Editorial: Rest easy, Three Waters

The old Three Waters plan has been flushed down the plughole. Photo / 123rf

EDITORIAL

The Government has ditched a major part of its wildly unpopular Three Waters reforms by pulling the plug on the four mega entities that would have delivered freshwater, wastewater, and stormwater services to households.

These four entities will become 10, with their boundaries established roughly along the lines of New Zealand’s 16 regional authorities, giving these councils more direct engagement and involvement.

This sounds like common sense as a means to help territorial authorities deal with the eyewatering cost of investment in water infrastructure - estimated at about $130 billion-$185 billion over the next 30 years. But it also throws into stark focus what a tepid job was done with the original plan.

National leader Christopher Luxon calls the latest iteration “dumb”. He says his party will repeal it, and replace it to allow councils “access to long-term debt funding so they’re financially sustainable”. The problem is, councils dug this debt hole themselves, and giving them a bigger shovel will only allow them to keep digging.

The biggest challenge to the reforms remains explaining to the New Zealand public why co-governance via 50:50 mana whenua representation on the entity boards is necessary and how that will work. More than $600,000 has been spent on communicating so far but it seems a vast number simply do not want to hear the rationale.

Three Waters is now the Affordable Water Reforms but remains hard to swallow for too many.