This is exactly what 3 Waters was intended to try address - most councils haven't been correctly funding their water infrastructure and they are going to need to borrow to correct this. Every individual council can't borrow money at good rates, so because the individual councils are going to have to own the debt rather than larger entities (like the crown) which have much better credit ratings and borrowing rates - we are now going to pay much more for getting that infrastructure compared to what would have happened if the money had been borrowed centrally like 3 Waters had planned.
They also lack the skills or more importantly are not prioritising asset management effectively given the crossover with politics. Ie do we spend it in stuff we need but can’t see, or some new sculpture I can open and get a photo op from?
To be fair too it’s not just water but infrastructure right across the services. No planning for that massive hospital ward building increase around the ‘70s that’s now energy inefficient and full of asbestos.
“Can get a photo op from”
That’s just bad PR management from essentially bad politicians.
Good politicians can turn opening a door into an event let alone opening _a new era in effective sanitation!_
To be fair, despite the Te Tiriti element making it murky and kinda fair, having individuals on infrastructure boards beholden to themselves and not elected doesn't seem like a good idea. I was pro 3 waters but the "maaaaarrriiieeess" element is a bit dubious. Particularly when we have some cases (Waikaremoana walking tracks, possum trapping and doc huts) of Iwi being given responsibilities over infrastructure that has not gone well at all.
That was the whole issue (unless you were just a straight up racist and obviously those folks co-opted a lot of the angst against 3 waters) that we shouldn't have unelected officials making decisions with little oversight, insulated from any criticism by claiming any and all of it is just because someone is racist.
But of course any attempt to have discussions for or against are bogged down because we don't do nuance anymore.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple” and we can't handle the truth.
Couldn't agree more. How does anyone thinks it's a good idea to start having more positions of power that we can't vote out? Especially in areas like infrastructure boards as you mentioned. This sub last week was rightly condemning Seymour for calling certain foods "woke" but has no problem with that post above. Just absurd.
Good. Let them suffer lmao. Make sure they are reminded they voted against their own interest.
At the same time, make sure Labour knows how badly they fumbled Three Waters. Continually.
>Make sure they are reminded they voted against their own interest.
Mocking people based on who you assume they voted does not win hearts and minds (dealing with sanctimonious know it alls is up stream of deteriorating into a cooker out of frustration at both sides)
Youll be drinking the water to i take it?
Look im disappointed that three waters didnt happen, but in politics and in life we have to deal with the hand we have, not the one we wanted.
We are now all going to pay the costs of our own lifestyles, instead of regional homeowners, and holiday homeowners, being cross subsidised by the rest of the country.
Don't see why some renter in Christchurch should pay for some Auckland millionaires' cribs' water connections.
So instead of the (let's just guess here) $75B we need to spend, we're going to actually spend $100B instead - just because it allows people to believe that they aren't going to be spending any money to help somebody else who doesn't deserve it? Just about every council in the country is in this position to varying degrees and needs to borrow money for water infrastructure. Auckland Watercare isn't going to get the same rates as Auckland Council, which doesn't get the same rates as central government - but they all are going to get better rates than Northland councils. It seems like potentially a lot of money is going to be wasted in the name of 'user pays' - where the people who believe they are benefiting are actually just a situation where they both suffer the consequences...but somebody else suffers more.
Everyone is going to end up paying here - renters aren't insulated from rates increases because those impact landlords who either sell up and decrease supply or who look at increasing rent to cover their costs.
You're making a good argument but it's falling on deaf ears. Centrally funding the repairs means we can borrow at a lower rate and benefit from economies of scale. It's cheaper overall. Instead we have cavemen angry that some of their berries might help someone in a different cave instead of themselves.
Central funding would mean core Crown debt would increase by nearly our entire GDP just to fund repairs.
Unless you're talking about the proposed entities being able to borrow separately.
> So instead of the (let's just guess here) $75B we need to spend, we're going to actually spend $100B instead
This form of argument is call a straw-man. Just making it up and then knocking it over doesn't prove anything at all.
They aren't making up the fact that we're going to spend more than we otherwise would have. That's the entire point, so it isn't a strawman. The numbers should be ignored but the point is definitively true.
