before it appeared publicly, may explain why.”
Centralising 3 Waters will become a money grab for consultants and private practise like all the other centralisation projects, and NOTHING gets done for years while they keep reviewing for months/years what they did previously and why it went wrong. It makes everything less efficient and more prone to be privatised while service and quality goes out the window and we get a major drop in quality and good will towards government!
Maybe they should get one of their ‘centralisation’ projects going well, before taking another essential service like water and running it into the ground with government selected consultants, while burning as much money as they can before deciding to privatise it (with another name for it, of course).
If you are using Janet Wilson for supporting evidence it suggests your case is not credible.
Spot on Bonnie.
Not if it’s all true, which I bet it is!
Nobody with a brain would employ Town after his terrible job on the SuperCity, oh but they did with familiar results, endless reports and money tipped down the endless hole of central government management via their appointed neoliberal managers.
As wealth on a global scale is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands the biggest threat to the sovereignty of small poorer nations like ours is foreign control of infrastructure and essential assets.
The best example of this is still the treasonous sale of our rail network by Richard Prebble. That successive governments have allowed the foreign ownership of our major banks is also deplorable. Now our major communications infrastructure network is being sold. The drive to privatize our water infrastructure is partly from a consortium of Asian banks.
The common thread is that profit flows overseas into the hands of the already wealthy.
Hi Martyn
Gladding’s assessment timely and solid stuff. Points that have not been made precisely or loudly enough throughout the debate.
I still think co-gov is more than a ‘distraction’ though. First, Mahuta has used your issue 1 in a “bait and switch” or “mot and bailey” type justification that is anything but good faith. She may well be concealing the privatisation concerns raised here, or something else. The problem is we don’t know.
Also, the origins and almost all co-gov bodies come from Treaty settlements or developments very close to them. Those followed specific historic wrongs proved in the WT on something like the rules of evidence.
With 3W, we have a uniform solution applied to a wrong that has not been so well scoped, where the tikanga plainly differs from place to place, even hapu to hapu. So the justification comes back to the “principles”, which are a contemporary invention of Parliament, and contested in terms of detail and even who is in a position to assert detail.
None of the similarities and differences with Treaty settlement contexts has been carefully explained by Mahuta. The public can sense that it is expected to welcome 3W the same as settlements, but also that 3W is different to settlements.
If 3W is rammed through before the case for co-gov made openly, we will therefore risk a key benefit common to all settlements and all New Zealanders – a durable compact from which we can hope to turn to the future.
3W is it now, then, risks smashing the durability of settlements. A forty year national project, etc etc. Internationally unique etc etc. Kind of something to be proud of, warts and all, etc etc. Not exactly a “distraction”.
Agree
3 Waters is another Labour scheme to take all the power under a Wellington umbrella of buracrats controlled by them just like health.
I live in Chch and if this system becomes in trenched we will not get the chlorine out of our pristine water and they will add floride at a cost of $66 million .
While most people do not vote on a single issue this power grab is so widly unpopular it could tip the balance . Unfortunately it’s main promoter Mahuta comes across as very arrogant so that does not help matters.
Yeah, a brown woman who really knows her shit = arrogant
If I lived in Chch I would be more worried about getting nitrates out of my water.
Christchurch water is clear of nitrates as its aquafers are very deep so no worries there.The water is hundreds of years old . .Some private bores in Canterbury that are not so deep need constant checks and money needs spending on helping these people but that is no excuse to take the whole Chch asset
Christchurch fresh water aquifers may be deep and almost nitrate free…for the moment. There has however been massive intensification of dairy farming on the Canterbury Plains in the past 20 years and as the effect of unsustainable farming practices filter through to the wider environment the good folk of Christchurch will realise only to late that the cheap, fresh and clean water that poured bountifully from their household taps will be gone forever. I now pay to filter my once pure household supply as the Christchurch City Council has been adding chlorine to the city water supply for some time. While they said it was a temporary measure during muti-million dollar upgrades to all the city’s water supply, those works are now complete but we still have chemicals being added into the supply chain. Why? Maybe I could receive a rebate on my rates for the continual purchase of water filters I’m now consigned to buy for the rest of my days? Or maybe I should bill Ecan or a collective of Canterbury’s dirty dairy farmers who have allowed and created this nitrate problem.
I find it interesting that these water supply upgrades and chemical additions have been made, at the ratepayers expense, just prior to the asset grab that is 3 Waters coming along to hoover up the nations public utilities. A little bit of socialising the costs prior to privatisation maybe.
