Ele Ludemann: Questions media doesn’t ask

Various news stories have criticisms on National’s replacement for Labour’s Three + Waters.

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?

Mike Hosking: Three Waters has been lost amongst the rest of the mess

Is a divisive issue still an issue if people don’t talk about it the way they once did?

The Three Waters legislation was passed yesterday under urgency - at one point this was the biggest game in town.

Many were aghast at what the Government was trying to do. They saw this as a massive overreach in terms of the Māori-fication of the New Zealand landscape.

Graham Adams: Labour’s Three Waters refresh is a tragi-comedy

The government’s disdain for democracy is a gift to National and Act.

Last week, we watched the Prime Minister rebrand the contentious Three Waters project with a name so banal it is surprising he didn’t fall asleep while announcing it. “Affordable Water Reform” is, in essence, a Post-It note to stick on your computer while you struggle to come up with an arresting title. If you suggested “Affordable Water Reform” to your colleagues in an advertising agency they’d assume you were joking.

There’s a lot that is risible in Labour’s ongoing attempts to find a Three Waters arrangement the nation might even grudgingly accept. The Water Services Entities Act was passed in December — and within hours a second bill that included extensive amendments to the first was introduced to Parliament. In fact, that bill is as long as the Act it seeks to amend. Now, the government will introduce and pass further legislation to implement the changes Hipkins announced last Thursday — as well as “associated matters” — all before this year’s election.

Thomas Cranmer: Hipkins Puts Three Waters Back on the Table

The Prime Minister announces changes to the controversial reform but we are left with the same problems that existed last year - only multiplied.

Last week saw Labour’s biggest policy headache, the Three Waters reform, return to the political fray. When Parliament adjourned for the summer recess twelve weeks ago, the government was widely viewed as having lost its grip on the reforms amid accusations that Three Waters had become Five, and suspicions that underhand tactics had played a role in the entrenchment of a provision of the WSE Act.

It’s no surprise therefore that in Chris Hipkins’ first Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister on 25 January, he approved the proposed overseas travel of Minister Mahuta to India departing shortly thereafter on Waitangi Day. The former Minister for Local Government who had, until the beginning of this year, overseen this major reform for the government has spent a significant amount of time out of the country ever since.

Eric Crampton: There's a better way to reset the Three Waters reforms

I don’t know the right number of local water service entities. Neither do you. And neither does the Government.

Sometimes, the right number isn’t the number that drops out of a careful tallying of sums by people far removed from the consequences of a decision. The right number instead is the number that emerges from a process led by those affected by it. Get the process right, and it will produce the right number, by definition.

If anyone ever tried to ask how many law firms or barber shops the country should have, no sensible person would ever try to answer it. The right number simply finds itself as people who want services shop around for them, and people wanting to provide services either take up jobs with existing providers or strike out on their own.

Are water service providers really that different?

Janet Wilson: Never mind the name, we'll all pay for water changes

In 2006 Sea World executives, fearful of a backlash from the gay community, decided to change the name of the Phillip Island fairy penguin to little penguin, an act which the community itself described as ridiculous and unnecessary.

That same characterisation could be applied to the lamentably renamed Affordable Water Reforms, aka Three Waters, whose very name has become a controversially partisan clarion call. Lamentable, laughable even, because the water reforms are now less affordable in their new 10-entity formation, a victim of decreased economies of scale.

Kerry Burke: The need to cut through the confusion over co-governance

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about what co-governance means, with our political leaders also seemingly uncertain.

Māori Party president John Tamihere seems to be clear, telling RNZ recently, that it was part of “the re-indigenisation” of our country, something that might play well with the 1% of voters that recent polls show support his party, but would be unacceptable to most of the other 99%.

Its literal meaning, however, is crystal clear, a sharing of government between two entities.

Graham Adams: A taniwha rears its head in the Three Waters debate

A question many of us have been dying to ask about the Three Waters bill is: “Could the legislation allow a taniwha to stop the construction of a dam, or any other planned water infrastructure?”

