That sound you hear is inevitability. You have to bring the people with you and the report into 3 Waters clearly shows Labour haven’t done that…
Changes Make Water Reforms More Workable For Communities And Councils – NZ Government
The Government has welcomed proposed recommendations to improve the workability of water reform legislation. At a time when the cost of living challenges confronting households is real, these reforms will help lessen the burden of necessary water infrastructure investment on ratepayers.
Parliament’s cross-party Finance and Expenditure Committee has reported back after five months’ work on the Water Services Entities Bill. The bill establishes four publicly-owned water entities to deliver more cost-effective, safe and efficient water services, through improved investment and management.
“I thank the committee for its careful consideration of more than 80,000 submissions and welcome its recommendations. As the result of listening to public submissions, extensive changes have been proposed,” says Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta.
“Government, councils and communities agree: we need to fix water networks and keep costs down. Financially sustainable investment in water infrastructure is beyond the reach of most of our 67 local councils and their ratepayers if they work in isolation.
“Keeping a lid on rates rises is imperative, as households, businesses, communities and councils around the country face cost of living challenges.
“When an estimated 34,000 New Zealanders get sick from drinking water each year, that is a crisis. We are committed to ensuring everyone’s drinking water is clean, boil water notices are minimised, sewage leaks get fixed, and pipes are in the ground to help build new homes, in the most cost-effective way possible.
“The amendments make the legislation more workable. They improve local voice, strengthen representation, and increase transparency. They will also provide certainty to councils and those working in the water services sector about the future of our critical infrastructure.
“We heard from rural councils who felt their voices would be drowned out by larger urban centres. At their request, the Bill now includes a provision which requires a mix of rural, provincial and metropolitan councils to be present on the regional representative group.
“We will also require the entities to establish an annual shareholders’ meeting. In the interests of transparency, we are also requiring these meetings and entity board meetings to be held in public. This level of public reporting will give communities greater visibility of infrastructure investment that supports broader wellbeing.
“Internal Affairs officials have also worked with the Office of the Auditor-General to improve accountability measures in the legislation, including strengthened reporting lines and obligations and increased audit scrutiny.
“We have listened to local government concerns about the role of entities in the local planning system. Our response is clear: entities will be ‘plan-takers’ not ‘plan-makers’.
“We have agreed to stronger rules to require water entities to better support and enable planning processes and growth. This gives councils and their communities certainty they will still be in the driving seat when it comes to planning and development.
“I also acknowledge those submissions and other input which questioned the fundamental elements of the water reforms. The Government has listened to and considered these views. We have also had tough conversations over the past five years since the former National Government first began this process.
“We remain firmly of the view that the future affordability and sustainability of our water infrastructure is best served by reform underpinned by the four fundamentals of public ownership, balance sheet separation, good governance, and Treaty partnership,” Nanaia Mahuta says.
The way this entire issue has been twisted into some racist attack on democracy is remarkable.
When Elizabeth Rata coined the phrase ‘Ethno-Nationalist State‘ to describe attempts to share power with Māori as promised by the Treaty, every right winger wanting to be racist found glee in the shielding of their bigotry by the pretence of intellectualism.
What is most hilarious about Rata’s claims of Ethno-Nationalist State is that she is 100% right, it’s just that she’s right in a way she doesn’t want to admit to, which is NZ is an Ethno-Nationalist State, it’s just a White Ethno-Nationalist State.
Our systems of power and control are all white, our dominant culture is white, our benefitting from colonialism is white, our purposeful laws aimed at taking more Māori land were white, our confiscations are white, our dominant narrative is white.
So sure, NZ is an Ethno-Nationalist State, but for white people.
Any attempt to rebalance the damage caused by taking 90% of Māori land in less than a century and any attempt to live up to the promise of the Treaty must be denigrated and appallingly decried as apartheid.
The backbone of the economic success story that is NZ, is in stealing Māori land and NEVER paying the full price back!
NEVER! NEVER! NEVER!
