Most of them talk about what it will cost and that ratepayers will have to pay more.
One question that the media doesn’t ask, or at least doesn’t report the answer to, is who would have paid for Labour’s scheme and how much?
What started as Three Waters grew and the costs of its multiple layers of bureaucracy would have grown too.
The organisations that were to appoint board-appointment committees that in turn were to appoint advisory panels would not have been working for nothing.
Redundancy for two water reform chief executives cost $710,000. Keeping them to oversee the bureaucracy would have cost more.
Three Waters was a complicated and expensive system. That the costs of it weren’t going to be paid by money fairies appears to have escaped media coverage.
Water infrastructure needs funding and under Local Water Done Well we’ll be paying either through rates or water charges. But we’ll be paying for the infrastructure and not the multiple layers of bureaucracy Labour was going to impose on us as well.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
The organisations that were to appoint board-appointment committees that in turn were to appoint advisory panels would not have been working for nothing.
Redundancy for two water reform chief executives cost $710,000. Keeping them to oversee the bureaucracy would have cost more.
Three Waters was a complicated and expensive system. That the costs of it weren’t going to be paid by money fairies appears to have escaped media coverage.
Water infrastructure needs funding and under Local Water Done Well we’ll be paying either through rates or water charges. But we’ll be paying for the infrastructure and not the multiple layers of bureaucracy Labour was going to impose on us as well.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
The huge redundancy pay should NOT have been paid.
A token payment should have been offered - take it or leave it. These people are playing the system - totally dishonest.
They knew there was a risk or repeal when they took the job. Very cynical - and greedy.
The model was actually much more flawed than the highlights above. I followed Thomas Cranmer's writing about 3W's financial structures and the comparisons with the UK initiatives. Mahuta's model was doomed to fail because it was poorly thought through and, like so many other Labour plans, was based on unrealistic assumptions.
New Zealand has dodged a watery bullet on this one. Having said that, the ageing pipes issue hasn't gone away and won't fix itself. But that's for much brighter minds than mine to sort.
the media aslos does not comment on the effective maori control aspect.
I suspect many senior positions nowadays are taken up more with some redundancy or replacement compensation paymnet in mind than the actual salary for work. I supect many engineer their own dismissal with that in mind and choose options for the possibility.
Apart from the mythical 'savings' by the purported 'economies of scale' and how much of those would have been eroded and almost assuredly been overtaken by the convoluted bureaucracy that was proposed, what really needs to be asked (and answered, given that this really was the underlying justification of the whole Three Waters rort) - “where is the disclosure of the Crown Law advice that Ministers Mahuta & McAnulty ‘claimed’ obligated the Govt to essentially provide co-governance of the water?"
And, if that obligation is indeed there as they claimed, how come the new coalition Govt can so readily walk away from it without now being in breach of the Treaty?
So, one or other Govt appears to have failed to act in good faith, but just don't expect our partisan MSM to ask such hard questions of the former Govt (or for that matter the new coalition), because such will likely expose the deception for what it is or, more likely, was.
And the MSM claim that they're not biased and only report the truth? Well, to do the latter they first do sometimes need to ask the hard questions, but that all becomes a bit tricky when they've signed up to the PIJF Treaty principles obligations.
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