The Front Page: How did the Government make such a mess of Three Waters reform?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern continues to face challenges relating to the Three Waters reforms. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The Three Waters U-turn has been one of the few examples of the Government acknowledging a mistake had been made.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was explicit in admitting that the Government had got it wrong by including an entrenchment provision that would have made it more difficult for future Governments to privatise water services in New Zealand.

Entrenchment provisions are rare and are currently only used in electoral law for issues such as the voting age.

The application of an entrenchment clause in this bill led to major concerns of legal academics about the “dangerous precedent” this could set for future governments.

The Government quickly back-pedalled, but questions persist about how the entrenchment provision even made it so far. “Labour has 64 MPs and many of them are lawyers,” NZ Herald deputy political editor and host of the On the Tiles podcast, Thomas Coughlan tells the Front Page podcast.

“You would think that if this clause was appropriately raised then some of those lawyers would have thought back to their constitutional law lectures at law school and raised some concerns.

“The political antenna of the Labour leadership is usually pretty good and I think if those concerns were appropriately flagged in caucus there would have been no way that Labour would have supported it because it’s just such a bad look.”

The other question that lingers over all this is whether it points to some level of disunity within the Labour caucus, given that this was still allowed to see the light of day.

“That’s the other question we still haven’t been able to answer,” says Coughlan.

He adds that given that the details of the caucus meeting haven’t been leaked to the press suggests that Labour does remain united – and party members deem that unity worth protecting.

And while the Government may have backtracked on the entrenchment clause, it hasn’t yet given up on passing this legislation.

So where does this legal mishap leave the Government’s Three Waters plans? How will a reluctant public respond to these problems? Was Labour right to admit an error had been made? And given all the opposition and controversy, will the reforms even see the light of day?

Listen to today’s episode of The Front Page for a breakdown of this complex legislative situation.