Government needs break to regroup after testing time
Bill English used to talk a lot about the importance of a government “holding its shape”. Unless the intended shape is a blancmange, the current government is failing to do so.
For every good news story about Pharmac funding a cystic fibrosis treatment or further support for public transport, there’s a Willie Jackson interview going awry, a new three waters embarrassment, or yet another log on the blazing pyre otherwise known as “youth crime out of control”.
As a result, Labour is staggering to Christmas under the weight of a clutch of policies that are either halfexecuted, half-baked, subject to blunder, or out of touch with the electorate.
The Three Waters policy is the clearest example of all four such features.
For a problem involving such a remarkable level of consensus about the need to find new, intergenerational ways to fund water infrastructure in a timely and not ruinously expensive fashion, it’s amazing how much discord the proposed solution has created.
A toxic brew of race, local representation and alleged asset expropriation makes Three Waters the ultimate political albatross and, like that bad luck bird for the Ancient Mariner, it keeps attracting more trouble.
A litany of blundering
In the past three weeks alone, missteps have allowed three developments that, in ascending order of significance, would threaten the tenure of any local government minister if it weren’t for the fact that the current one, Nanaia Mahuta, appears to be untouchable.
First, there was the suggestion that parks and other public areas that also double as stormwater management assets could be hived off to the four regional water entities.
That came from the select committee report on the Water Entities Bill and was a nice little win for National’s three waters spokesman, Simon Watts, who has yet to produce an alternative policy beyond the “repeal and replace” slogan that adorns fences up and down the country.
Presumably, this is because he doesn’t need to do anything but sit back and watch the Government implode.
Right now, National doesn’t need policy. It just needs not to be Labour.
The second win for Three Waters naysayers was the creation of a new meme suggesting that it’s in fact “five waters” since inevitably any water discharged anywhere will end up in the sea (a fourth water) and that geothermal fluids also have to be disposed of (a fifth water).
The argument is specious, but the line is politically powerful in an environment where new ways to mock this slow-moving trainwreck of a policy are avidly welcomed.
Third, and most serious, was the entrenchment debacle, which should never have happened. There is still and will probably never be a decent explanation for it, and which a more sure-footed government would have killed off far more quickly than it did.
It took until last Sunday for Chris Hipkins, as leader of the House, to pull the misconceived entrenchment attempt and belatedly call it a “mistake” after a surprisingly strongly worded intervention from the Law Society suggesting the government was toying with NZ’s unwritten constitution.
The prime minister has dodged the question of how the caucus, which she chairs, could discuss the matter without the entrenchment clause being one that she would “necessarily be aware of”. Hipkins, at least, has conceded he wasn’t aware of it when it landed as part of a supplementary order paper from the Greens’ Eugenie Sage.
‘Explaining is losing’
On the basis of the old political maxim that “explaining is losing”, the government will simply press on, with opposition calls for Mahuta to be sacked being water off a duck’s back.
But the whole episode still leaves Labour in the unusual position of voting against an anti-privatisation measure.
Sage may not have deliberately engineered this outcome, but it looks like another win for the Greens, which appear to be pulling substantial support from disappointed Labour voters.
However, it appears that Three Waters is a hill the government is willing to die on. It’s determined to use its once-in-a-generation (if that) absolute majority to push the three waters package into legislation by the middle of next year, come hell or high water.
That’s why it will risk another round of dire headlines in the last two sitting weeks of Parliament this year by introducing the second tranche of legislation that is required for the whole reform to go ahead.
However, if there was ever a government that looked as if it really needed a Christmas break to regroup, it’s this one.
Jacinda Ardern has already indicated that a new year reshuffle is on the cards.
Some of the changes are starting to look obvious.