Three Waters repeal welcome
Pretty confident community and ratepayers will generally be supportive of Water Services Act Repeal Bill
The Coalition Government’s just completed 100-day plan, with 49 actions ticked off or delivered, has rightly received a lot of airtime. We will all have opinions on what we support, or don’t support, in that plan.
I, like many of you, will be scrutinising outcomes closely, many of those outcomes will take time to realise and some (like environmental) may not be evident for years or decades.
I’m pretty confident our community and ratepayers will generally be supportive of the Water Services Act Repeal Bill, which has repealed all of the Labour
Government’s 3 Waters — later renamed Affordable Water — services bill.
Although as a council we didn’t quite go so far to join the Communities for Local Democracy group of 30 councils, we belatedly voiced strong opposition to 3 Waters, largely as Whanganui has invested heavily in waste and storm water in particular.
Although Whanganui carries significant debt for that, our 3 Waters are in good shape and it was not in our interest to hand over our heavily invested assets to, initially, four entities (later expanded to 10) where council had no direct input into its own assets.
Sure, we got about $6 million of Tranche 1 — Better Off funding, which has gone to a variety of housing and other projects, including over $2 million to the Sargeant Gallery project.
But that taxpayer funding is likely to be clawed back by the Government in some other key areas.
Regardless of the cost of the new Government to overturn Labour’s 3 Waters Bill, including a $710,000 redundancy bill for just two chief executives, the new Water Services Act Repeal Bill is a win for Whanganui. We have budgeted in our draft Long Term Plan (LTP) for our water services and simply know best what needs investment, and where we can pull back costs. We also have the option to work with neighbouring councils to see if collaboration can lead to economies of scale and savings for the ratepayer.
Regulation of water standards is important and agreed upon by most.
But in my opinion, Minister Mahuta’s 3 Waters “one size fits all” proposal lacked genuine consultation with the councils/ communities that owned those assets.
It was the start of Labour’s eventual downfall, with a myriad of post-Covid issues getting mixed up with 3 Waters, in particular the cogovernance issue.