There’s a lot of interesting reading on nitrates in Canterbury’s aquifers if one can be bothered to look it up. For instance…
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/battle-lines-drawn-over-canterburys-nitrates
Currently water infrastructure is owned by 67 local councils – that is public ownership. Wrangling 67 councils into selling their secure water assets to multinational water corporations is a difficult task unless an Act government legislates that they have to be privatised. Local councils have efficiently provided clean drinking water to their communities for over 100 years. One council fucked up on quality control thats not a reason to expropriate the assets of the other sixtysix councils from the ratepayers who built them up over the last 100 years. The Mahutas have seen this as an opportunity for a raid on generations of Pakeha ratepayers. Once in maori management operation rights, like fishing quota, will be leased to foreign corporations who will get into the game with borrowed funds. The borrowings and interest and lease payment to maori will all be additional costs over and above the current council operational costs. Water users will pay all over again for the infrastructure they currently own. The whole scam is inflationary, anti-democratic, anti-cooperative ownership and possibly racist. Whats needed is a water quality authority and some funding for infrastructure expansion and renewal. Central government can use its low interest borrowing power to provide funds to councils. Councils could issue local government bonds to fund new water assets but thats a bad idea as it leaves them at risk of becoming over indebted and ‘forced’ to sell to water corporations. While Labour has the majority they need to pass a water rights law and reqire that town water supply must be held in public ownership and that a super majority of an 80% parliamentary vote be reqired to overturn the ‘water is a human right law’ .
?
I agree with the heading – it’s our water for ever or forget tinkering with the management. Labour is never to be trusted again and Maori can be led astray from their own bright sparks. And Indian would make a whole lot from peddling it to their parched country. And what about cutting back on the present exports that naive but determined NZ pollies have been encouraged to sign to.
The first thing an incoming government should do is shut down the Waitangi Tribunal, immediately followed by constitutional law to guarantee an equal franchise for everyone, regardless of gender, race or religion. Then reverse all the appalling race based legislation the current government has slipped through under the cover of Covid
Good idea Andrew you are absolutely right, and we would all expect the ACT and National coalition to make this a bottom line foundational policy commitment. Let’s finally run equality up the constitutional flagpole and see how many Kiwi voters salute. And it can’t come soon enough. Enough of this two-tier racism rammed down our throats,
If 3 Waters goes through, water will be privatised within decade, just like our power.
In our growing low wage economy and importation of poverty, where people now can’t afford food anymore, water will start to become a cash cow and more expensive. You can already see that 3 Waters is throwing away money on consultants at an alarming rate, and will change the election to Natz and ACT.
Only if you vote ACT/National?
Labour saw what goods ACT had on its wheelbarrow of lies in the 1980’s.
NACT would sell this off water right in a heartbeat, because “the private sector can run things better than governments”. But first, they’d ‘honour current farming consents’ fir farmers and Chinese Water Bottlers.
Better to have it in the stable hands of Kaitiaki in Maoridom and government partnership, rather than WAI on the NZX if ACT and National get their way!
It is important to remember, Martyn, that neither the Waitangi Tribunal, nor the Courts, have the power to overrule Parliament or strike down its legislation. In New Zealand, unlike the USA, Parliament is sovereign. Laws people don’t like can only be amended or repealed by an Act of Parliament.
It is also important to bear in mind that a present parliamentary cannot bind a future parliamentary majority. Reforms cannot be baked-in, they are always subject to alteration – or even abolition – by future generations.
So, if Maori do not like National/Act legislation they have two options:
1. Assemble a parliamentary majority to overturn them.
2. Start a civil war.
I know which option I prefer.
Labour tried to include protections against privatisation – but National would not support https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/466167/three-waters-anti-privatisation-entrenchment-rejected-by-opposition-parties
Three waters anti-privatisation entrenchment rejected by opposition parties
Another protection against privatisation is entrenchment – a requirement for at least 75 percent of MPs in Parliament to support any proposal to merge or sell any of the entities’ assets
“To some of our political opponents, here’s the time to step up if you believe in public ownership. And we’ve heard certainly from the National Party that they’ve been throughout this process concerned about the loss of ownership in communities, well we’ve dealt with that today thanks to the working group’s recommendations.
“Now they can step up and say ‘we will agree that these assets won’t be sold
Asked multiple times if National would support the entrenchment measure if it came to a vote however, he would not directly answer
Comments are closed.