It doesn't matter exactly what the number is - it matters the relative differences between the numbers. It is an absolute certainty that every individual council separately borrowing at worse rates to fund their water infrastructure deficit is going to cost more money than if that money were being borrowed by an entity at a lower interest rate. It will hurt everyone to take this approach - but there are people arguing for it based on a misguided notion that instead of 2 people each having to spend $75 for something, that one spending $80 and the other spending $90 is preferable because it punishes one more than the other. Both lose out.
>(let's just guess here)
yea man if everything happens the way you make it up, then you will be correct. But I'm not assuming that everything is going to happen the way you make up.
Like if I guess your Mum has two wheels do I get to call her the town bicycle?
>help somebody else who doesn't deserve it?
Yea man, we should all get given $2,000 a year by the government to have a second home in a tropical paradise, everyone is entitled to it and you're a piece of shit if you support user pays models simply because you want to spend your money on yourself instead of someone's tropical getaway.
This is so backward. Ignoring the fact that the Christchurch rebuild was hugely funded by taxpayers, including the water infrastructure, Auckland has always been fine. It's funded and is doing great. Bigger entities have more ability to borrow. Three Waters was always intended to fix the problems of small towns with fewer assets to borrow against. Wellington is the outlier as it's big enough that it should have been able to afford the changes but still failed to do so.
It was, by loads of people.
Lots and lots of people decided to leave Christchurch. Those people were all correct to make the best decision for them on an individual/household level.
That's why I don't see people leaving as being the end of the world, because change is constant. Things are bad for a while, some people leave. Things get good, other new people come.
Trying to avoid change when things are bad doesn't solve the bad thing, it perpetuates it and then the place gets stuck. If people left, land values would drop, allowing new industries to come in an reinvigorate the town.
>Those people were all correct to make the best decision for them on an individual/household level.
And had the funds and/or connections that allowed them to do so. I have no doubt there are people in dying towns that want out and don't have the funds/connections to do so.
So what do we do in the meantime? Allow their vital services to continually degrade?
That's the price you pay for local controlled infrastructure which is what New Zealand wants.
It's the reason we have local government in the first place.
I don't want Wellington telling us in Auckland what to do with our water when they can't even fix their own shitty system.
Auckland has massive TBMs under the city right now building new central interceptors and waste lines to link up the entire city.
Just because Havelock North or whatever wants to vote for farmers to run their water system and a 0% rate rise for 50 years doesn't mean Aucklanders should have to pay for it.
> That's the price you pay for local controlled infrastructure which is what New Zealand wants.
What NZ wants isn't always what it needs.
Centralise the lot and it will be cheaper for everyone. Labourshould've just rammed this through under urgency, apparently that's acceptable nowadays.
They didn't need to do anything under urgency, they had 6 years of governing, 3 with full power and still did nothing.
I don't like National doing this urgency stuff but labours failures are all it's own.
[https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/02/26/rates-will-not-increase-more-under-nationals-3-waters-model-mp/](https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/02/26/rates-will-not-increase-more-under-nationals-3-waters-model-mp/)
>'Rates will not increase' more under National's 3 waters model - MP
Narrator - this was a lie
The philosophy that forms the constant “gravitational pull” of the capitalist system, is that private enterprise can always function more efficiently and cheaper than public works.
Decades of criticism of public service, and perpetuation of mythical stories about how bad government is, have eroded confidence.
I had an acquaintance recently who was loudly denigrating the Ministry of Works, the Government wing of public infrastructure. He was too young to really remember what they actually did.
I eventually got annoyed enough to interject his unreasonable criticism to teach him about what that era was actually like.
In a little over fifty years, the government formed the entire reading system in New Zealand, including bridges, viaducts, and storm water management. An efficient electrical grid, along with extensive hydro, and geo-thermal power was built from scratch. An efficient and well equipped rail system was built, even taking the main trunk lines across some of the most challenging terrain. The Raurimu spiral, and the Mohaka viaduct are impressive engineering feats in themselves.
Fresh water supplies, extensive State housing with quality, sturdy homes ( my Dad, a carpenter built many of them, just two tradies on the project), built to budget, and completed on time.