It is not a frivolous question, as anyone who can remember the events of 2002 will attest. That year, work on the Waikato expressway, near Meremere, was halted and plans modified after Ngati Naho hapū claimed it was traversing the territory of a one-eyed taniwha, Karu Tahi.

An integral part of matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), taniwha are mythical creatures said to live in or near lakes, rivers and the sea.

Stuart Smith: Check Your Candidates’ Three Waters Stance

There is growing public concern with the Government’s Three Waters legislation that will take council drinking, storm and wastewater assets and place them in a convoluted governance arrangement. The concern has grown to anger as the public realise that the select committee process is a sham, with government members merely going through the motions. Most of the submitters have given up their time to give evidence to the select committee in the hope of their council retaining ownership and control of their Three Waters assets. And yet we now know that the government are already advertising for staff to run the new bureaucracy.

John Porter: The Absolute Power of Veto

“We have always owned the water!” So said the Maori king back in September 2012. He went further by stating, “the ultimate goal for iwi is to retain management and control of water…” Well, he wasn’t too far wrong those 10 years ago!

Today, he would probably say, “We own it and if you want it, you’ll have to pay!”

Oh, and by the way, the Maori king is Mahuta’s cousin.

The Three Waters Reform Bill is being pushed through parliament despite huge opposition. So the longer this Government refuses to budge on the co-governance aspect of Three Waters, the more it looks like this reform isn’t really about cleaning up our water, is it?

It’s actually about embedding a race-based way of running things in New Zealand.

Eric Crampton: Bad debt and a bad precedent

Among the problems leading to the Government’s proposed Three Waters reforms were councils loading up their balance sheets with dubious debt.

So it seems odd that the Government plans on loading up the balance sheets of amalgamated water service entities with dubious debt.

The Government provided a lot of sweeteners to councils to encourage them to sign on to the water reform agenda. The first tranche of that 'better off' funding came from central government and has been covering all manner of community projects, from swimming pool upgrades to walking trails.

The second tranche of funding will have no greater tie to water infrastructure but will turn into debt that has to be paid off by the new amalgamated water providers.

So part of what got us into the current mess is being imposed on the new water service providers. It seems a rather bad idea.

Let’s recap.

Stuart Smith: National’s Response to Three Waters

The Three Waters debate is heating up as the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee, or FEC as it is known, begins to hear evidence on the Water Services Bill. The Three Waters legislation will enable the establishment of four Water Services Entities with convoluted co-governance structures that will take control of rate payer owned assets. FEC received 88,324 submissions which had to be hard copies because the government used their majority to stipulate this in the hope that it would reduce the number. As a result, select committee staff were forced to wade through mountains of paper to collate submissions.

Point of Order: Govt gives each council another $350,000 (of our money) to get Three Waters flowing – and win their support for its coup

Three Waters reforms – the subject of widespread disquiet around the country – was among the issues tackled by Ministers with new initiatives over the past 24 hours.

So too was the vexed issue of housing.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into both problems. Or should that be “challenges”?

Tim Dower: Our water needs attention, but Three Waters is not the way to do it

It's hard to understand the Government's obstinacy on the Three Waters reforms.

From the get-go, the response from local bodies up and down the country has been a pretty resounding, no thanks.

They've read the room; local voters either don't like the plan one bit or don't understand or don't even know what's happening.

Only a quarter of us think Three Waters is a good plan, that's according to a One News - Kantar poll.

Craig Little: There's a better way forward than Three Waters

In her election victory speech back in October 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated, “We will be a party that governs for every New Zealander".

She went on to say everyone was living in an "increasingly polarised world", but she hoped this election had shown New Zealand that this was not who we were and that as a nation we can listen and debate.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the Three Waters Reform, the Government hasn’t listened or debated, because the outcome was predetermined from the beginning, and this has perpetuated a divided and polarised nation.

Graham Adams: Is the jig up for Three Waters?

In Parliament last week, David Seymour was so cock-a-hoop about what he reckoned was the beginning of the end for Three Waters he could barely hide his glee.

