Mike's Minute: Three Waters spending is now grossly wasteful

If you are looking for work, there is still one job left at the highest level of the Three Waters structure.

They have announced they have appointed three of the four chief executives to lead what they have gloriously called Entity A, Entity B and you can guess the rest.

Here are several questions for you:

Who in their right mind would want to work for Three Waters?

In signing on now, do you even know you will ever actually start your job, given there is officially, as we sit here today, no Three Waters?

What happens if Three Waters never starts and what happens when the Government lose the election and Three Waters is unwound?

The answer, I suspect, is a pay out. In the mean time, if you're one of the four you get to join the transition authority. How fun does that sound?

Does this announcement of new CEOs indicate that the much hyped, vaunted and touted Chris Hipkins' "bread and butter reset" is not going to include Three Waters as has been suggested by many, if not most.

And if it doesn’t, does that not mean that the so called reset to try and get Labour into some sort of competitive form for the election is largely pointless, because one of the most contentious and radically, if not racially driven, ideas in many a long year will carry on as per normal?

It does lead to the very important overarching question around needless spending, not to mention time and energy. If you aren't doing something, how much of the aforementioned do you waste before you wake up?

The media merger, which we all agree appears dead in the water, must have run up hundreds of millions by now in groups and committees and explorations and consultants.

Some consultants for it are on $9000 a day. For what? Something that isn't happening?

In the Three Waters case we have offices rented out and kitted out, we have staff on boards and the bills are being paid for God knows what.

I haven't even got to the $44 million in fees so far for the Auckland light rail that has yet to lay a single centimetre of track, despite the promise to have the whole thing finished two years ago.

In a cost of living crisis, does none of this not concern us?

Are there not better uses for the money? Is it not a lesson in working out what you want to do, how you want to do it and how determined you are to actually deliver, before you open the wallet filled with money you don’t actually have anyway?

I just don’t see how a bloke, and they are all blokes, can take a job that doesn’t exist, in an entity that may never exist, accepting tax payers dollars - to twiddle your thumbs in a transition group going potentially nowhere.

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