Andrew Geddis: What happens when MPs ‘entrench’ legislation, and why does it matter?

A newly added provision to the three waters bill is a potentially momentous change to how law is made, explains Andrew Geddis.

On Wednesday night last week, something very unusual happened while parliament was busy making law. MPs from the Green and Labour parties banded together to make it much more difficult for a part of the government’s controversial “three waters” policy to ever be changed, or even removed altogether. Should future MPs want to smooth the way towards privatising the government’s new bodies for managing our water resources, they’ll have to get 60% support in parliament to do so.

Rachel Smalley: Three Waters - Overturning 'entrenched' laws is much harder to do

Three Waters – it's never far from the headlines, and it reared its head again over the weekend with some of our learned legal brains raising concerns about a constitutional issue that flew under the radar at parliament last week.

And that issue is the Government seeking to entrench a provision in the legislation that would make it difficult for any future government to overturn an aspect of these water reforms.