Government needs to honour promise to listen on Three Waters

The government needs to listen to the community demanding better water reform rather than pushing forward with a plan that could deliver disastrous outcomes.

In its submission to the Finance and Expenditure committee, Communities 4 Local Democracy He hapori mō te Manapori has clearly outlined a pathway to deliver better water reform, and exposed the significant shortfalls in the Government’s current proposal.

C4LD Chair and Manawatu District Mayor Helen Worboys said that the government had lost its social license to push through these plans in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

“Thousands of submitters, most asset owning local authorities, and the vast majority of those polled by various councils at points throughout this process, have all given the clear message that this isn’t the reform they want to see,” she said.

“We’ve put together a common sense, home-grown model that will work.

“It’s a model that’s been developed with decades of real life experience in New Zealand, not one lifted from a country nothing like New Zealand and developed by a government department with limited to no experience in infrastructure policy and utility regulation.

“C4LD’s approach to Three Waters reform is built upon, and extends, the Productivity Commission’s recommendations and our approach is neither frivolous nor unusual.

“Most importantly it is based on expert analysis carried out not only by our own contracted experts in water services infrastructure reform, but also on the recommendations of the Productivity Commission, the Government’s own expert body on regulatory and economic reform matters.

“The Government prematurely selected a highly risky mega merger option without properly considering credible alternative options. Water services are critical to wellbeing. Policy development to reform water services should therefore follow a standard policy process.

“Not following standard policy processes creates a risk that the model selected could fail, and lead to reforms that do not meet the agreed public policy objectives, or that produce unintended consequences.

“The Government did not establish the reform objectives and instead focused on only one among a range of important factors - "scale”. This contributed to premature selection of a preferred model following a relatively cursory review of the international experience.

“Other Government centralisation ‘reforms’ appear to be under stress, most notably the polytechnic reforms into the mega-entity Te Pūkenga. Inadequate understanding of other available policy reform options to those based on “scale,” arguably is a contributing factor to this position.

“It would be a disaster for New Zealand if similar policy failures were to replicate themselves in the water infrastructure sector because a similarly flawed approach to policy analysis was adopted.

“We were told that the Select Committee process would be the time that the public could finally get their say on Three Waters, we want the Government to live up to that commitment and actually listen to what the overwhelming majority of the public is saying.”

The Communities 4 Local Democracy He hapori mō te Manapori submission is now available at demandbetter.nz