So farewell, then, Three Waters or Affordable Water or Stormy Waters or whatever you were called. We’d liked to say we’ll miss you, but actually we never really got to know you at all.
As per the coalition’s 100-Day Plan, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced this week that Labour’s divisive scheme to fix the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure is a goneburger. Three Waters is now officially Dead in the Waters. The repeal of the Water Services Entities Act is expected to be done by this time next week.
Trashing that legislation comes with a massive bill. Some $1.2 billion of taxpayers’ money will have been wasted in work already done to implement Affordable Water, though some of it went to grants to help councils. But, hey, that’s not our fault, says National. Presumably, it must be the former Labour government’s, then, for having the temerity to implement legislation the Opposition hated. Queer logic, that.
National’s “Local Water Done Well” — an excellent example of “Policy Naming Done Badly” — will eventually replace Labour’s plans for 10 mega organisations with a for-now-unknown number of council-controlled organisations (CCOs), achieved by two further pieces of legislation to be passed later this year and next.
In intent, there is little that separates the two schemes. Both seek to fix a broken system by creating separate, self-funding entities to take care of water infrastructure, thus getting it off the balance sheets of cash-strapped and debt-laden councils so that these new council-controlled entities will be able to borrow big to fix a costly problem estimated at $185 billion over the next three decades.
In philosophy, however, National and Labour’s plans couldn’t be further apart if one was Donald Trump and the other reality.
Labour — which spent six years suffering from the quaint delusion that everything can be made better as long as it’s run by a giant, faceless bureaucracy in Wellington — achieved its goals, opponents claimed, by forcibly stripping councils of assets and control while conducting an iwi co-governance experiment.
Meanwhile National — which suffers from the quaint delusion that everything can be made better by a smug white guy in a business suit — will effectively let councils do whatever the hell they want within the new CCO framework, provided the government believes it will be “financially sustainable”.
It is, of course, these very same cack-handed councils that have created the problem in the first place through decades of lamentable governance and underfunding. Asking councils to fix water now is like asking the surgeon who botched your nose job to have another go.
So, will National’s solution work? It doesn’t matter whether your glass is half empty or half full on that one because, either way, what’s in the glass isn’t water but vague promises and sketchy details.
Labour did at least present its case with the promise it would not only fix things but that it would reduce household water costs by as much as $5400 a year by 2054. National isn’t bothering with any of that carry on.
Instead its plan, beyond the legislation letting councils sort it out themselves, is frustratingly fuzzy for those wanting to know helpful things like how much more it’s all going to cost and how much it will or won’t save households.
At a post-Cabinet media briefing on Monday, National seemed not at all bothered about communicating the consequential details of its plan. Simeon Brown, the party’s boy king of local government, made it clear that the set-up costs for National’s plan were unknown, but these were councils’ responsibility anyway.
Brown pretty much indicated that once the CCOs were created, water was back to being all local government’s (ie, ratepayers’) problem, though there would be a yet to-be-defined “regulatory backstop” for central government to intervene in as yet-to-be defined circumstances.
The justification for this relentlessly laissez-faire approach, according to Brown and Luxon, was this was “what councils want”.
“Councils are already having these conversations right now,” Brown said. “Councils in the Hawke’s Bay are already talking about how they can set up a CCO for their region.”
This might true, but any suggestion it’s what all councils want is pure supposition. Of the 78 local authorities in the country, fewer than half were part of the anti-Three Waters pressure group, Communities 4 Local Democracy.
But that matters not. National’s ideology demands Affordable Water be dumped, even if that could leave some councils as badly off as they are now. Like Labour’s scheme, National’s seeks to achieve its goals through the merging of councils’ water assets into bigger, independent groupings that will enable them to convince lenders and global credit rating agencies that they’re worth the risk.
However, where Labour forced these economies of scale to happen by amalgamating all water assets into 10 entities, National is leaving it all up to self-interested councils to sort out.
That might be fine in Hawke’s Bay, but what about in Wairarapa? Why would a larger council like, say, chronically leaky Wellington, want to take on the troubles of a struggling neighbour like South Wairarapa? Wouldn’t Wellington’s own ratepayers have a thing or two to say if they did?
Brown has so far refused to fully answer any of those sorts of questions. They were “hypothetical”, he said on Monday, though only if you don’t live in places like South Wairarapa or the South Island’s West Coast.
What also appears to be hypothetical is the notion that Local Water Done Well, even if does fix our water infrastructure, will save already overburdened ratepayers from the daunting prospect of even higher rates.
All we really know, as Affordable Water gives ways to Local Water Done Well, is this: that the price tag for National’s dogma starts at $1.2 billion.