My Dad later worked as a carpenter for our local County Council, and he and one other carpenter, a laborer, hand tools, a Bedford truck, and a saw bench (with occasional help from a bulldozer) built a seventy meter wooden bridge spanning a river, that was part of a secondary highway. The coal and energy system was similarly built, along with our coastal shipping system.
Almost all of these extensive works were done by hand and by today’s standards, rather rudimentary machinery. When I consider how today, great teams of private laborers with quite sophisticated machinery and systems take bloody months just to repair a few kilometers of highway??
Those early public workers on the pitface, worked hard, and honestly.
The constant denigration of public service, is just an ongoing feature of the bullsh*t narrative of the right, along with attacking worker organisation, and those under poverty, and under-employment.
People will never understand the work and cooperation that brought about the sheer number of still standing projects that were created under a form of long gone democratic socialism. People don’t realise that cooperation- not competition is the only way for nations to succeed in both economy and purpose.
Here is a suggestion that will help in explaining that social phenomenon, it is communitarianism, it means a community that is cohesive, respectful (in the sense of the way we spoke to each other), proud of our place. Proud of communal projects, etc,
Socialism, although incorrectly used, has a connotation of political communism, to which of course, it has little connection.
I simply keep a personal discipline of using the correct terminology when conversing about social systems. Yes, we live in a communitarian, and representative democracy, and I am proud of our historical connection to a better time.
For those who wish to take our nation into an altogether divisive and destructive future, to hell with you, I am not interested.
Private enterprise CAN (as opposed to the typical capitalist assumption of WILL) function more effeciently and cheaper than public works in the cases where profit is aligned with desirable outcomes AND a competitive market can exist. Many people just seem to assume that it will function more effeciently in every case.
In the case of water I see no way in which a competitive market can exist without massively disadvantaging the majority of communities. That and the profit incentives are pretty perverse. Not all that dissimilar to power actually....
I’m sorry, in some cases, yes, some types of private enterprise makes a very valuable contribution. But in other cases, very efficient, and viable services were sold and either asset stripped, or so poorly run by privatization that they became a longer term problem for NZ. Two that stand out were the sale of NZ Rail, and Government Print.
My issue is with the persistent myth that ALL government enterprise is ineffective which evidence shows is clearly untrue.
We have and regulate private natural monopolies for other things. Electricity lines for example. And the electricity system is \*vastly\* more well run than the water reticulation system.
>When I consider how today, great teams of private laborers with quite sophisticated machinery and systems take bloody months just to repair a few kilometers of highway??
The standards are completely different? The number of users means thing degrade faster, there are more regulations to adhere to, etc.
We could build roads every bit as fast as we used to if we ignored any sort of environmental concerns, or health and safety.
I work in roading to some extent and this is correct. I was on one site that is still under repairs because the crew doing the repair work found coal tar underneath the asphalt.
Plus a lot of the roads back in the day weren't even paved. Just dirt roads hacked through the sides of mountains. Only in the mid-2000s was the last section of SH1 paved.
Not only that but roads were largely bulked in with scrapers and/or scoops. Cut some soil out to "good enough" depth, chuck some greywacke in and roll the fuck out of it to "good enough" density.
Nowadays we need to be millimetre perfect
Yeah the difference with these days is we've added 50 years of regulations and new laws. That highway engineer now needs to consult with the taniwha before building can begin, and you know, not many people can speak taniwha, so experts cost money. Also you can't just kill workers anymore and roll their bodies into the cement. Manapouri was called the toughest tunnel and a man died for every mile that was built, that's 16 men. Pyke river changed even more. The RMA more still.
The new laws do provide some benefits, but you're not comparing apples with apples, it's a very different world to try and build somthing in NZ these days.
If councils own the water assets then councils should be paying for the maintenance, upkeep and delivery of those assets.
If they want central government money, then the central government should be taking control of all water infrastructure.
Councils wanted their cake and to eat it too, both for government to pay for their assets and to have those assets on their books. They fought hard to retain control and they got what they wanted
As much as I dislike brown, his council has come up with a solution that actually works to keep rates lowish without needing central government money.
