John Roughan: We need to be proactive in maintaining infrastructure

While cleaning up after the floods, for the most part, people were keeping their spirits up. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

Notice something? In just about all the television pictures of people battling the big cyclone this week, they were smiling. I didn’t notice it for a while but when I did, I looked for it and kept noticing it. Behind reporters speaking to cameras in woeful tones, people usually looked cheerful.

Whether wading through water or mucking out houses or carrying stuff to safety, they were doing so with a kind of bemused resignation. There were exceptions, of course: collapsed houses, power cuts, several deaths and people who couldn’t be reached, nobody was smiling at those. But for the most part, people were keeping their spirits up.

Climate change is here and we know now we’re going to be all right. We can see ways to make houses and suburbs more flood-resistant and to maintain water supplies through droughts. And it doesn’t need to cost the country a fortune.

The big risk now is that the double blow of tropical storms over the past three weeks will stop the Government’s retreat from Three Waters. You can almost hear hope returning to its lobbyists, consultants and publicists.

We must not let the infrastructure industry talk us into grossly excessive investment, such as enlarging Auckland’s stormwater drains to monsoon proportions when the solution may be as simple as regular maintenance.

A week after that “atmospheric river” fell on Auckland without warning on the Friday of Anniversary Weekend, a bus driver wrote to me. “Most of the flooding was caused by blocked drains because of rubbish sitting over the grates,” he said. “Yet as I drive around, those same drains are still blocked. They haven’t learned a damn thing.

“They used to have trucks that stopped and lifted the grates and sucked out the crap, now they just sweep over them. It all went to the pack when we became a supposedly Super City, and just gets worse.”

That’s my experience too. As councils have been amalgamated into ever larger units, they appear to know ever less about my locality and seem less interested in mundane tasks such as maintenance. An engineer involved in suburban development tells me councils now reject any drainage scheme that requires maintenance.

After the flood we read that the Auckland Council has a policy of “reactive maintenance”, meaning they send a crew to clear a stormwater drain only when residents report it blocked.

My neighbourhood is at the bottom of a downhill cul-de-sac. I once phoned the council when a lake was brimming at the kerb and a crew came with suction pumps impressively quickly. But in a subsequent storm, nobody noticed the blockage in time and a neighbour’s house was flooded.

This time, by sheer chance I presume, the drain got some reactive maintenance just a day before the deluge on January 27. The drain coped with the torrent that came down the street. Thousands of Auckland homes might not have been flooded that day if drains were regularly cleared.

There might be an additional cost to ratepayers but it would be nothing to compare with the billions the proponents of Three Waters want to spend. More importantly, we get to decide what we will pay for as council voters. Three Waters would dilute our voting power to practically zero.

Three Waters is a local government amalgamation on steroids. All municipal water supplies, drainage and sewerage would be removed from the control of elected councils and entrusted to four mega-regional servicing agencies, answerable to a new national regulating body that has already been set up.

The system is being set up for big engineering, big bureaucracy, big borrowing and ultimately big bills, all with minimal reference to the public who, the designers fear, would resist paying for infrastructure on the scale the designers think necessary.

The new Minister of Local Government, Kieran McAnulty, has been assigned to make this monster more politically palatable if he can. He has been given a few weeks to do it but he has been on cyclone damage duty this week and might not have got on to his political assignment yet – or he may think the weather has rendered it no longer necessary.

That would be a mistake. He needs to repeal all the undemocratic elements of legislation passed last year (not just “co-governance”) and restore the power of elected councils. This matters more than all the projects the Hipkins Government has ditched recently.

This year’s election was never going to turn on a merger of public broadcasters or biofuel subsidies or the right to hate a religion - or even unemployment insurance. But it could well turn on Three Waters.

The new climate has presented its risks and voters have demonstrated their resilience.