One big mistake

Our water is supplied by the oldest rural water scheme in the country.

Before it was established, farms didn’t just run out of feed for their stock when droughts struck, they ran out of water for people and animals too.

The need for a reliable source of water was solved by the rural water scheme that pumped water into tanks and then fed it through pipes under pressure to troughs and houses. The success of the Windsor scheme prompted other areas in the district and further afield to follow its example.

The North Otago schemes were gradually taken over by the Waitaki District Council but requirements for stricter regulations on water quality led to a trial with four of the schemes taking back control under one organisation.

. . . Corriedale Water Management Ltd was formed when the Waitaki District Council rewrote its water bylaw four years ago.

A “fundamental” philosophical difference separated the way its users wanted to operate and the way council-owned water schemes were expected to work, chairman Bill Malcolm, of Airedale, said.

A trial was agreed to in December 2013, and the company — set up to take over the operational management of the Awamoko, Tokarahi, Windsor, and Kauru Hill water supplies — worked to meet “ever increasing compliance requirements” and still believed in the benefit of “consumer-driven decision-making and hands-on operation”.

“It’s from the ground up, rather than a few people at the top driving things,” Mr Malcolm said.

“They [the council] see a large-scale contractor as the way to go, and we see caretakers.”

The local knowledge of where pipes were in the ground meant less mucking around when a fix was required and the company’s two employees and one contractor kept costs down, he said.

The company’s four rural schemes cover an area of about 50,000ha, serve about 1150 people and, by a conservative estimate, about 75% of the water is used for stock. . . 

The trial was successful, the company still operates and we have a reliable supply of clean water.

Every now and then after very heavy rain we get notification to boil water. That usually only lasts a few days until the river runs clear again.

When we have a problem we know who to ring to get it sorted. It’s a local call to someone who knows the scheme intimately and the the problem gets sorted, quickly.

I have far more confidence that the scheme will continue to deliver clean water at a reasonable cost as it is, than I have in the expensive, multi-headed bureaucrat-heavy monster that Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta is trying to inflict on the country.

She has admitted she got two parts of the Three Waters proposal wrong:

“There are two areas of the Three Waters reform programme that I underestimated, and I acknowledge that’s my responsibility.

“The first one is I underestimated that the public really knew what was happening with pipes under the ground, and they had a lot more knowledge of the trade offs councils were always making in relation to what gets spent above the ground, what gets spent below the ground,” Mahuta said. . . 

That might apply in some places, but not here. We are rated for our water scheme, and we know what it costs.

Then there was the expensive and puerile advertising campaign.

“There was a high level of sensitivity from local government around that campaign because they felt that they were getting blamed for something and I acknowledge that decades of underinvestment in water infrastructure is within the council purview but perhaps the advertising campaign wasn’t the best way to tell the message,” she said.

Not every council and every water scheme has suffered from underinvestment.

“Again, those are two areas that I underestimated that I got wrong, and I accept responsibility for that,” Mahuta said. . .

If only that was all that was wrong, it’s not.

The whole proposal is one big mistake and the Taxpayer’s Union explains how the proposals by the working group that was supposed to improve it, have made it worse.

When the Government announced last year it would delay the Three Waters legislation, they appointed an “independent” Working Group to provide recommendations on ways to make the legislation more palatable for local councils. At the time, we called it out as anything but independent. The Working Group itself was 50/50 co-governed, and of the Mayors appointed to represent the interests of local government it was stacked in favour of the very few who were supporting the Government’s proposals.

Today the Working Group has released its recommendations.

Under the recommendations, councils would still not have anything close to proportionate representation on the four “Regional Representation Groups” that appoint the selection panel that appoints the board members for the new entities. For example, Auckland Council would have just four of 14 seats for the northern group, despite having 90 percent of the region’s population and contributing the lion’s share of the assets.

As we predicted, the Working Group has backed Nanaia Mahuta’s co-governance model that will see half the seats for each region held by iwi/hapū members, giving iwi an effective veto right over every major decision.

Here are some of the key recommendations:

⚠️ Fresh off the back of the infamous $4 million “Better Water” television ad campaign, the Working Group wants another new public communications campaign to explain “need for change” to New Zealanders.

The first proposal is for propaganda  an advertising campaign, to explain the need for change, but we don’t all need to change and none of us need the change that’s proposed.

⚠️ Councils would now hold shares in the new water entities. This is clearly an attempt to ward off accusations that Three Waters is an asset grab. But it’s yet another deceit: regardless of their shareholdings, councils (and therefore ratepayers) will still be stripped of all the crucial rights of control that define ownership. Councils won’t be allowed to receive a return from the water entities, yet that is specifically allowed for Mana Whenua groups. In short, the “ownership” of shares will be meaningless.

It is ownership in name with none of the rights that true ownership confers on owners.

⚠️ Further, the Working Group has suggested adding yet another layer of bureaucracy to the scheme, in the form of new “sub-regional” groups representing smaller councils and iwi. This would mean five layers of bureaucracy in total separate ratepayers from water services: councillors, the co-governed sub-regional representative group, the co-governed Regional Representative Group, the Selection Panel, and the water entity board.

If the answer is more bureaucracy, they’ve asked the wrong question.

⚠️ The Working Group also wants to establish a new Water Services Ombudsman, with a “tikanga-based dispute resolution process”. And they have demanded a new policy consultation process between the Crown and its Treaty partners, separate from public consultation. . . 

That’s more bureaucracy, more costs and less accountability.

Together, these ideas intensify the absurd complexity of the scheme. The whole thing stinks of “jobs for the boys” that will ultimately cost ratepayers.

Nanaia Mahuta and her Cabinet colleagues will now “consider” the recommendations before unveiling the legislation that will be put before Parliament. From our perspective, there is nothing to consider: Three Waters cannot be salvaged.

RNZ has the full 47 recommendations here.

The proposal would lead to higher costs, more bureaucracy and loss of local control. It cannot be salvaged but it could be bulldozed.

The Taxpayers’ Union has a petition urging the government to abandon these costly, undemocratic proposals. You can sign it here.

It is also backing the Water Users’ Group that has filed an application for judicial review with the High Court on the basis that the co-governed Three Waters scheme is based on an invented and incorrect interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.

. . .If the Water Users’ Group wins, it will knock back the radical interpretation of the Treaty that underpins He Puapua and is driving co-governance across the local government, health, and resource management sectors. . . 

You can donate to support the legal action at the link above that paragraph.

A win wouldn’t just torpedo Three Waters, it would put a stop to the ever increasing Treatyfication and the racism and divisiveness that it is spawning.