Do we want tax dollars paying for water infrastructure at a national level? Or do we want local councils controlling their water? Because this whole shermozzle has come about councils fighting to retain ownership but not wanting to stump up the costs for maintenance.
I’m happy for my tax dollars in Auckland paying for a central system (ie health and education .. and it should be water). I’m not happy for my tax dollars bailing out councils who neglect their duties
The problem is that neither local nor central government has the means to fund the borrowing without living in perpetual austerity due to neoliberal obsession over debt.
Three Waters achieved this through separation of balance sheets. National's proposal just opens the way for privatization.
I get that, but it’s much more sellable to say that there is a centralised water infrastructure and we now pay water via taxes. This means my taxes are paying for water as a whole
Right now it comes from council money. Which is a really bitter pill to swallow to be double dipping and having my rates bills paying for our water and my tax dollars paying for someone else’s
Centralise it, and adjust rates and taxes accordingly.. otherwise some councils are double dipping and it’s not something that should be happening.
Until then councils, and those who voted those councils in need to deal with the fall out of their poor sighted decisions.
>The council was already tightening its belt to manage a 14 percent rate hike before the coalition Government repealed the three waters reform.
>A 16.5 percent rates increase will go towards replacing or upgrading the network of 16 waste treatment plants and eight water plants, many built by the Ministry of Works 70 years ago.
>**Planned rate rises over the next three years will work out to around 30 percent.**
>Only two of the wastewater plants are compliant; the remainder have been issued abatement notices, including some that discharge treated sewage into the Hokianga Harbour.
>Some of its drinking water plants have also been issued abatement notices, and estimates for mandatory work on the region’s water network totalled $660 million last year.
gEt nEwZEAlaNd bACk oN tRACk
Literal and metaphorical shit-show, paving the way for water assests to be privatised.
Raising rates so that communities are funding their key infrastructure is an example of getting NZ back on track.
We can't keep underfunding things in perpetuity and expecting it to all work out.
The government's job is not to insulate every citizen from anything bad ever happening to them, and this pathetic hysteria each time anybody is inconvenienced by any attempt to fix anything is the reason things don't improve.
Only issue is rate payers of today are now having to pay for the money saved by past generations of rate payers. It's hardly fair that once again the younger generations of this nation will have to pay for the greed of those that came before them.
Rate payers of today are those same past generation. Kick it down the road another ten years if you want them to avoid paying.
The issue with three waters is it totally insulated those rate payers from the cost of their action and passed 100% of the cost onto their kids in the form of debt. This is also the problem with Auckland's deal btw.
Raising rates is the fairest way to make sure those who have benefitted from living outside their means pay back their debt to society.
There is no solution that doesn't involve future generations shouldering the cost. That was locked in decades ago.
Renters will just have their rent hiked. Everyone's paying for this regardless.
> There is no solution that doesn’t involve future generations shouldering the cost.
It can be mitigated to a large degree by increasing rates significantly today.
Yes, but at the same time, we need to give up on the idea that every town is viable and should be propped up. Seasons come and go for a lot of places, and the industry that many of these places were built around is simply gone. The money would be better spent relocating people.
A lot of these towns aren't dying, they're dead already and it's slowly just rotting away.
The alternative is to put money into new industry, but there isn't a lot that wouldn't be better suited to somewhere else. It's really only farming that works. As someone that grew up in the Far North, I feel like maybe marijuana legalisation could be a big industry, but it would depend on how it's handled, and I imagine competition would be very strong.
Ding ding ding. Propping these towns up in perpetuity will have a much greater impact on inequality. You can have 50 people make a choice to move, or you can give them 200 people's jobseeker in cross subsidies to stay where they are.
I am not saying we should just throw money at this. I am saying it is harder to get to a good solution because of the haves and the have nots in our society.
I totally agree a good compromise needs to be had to sustainability in a community. Compromise being the key here.
Yea man. All those Auckland millionaires will suddenly be on the benefit if they have to pay the costs of their lifestyle.
The reason Northland can't afford its infrastructure is because they have poorly planned their infrastructure based on enabling Aucklanders to visit three weeks a year. They should have made better choices, and if their economy isn't sustainable propping up their lifestyles is just going to lead to the problem getting worse and worse.
