There is nothing wrong with the water in this country, writes Mike Hosking. Photo / Ruth Jensen
There is nothing wrong with the water in this country, writes Mike Hosking. Photo / Ruth Jensen
OPINION:
Three Waters is a con, and no amount of the tinkering around the edges, as we’ve seen yet again with the release of the select committee’s work, changes that.
The fact the report was dumped, like so many reports have been dumped, on a Friday, doesn’t help the Government’scause.
Three Waters is also based on a series of lies.
The main one is that our water is no good and only a centralised system can bring it to a standard we could find acceptable.
I have been drinking the water in this country for 57 years in all the main centres I have lived in, as well as smaller places like Gisborne where I lived as a small child, and none of the glasses I have had killed me or made me sick.
Havelock is the Government’s poster child for how bad the water can be.
The reason they cite Havelock is because that’s it, there aren’t really any others, and Havelock was six years ago, and was not an example of how mass reform would have saved the town.
The reality is the water in this country in general terms is fine. Yes, there are issues with major infrastructure work in small places where the rating base is small but the bills are big - but that is not a reason to roll into town, as the Government has, with a dangerous ideology and a few billion in bribe money to nick control.
In fact, the maddest thing about the whole idea is the premise that somehow the Government believed that, in taking assets off councils for next to no compensation, we would go along with it.
What idiot, having owned and invested in infrastructure for decades, hands that over, loses control, gets nothing back and thinks they haven’t been stitched up?
The next part of the fallacy is when they tell you, if you don’t do it their way, your rates will go up.
That may well be true for those who need upgrades in their systems but it isn’t for those many areas that have done a decent job over the years and don’t in fact have any sort of problem at all.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta are under pressure to dump the Three Waters programme. Photo / Warren Buckland
But more importantly, since when did central government start worrying about local rates? Rates go up every year everywhere ... I’ve never heard a peep from Wellington.
When was the last time central government was in angst about rate increases?
It’s not their business, that’s why we have local councils, local authorities, who make local decisions.
So what we have is a bad idea, badly sold, trying to solve a problem that for many doesn’t even exist, using a mechanism that pretty much rips off anyone who is foolish enough to buy into it.
What’s amazing about all this is most of us had it worked out from day one, hence the pushback from the various councils around the country.
And despite the Government offering bribe money for local projects, or the various changes they have made, they still don’t have buy-in or anywhere close to it.
Friday’s select committee report offers an annual meeting for “transparency”, it offers a change for rural areas so they potentially have more say, none of it means a thing when the product still stinks.
Which brings us to what this is really all about - not about rates or assets or health, it’s about race.
The three mayors headed by Wayne Brown, with their alternative plan, flushed that out, and the committee, on Friday, by leaving the co-governance aspect of the deal unchanged, confirmed what most of us had suspected from the get-go.
Also, never forget that this policy was never part of the Labour campaign in 2020. Show me where Nanaia Mahuta or Jacinda Ardern told voters that their local water facilities were about to be taken off them and handed to a centralised authority with Māori appointed to run them.
We weren’t told, and by the time we were post-election, the disingenuous stench was overwhelming.
The policy is a dog, and if Labour had half a brain they would bin it, especially given their polling troubles.
But how beholden to the Māori caucus is the wider party? And do they hold so much sway that they are prepared to sink their re-election chances on one of the most divisive policies in decades?