We are a shallow juvenile settler country with all the cultural maturity of a can of day old coke, we are a low horizon people who lash out at others who see stars. Our imaginations are glued to cow udders, rugby and cars. To attempt a debate about identity when so many micro aggression trigger snowflakes are screaming is a feat beneath our collective dignity.
Co-Governance is the EXACT model that National and ACT developed, to now decry it because post covid stress has exacerbated economic anxieties isn’t leadership, it’s gutless capitulation to the lesser angels of our nature. What I find most hilarious is those screaming that Māori are taking over can’t name 3 councillors on their own local council.
3 Waters was an attempt to serve two maters, the Waitangi Tribunal ruling into water ownership triggered by Key selling 49% of the hydro assetsand the need to find a way for Local Councils to fund water infrastructure. The way it has been manufactured into a racial smear on Nanaia Mahuta and her family DESPITE DECLARING ALL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST is proof positive that the angry and confused trump any attempt at rational debate.
What its most egregious is how these small attempts at creating basic consultation between the dominant culture and the indigenous culture they signed a Treaty with is now portrayed as a giant attack on the values of Democracy!
The way the right have framed 3 Waters as an attack on democracy is a masterclass of propaganda that would make your average Qanon Fear grifter blush.
The reason we have a vast under investment in water infrastructure is because Local Government won’t upgrade a system put under immense stress by Central Government’s open door immigration policy and low wage economy addiction.
Suburban home owners are fine with this mass immigration policy and infrastructure gridlock because it pushes up the untaxed house valuations they have gotten used to gaining year in and year out.
Neither Central Government nor Local Government want to have an honest discussion with voters about higher water rates and higher taxes.
Someone has to come up with the $150billion over the next 30 years to keep up with the expected population growth from the mass immigration policies of both Labour and National.
20% of our water is lost between the tap and its source!
Christ we can’t even debate taxing the fucking banks windfall taxes without the Right clutching their pearls and fainting on behalf of the free market.
The way this refusal to debate the cost of mass immigration policies and the political power of middle class property speculators has been twisted into a racist debate about co-governance and Māori ethno nationalism is gasp inducing in its dog whistling audacity.
3 Waters isn’t about Māori taking over the fucking water, it’s about Local and Central Government refusing to pay for the mass immigration policies that are enriching the property speculating middle classes.
Yes there are issues about possible water privatisation, yes there are issues about how we arrive at Māori voice in these decisions, but ultimately this is all about no one wanting to pay for the mass immigration that is enriching property owners.
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.
That’s what Labour has attempted to do but the way it has been maligned and miscast as Māoris stealing da water is utterly misreading what this is all about.
This hasn’t been helped by a Government (Willie Jackson aside) who seem too scared to actually try and explain how this will work to the public so that can be brought along with this reform rather than seeing it as existential threat to them (despite the vast majority of those complaining unable to even name a local councillor, let along their Māori representative).
Co-Governance is our strength not a betrayal of Democracy.
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So these are ratepayer or publicly owned infrastructure that currently have some sort of accountability and answer to elected people, not based on their race. And we have been told repeatedly that South Africa, the US southern states and a variety of ethno based policies by 20th Century politicians like the former Yugoslavia or worse in Europe or Africa were bad. Repeatedly. And they were rigut, it was very bad. There have been some pretty explosive protests in this country over race based rule interrupting a few rugby tests.
But then along comes 3 Waters with its non elected ethno based governance, the assets are confiscated from the public, some vague unquestionable ethno rules govern it and the somehow the government are going to sell this to the public? And it’s all okay? And we know if it goes bad NO ONE will be allowed to question it, no one, for risk of being labelled racist! We’ll just be bled of money, no questions asked and if the system fails, none of us can do a thing about it! Thats the thing with the unelected.
I think the public should rightly question this. And you’re not right wing or a fascist or racist to do so. The fact this was so shadowy in its formulation and the government cannot explain it absolutely stinks of how dodgy it is!
Why not have 3 Waters without the race based component? Surely a national governance on water quality is then a good thing, if 3 Waters is so good!