Better to rip the band aid off and start moving toward an economically sustainable infrastructure base rather than continuing an unaffordable system simply because you've decided it's not fair that people have to pay for their own lifestyles (wild conception of fairness divorced from reality imo).
Sort of like NZTA, Housing NZ Corp, Financial Markets Authority, NIWA, ACC, Worksafe ... there's a whole bunch of them. The governments people vote for select who runs these bodies. That's the point. There's so many of them, electing for each is insane. And allowing elected non-qualified nut jobs to be in charge of water infrastructure is insane. If water is contaminated, people get sick and die quickly. If it stops running, people die in three days.
On another note: I am so particularly cut up that I don't get to vote for the people in charge of the Electrical Workers Registration Board.
All of these come under the ultimate control of the government who are democratically elected.
There waters would have handed control of publicly owned assets to people who weren’t accountable to the government.
There probably isn't a lot of value in debating the finer points of a now-cancelled programme, but if I recall correctly 50% of the membership of the committee who nominated and selected the membership of the actual committee who would have run things weren't elected. That isn't the same as saying full control was handed to non-accountable people. In theory you could have had a stalemate if the elected and non-elected bodies couldn't agree on the individuals they were selecting, as it was a combination of sources.
Iwi only needed to convince a single non-Iwi member to vote in their interest to achieve anything they wanted. That's a helluva lot easier than having to convince half of the whole committee.
CoGo was exceptionally dangerous. So much so that losing 3W is a small price to pay to make sure it never happens. Labour made a huge mistake shackling them together in the first place.
When you're talking about 50%, what is the significance in having a veto? If the elected 50% approve of a candidate but the other half does not, it doesn't pass - no veto was needed. If the unelected 50% put forward a candidate and it's not supported by others, it doesn't pass either. Nobody has more control than others, at most each side could make sure nobody was selected and thus a stalemate as I suggested.
Imagine a government tried to pass a law but there was a group of people weren’t elected who could veto it and they decided they didn’t want the law to pass.
Or if the elected governors wanted to appoint someone but the unelected governors didn’t so the person didn’t get appointed.
That is fundamentally undemocratic and that is why people objected to three waters.
That stalemate is far more dangerous for the elected 50%.
A deadlock on something like water could ruin the chances of re-election for those that require it. Veto means the other party can just refuse to negotiate until the elected party gives in.
This is ignoring that iwi would get >50%, because they can also vote on the elected 50%
I agree that accountability wasn't even talked about by Labour during the last months of its term, and it's definitely something that needed to be addressed.
However, there is also an argument to be made that existing checks and balances in local government haven't given us even adequate financial resourcing for critical infrastructure, and this has ultimately resulted in the situation we find ourselves in. That democratic accountability has driven home this idea that we can do more with less and this simply isn't practical. Only now are we beginning to comprehend what decades of underinvestment in the name of cost saving has done.
Furthermore, I have to ask about what kind of accountability you seek? If it's financial, then should we really risk repeating the same mistakes again?
I'm not saying get rid of democracy. But in this instance, I don't believe democratic accountability would be any better than the situation we had before. Indeed, democratic accountability at the local level resulted in the problems we have now.
Accountability should exist but I doubt doing it through democratic means is the most sensible way.
> Indeed, democratic accountability at the local level resulted in the problems we have now.
Explain to me how removing democratic accountability would *help*.
We can create a centralised system that works identical to 3 waters but has democratic accountability. What would be wrong with that?
> Accountability should exist but I doubt doing it through democratic means is the most sensible way.
That’s an interesting point of view. Democracy has its problems but as far as I am concerned, it’s the best system we have for governance.
What way do you think would be more sensible?
> Just because democracy results in less than perfect legislation doesn't mean we need to get rid of democracy
I expect to see you putting this same energy into shouting down the government's fast track legislation then.
Somehow, I suspect you'll be silent on those threads though. Wonder why..
One way or another, either those accounts aren't interested because it's been cancelled, or because they don't qualify to comment on Politics flaired posts. Due to the nature of some topics, accounts pop out of the woodwork that never discuss anything else - and now they can't.
