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Summarised by Centrist
Taxpayers’ Union board member Peter Williams says National is on the verge of locking in the very sort of co-governance model it promised voters it would scrap.
Williams says he joined the fight against Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters reforms in 2022 and believed that, with the election of the Luxon government, “we had won”. Instead, he says, “co-governance of local water is back”.
He points to National’s 2023 “Local Water Done Well” policy and repeated statements from now-Minister Simon Watts that any alternative model would not include co-governance. Watts had said: “National’s alternative to Three Waters will not have co-governance with ratepayer-owned assets remaining under ultimate democratic control.” In Tauranga, Williams notes, Watts went further and called it a “bottom line”, saying: “Co-governance will not be part of any alternative model that National proposes in a future government, and that is a bottom line.”
He writes that Watts has “just waved through local ‘Water Services Delivery Plans’ that explicitly include co-governance as part of the new water entities”.
He also claims that a “secret Iwi ‘Partnership Agreement’ exists” in Wellington and that it “trumps the entity’s constitution and is binding on the water entity, its shareholder councils, and the Board”.
Williams also objects to the plan’s adoption of “restoring Te Mana o te Wai” as the entity’s vision. He says this “effectively ties the hands of the directors” and will require them to protect the “mana” and “spiritual health” of water in line with iwi interpretation.
He argues that National’s failure to follow through on its mandate for change may be one reason it is “suffering in the polls”.