Well written piece XRAY sums up how many think .Living in Chch we have seen how the government leaned on us to have our beautiful water chlorinated just because they want it done .zNow we are going to be hit with a $61 million bill to put floride in the water .I know this will cut done bad teeth but it would be cheaper to supply all school children with floride toothpaste . This government love the power
Oh joy. Just what I need right now. Another reason to go and vote for the hateful ACT.
Jeez the left has really castrated itself over the last 30 years. It has turned itself into an Ethno-Racist movement and wonders why the Dumb Lives Matter movement gets such strong and noisy traction.
Cause and effect is the ONLY force out there.
You have all chosen the free market and now it’s on its way back to bite you all on your collective 3 arses.
34,000 people a year get sick from our water. Really?
That “estimate” is from the government’s three waters propaganda. It’s clearly absurd; 34K per year sick from municipal drinking water? You would think you would at least know, or know of, some of this legion of victims, that there would be serious public health issues raised by health authorities. We do hear, now and then, of some food poisoning issues, and probably know people who have got sick. But this?
What’s it called when you are being lied to in the service of a political agenda?
We could spend years arguing over who gets to control our water services and spend hundreds of millions setting up complex bureaucracies or we could just simply have a contestable fund to allow the councils to fix water infrastructure… Crazy I know.
If Labour actually addressed the core issue – leaky pipes rather than make this into an identity politics debate they would also likely take out the next election…
Martin bangs on so much about the damage social justice warriors are doing to the left but then writes woke propaganda pieces like this. I don’t get it.
100% Neil.
Read a great article a few months back (one of the authors was Peter Davis Helen Clark’s husband). Issuing govt bonds would be the most straightforward way a ragmatic way of solving the problem
Totally agree. It seems he flips between Chris and Stephen, doesn’t know which way to jump.
Please add this to the agenda for the next Working Group ep., Comrade.
@Martyn can you conceive, perhaps in a parallel universe, that there are good faith, non-racist (even pro Māori version of ToW, pro co-governance) reasons to object to 3 Waters? There are racists in the room but the vast majority of pushback is over the risk of elitism (a class issue) and characterising that as racism or only right wing is disingenuous. A tactic to taint political opponents and frame all opposition as illegitimate.
I won’t recap my position or some excellent comments on Stephen Minto’s recent blog post (Corey Humm, Denny, Neil and others).
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2022/11/11/the-treaty-of-waitangi-and-3-waters-co-goverance/
Corey Humm puts it best as the danger 3 Waters becoming the “water equivalent of the reserve bank”. The concern is not a trend towards an ‘ethnostate’, it is a continuation of the existing trend towards corporate oligarchy.
To take a single example, given the binding nature and unlimited scope of mana o te wai statements, instead of seeing Qanon everywhere, could you explain how the concrete example of Playcenter is NOT a microcosm of what is to come? (demonstrably not democratic, not for the benefit of all, not even the majority of rõpū).
If you cannot, then consider when the stakes are so much higher, this risks not only driving a wedge between Māori and non-Māori (because of the incorrect perception that it is about race) but between iwi and iwi, hapu and hapu. Different iwi and hapu are likely to have very different ideas about managing resources. Similar to 4 rõpū being vetoed by 2 over Playcenter, what happens on a much larger scale when mana o te wai statements come into conflict?
As with most of this governments policies, they really haven’t thought this one through.
“What I find most hilarious is those screaming that Māori are taking over can’t name 3 councillors on their own local council.”
– Indeed it is not ‘Māori’, it is a minority of well-heeled individuals who will be empowered. However by that logic if you cannot name 3 directors of Ratheon or Lockheed Martin does that render all your complaints about the US military industrial complex invalid?
The laughable thing is councils are not worried about democracy. They are protecting their patch/jobs. Most councils could say “leave it with us, we have f*cked it up so far”. Good argument.
I am also amazed how Ardern has persisted overall, while tinkering with the concept. If only she had shown this fortitude with Capital Gains Tax, instead of folding like a deck chair.
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