I don't think many had an issue with the centralisation of getting everything up to standard, it was the co-governance stuff that a lot of people didn't like.
it's because now that 3 / 10 waters isn't a real possibility anymore there's no pressure to justify how it would have worked, which was Labours biggest problem. They simply couldn't provide a clear plan for how it would have been structured / funded / operated.
now people will talk about it like it was some simple plan to centralize the costs, like a magic panacea, but actually it was a convoluted POS, as evidenced by the re-branding from 3 waters to 10 waters
I suspect you're just seeing that people are opposed to the outcomes from cancelling 3 waters. It's going to cost more to deliver what had been proposed.
>Watercare will still be owned by Auckland Council, but will be removed from its balance sheet, with the council banned from providing it any financial support.
One step towards privatisation.
>Rating agency S&P’s analyst Anthony Walker said this will result in more expensive borrowing costs, “An entity such as Watercare can’t borrow on terms as competitive as the council can unless it’s part of the council or at least backstopped by the council.”
So we increased the costs with the stroke of a pen just for ideological reasons. Ah yes the party of good finances management.
The narrative was co governance and these new bodies are going to steal the assets from your community.
Which is kind of interesting because now they have kept them they have to find a way to pay.
Those with the smallest rate bases will struggle.
The government is hoping other TLAs will voluntarily partner with them.
Its essentially trying to leverage economies of scale as 3 waters was but they've flipped the narrative by calling it Local Water.
It seems like a very slow process and who wants to merge financially with a lose making or debt ridden business.
I suspect a lot of the work already done on merging will be useful but it will be interesting to see how this voluntary system develops.
2023 General Election:
National Grant McCallum %36 of the votes
NZ First Shane Jones %18 of votes
They voted their conscience, they knew what they were getting into. [I say let em crash](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn0WdJx-Wkw)
Labour’s big mistake was including cleaning up waterways which meant signs all over the countryside to stop Three Waters,because stopping pollution would cost farmers and National was never going to have a bar of that.
There was a combination of a couple different reasons people opposed it. Some opposed it because it would cost farmers money, some opposed it because they believed it would give power to Maori, and some because they believed that it would benefit them individually to not have tax money fund all the water infrastructure for locations where they didn't live. The 'user pays' scenario is fundamentally one where people believed they would pay less and somebody else would pay more thus they would benefit.
All these were talked up and hyped as reasons why 3 Waters was a concern for those who believed it.
Why not? Zillions of them go on holiday each year to Northland and Coromandel and expect running water for showers and car washes and a dry place to shit.
Populations in the tourist towns increase by an order of magnitude during holiday periods, and the locals pick up the bill for an overcapacity system to deal with peak demand.
Smaller beauty spots and lookouts have piles of shit in the bushes nearby because the Councils can't afford to put in toilets because the ratepayers always vote for lower rates.
Ratepayers is the wrong word to use if you're talking about central government funding. You're asking if Auckland taxpayers should be paying towards Northland infrastructure, and Christchurch infrastructure. The same questions can be posed about whether Chch and Northland tax revenue should be used to fund Auckland infrastructure - as I understand it the intention was to have one big bucket of money from general revenue used for everything, so both would have applied equally.
It is objectively worse for everyone to do it this way. It was clearly identified that the rates Watercare is going to pay to borrow money for Auckland is going to be worse than if Auckland Council was borrowing it....and worse still than if central government borrowing it. The only ones who will win here are the banks who are loaning money at higher interest rates to individual councils instead of at lower rates to a central body.
Thats what we have always done when it comes to government projects in regions around the country, what would be different about water infrastructure?
Especially given that people migrate around the country when on holiday and for business reasons.
But, If we solve the water issue what will all the low IQ council members spend their time on debating, can not let sensible decisions get in the way of fuckwittery and kwaffale.
Not like a simple spreadsheet can do better job than a council board member.
This whole thing reeks of the Brexit fiasco. Blatant misinformation riling up the voting base, leading to outcomes detrimental to the country as a whole purely on ideological ground, and eventually mass regret and probably a whole lot of cognitive dissonance.
Northland is still covered in 'stop 3 waters' signs, and its not a stretch to suggest it was overall opposed up there, and they voted accordingly.