He claimed the Labour Party:

"...has been all aflutter in their caucus this week talking about Three Waters, saying to each other, ‘Do we really want to do this? Is it really worth it, botching this thing, so that we lose our seats?"

Act’s leader reckoned the backdown had already begun and the Labour caucus would soon vote to kill the contentious programme that will strip councils compulsorily of their water assets and hand them to four vast regional entities governed by equal numbers of unelected iwi members and council representatives.

The rumour that a majority of Labour’s caucus is beginning to stand up to the powerful Māori faction over the co-governance aspect of Three Waters was circulating before Seymour got to his feet in the House to declare that Three Waters is “a Treaty settlement disguised as an infrastructure project” — and one that is making Labour MPs very anxious.

Seymour predicted:

Karl du Fresne: Squeeze your eyes shut, cross your fingers and hope

The Three Waters project is a con and a fiasco on every level.

First, it fails to satisfy even the most basic democratic test. A system in which the nation’s water infrastructure is run by opaque “entities” where 16 percent of the population wields 50 percent of the power (and that’s assuming the representatives of the iwi elite truly speak for all people of Maori descent, which is far from assured) makes a mockery of representative government.

Second, and in addition to the above, it severs the links by which the public is able to exercise control over infrastructure that it owns. The recent attempt to overcome opposition to Three Waters by tweaking the shareholding arrangements, so as to create an illusion of financial control by councils, was a feat of prestidigitation that fooled no one.

John Bishop: Three Waters is still a shameless asset grab

”How did Three Waters go so badly wrong?” asked the newspaper headline.

From the Government’s point of view, the answer is that it hasn’t gone wrong. The scheme to grab assets paid for by ratepayers over many years and put them into four new entities well out of reach of ratepayers is still going ahead.

These entities will be governed and managed in accordance with “the principles of the Treaty, Te Mana o te Wai and mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori, kaitiakitanga, and te ao Māori”, according to the various Cabinet papers on the subject.

Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta trumpets that councils will still own the assets, which isn’t even sort of true. Councils may own the assets, but they certainly will not control them.

It would be like owning a house which you can’t live in, where the tenants set the rent, and you can’t get rid of them. Yes, you still own the house, you just can’t exercise any real control over what happens in it, but you still pay the bills.

Graham Adams: Three Waters looks like the government’s suicide note

It has been widely noted that Jacinda Ardern didn’t appear at Friday’s media conference in Porirua to announce that the government would press on with its deeply unpopular Three Waters programme — albeit with a few minor adjustments.

The task of presenting the government’s response to a working group’s recommendations was left to Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Grant Robertson, wearing his hat as Minister for Infrastructure.

As Newstalk ZB’s political correspondent Aaron Dahmen reported: "Interesting to note that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is taking a week off after her Singapore / Japan trip but if she wanted to be here [at the Three Waters announcement], she would be."

Host Kerre Woodham responded with a derisive laugh: "Ah, she was never going to be there!"

But why would the Prime Minister have interrupted her holiday to attend? The scheme toforcibly transfer the water assets of the nation’s 67 councils to four vast regional entities — while giving 50 per cent governance over infrastructure, paid for by generations of ratepayers, to unelected iwi members — is so disliked it could well be her Waterloo.

Bryce Edwards: Is Three Waters really about water infrastructure or iwi co-governance?

On Friday the Government made some announcements about their Three Waters programme that were meant to assuage public concerns about the reforms. Instead, the announcements merely reinforced that Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta is determined to push the reforms through in the face of strong public opposition.

The gist of Friday’s announcement was that, following on from consultation with local government, Labour is making some significant improvements to Three Waters. In reality, the core of the water reforms remains the same, with critics pointing out that the changes are largely cosmetic.

The central and most contentious element of Three Waters, co-governance with mana whenua iwi, has been reconfirmed. The new four mega water companies that are being set up to amalgamate the drinking, waste and storm water infrastructure around the country, will be subject to equal control by iwi and local government.