Tim Dower: Rumoured changes to Three Waters mean nothing

There’s a good piece in BusinessDesk on where we're going now with Three Waters.

For clarity, I've been against Three Waters from the start.

Where I live, we saw it as a straight-out asset grab.

It was good facilities built up and paid for by ratepayers over decades being subsumed into a massive body, effectively subsidising Auckland, and patching over decades of incompetent management there.

Now, BusinessDesk is reporting the Government looks ready to dump the four "mega" water bodies plan so many people hated.

Instead of that, they're looking at having 10 of them.

Not four monstrous new unelected, expensive administration systems, but 10 of them.

I ask you, can these people not read the room?

It's also reported the other two most contentious elements of Three Waters, Māori co-governance and taking the assets off councils’ balance sheets, these will stay.

I ask you again, can these people not read the room?

Now what do governments - and come to that the private sector do - when an entity or a project or scheme has got itself such a bad name you dare not mention it?

You give it a new name.

Think about it, Telecom? Yuck. Spark? Mmmm, okay.

So Three Waters as a term will go, we'll get 10 new administrations instead of four, it'll get a new name, but otherwise nothing changes.

Where they went wrong with Three Waters was, as usual, issuing orders from Wellington. On top of that, the "my way or the highway" attitude of the former Minister didn't help. 

Do you know what might work? A bottom-up approach. Let the councils tell Wellington what they need, not the other way around. 

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