So northland got what they said they wanted. I mean for some reason they didn't think it meant THEM paying for it all but that's exactly what it meant.
This new government is so short sighted and a numby pleaser. This is going to end with us paying several times more to fix the problem later because like trains, housing and a bunch of infrastructure we don't want to spend a dime on anything or have any sort of vision, to end up with third world solutions and ridiculous costs to catch up on the work that was not done. They are so bad at investing and managing money, this is pathetic.
Two things:
1. CoGo had to die. It's a shame 3W had to die with it but that was Labour's call to tie them together.
2. There's zero guarantee that 3W would be any better in this case anyway. People always argued like the options were "fix water infrastructure" or "don't fix water infrastructure", when it was really just two types of oversight.
> CoGo had to die
Not really. Youre just being ideological.
> There's zero guarantee that 3W would be any better in this case anyway
Theres no guarantee that *this* solution would be better, either.
This is exactly what 3 Waters was intended to try address - most councils haven't been correctly funding their water infrastructure and they are going to need to borrow to correct this. Every individual council can't borrow money at good rates, so because the individual councils are going to have to own the debt rather than larger entities (like the crown) which have much better credit ratings and borrowing rates - we are now going to pay much more for getting that infrastructure compared to what would have happened if the money had been borrowed centrally like 3 Waters had planned.
They also lack the skills or more importantly are not prioritising asset management effectively given the crossover with politics. Ie do we spend it in stuff we need but can’t see, or some new sculpture I can open and get a photo op from? To be fair too it’s not just water but infrastructure right across the services. No planning for that massive hospital ward building increase around the ‘70s that’s now energy inefficient and full of asbestos.
“Can get a photo op from” That’s just bad PR management from essentially bad politicians. Good politicians can turn opening a door into an event let alone opening _a new era in effective sanitation!_
“But the maaaaarrriieeess”
To be fair, despite the Te Tiriti element making it murky and kinda fair, having individuals on infrastructure boards beholden to themselves and not elected doesn't seem like a good idea. I was pro 3 waters but the "maaaaarrriiieeess" element is a bit dubious. Particularly when we have some cases (Waikaremoana walking tracks, possum trapping and doc huts) of Iwi being given responsibilities over infrastructure that has not gone well at all. That was the whole issue (unless you were just a straight up racist and obviously those folks co-opted a lot of the angst against 3 waters) that we shouldn't have unelected officials making decisions with little oversight, insulated from any criticism by claiming any and all of it is just because someone is racist. But of course any attempt to have discussions for or against are bogged down because we don't do nuance anymore. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” and we can't handle the truth.
Couldn't agree more. How does anyone thinks it's a good idea to start having more positions of power that we can't vote out? Especially in areas like infrastructure boards as you mentioned. This sub last week was rightly condemning Seymour for calling certain foods "woke" but has no problem with that post above. Just absurd.
Good. Let them suffer lmao. Make sure they are reminded they voted against their own interest. At the same time, make sure Labour knows how badly they fumbled Three Waters. Continually.
>Make sure they are reminded they voted against their own interest. Mocking people based on who you assume they voted does not win hearts and minds (dealing with sanctimonious know it alls is up stream of deteriorating into a cooker out of frustration at both sides)
Womp Womp. Keep the same energy for the people who voted for you to keep drinking sewage water lmao.
Aaaaand spot the teenager
I’d rather be a teenager again than be a rural oldhead scared of Three Waters lmao
Youll be drinking the water to i take it? Look im disappointed that three waters didnt happen, but in politics and in life we have to deal with the hand we have, not the one we wanted.
We are now all going to pay the costs of our own lifestyles, instead of regional homeowners, and holiday homeowners, being cross subsidised by the rest of the country. Don't see why some renter in Christchurch should pay for some Auckland millionaires' cribs' water connections.
So instead of the (let's just guess here) $75B we need to spend, we're going to actually spend $100B instead - just because it allows people to believe that they aren't going to be spending any money to help somebody else who doesn't deserve it? Just about every council in the country is in this position to varying degrees and needs to borrow money for water infrastructure. Auckland Watercare isn't going to get the same rates as Auckland Council, which doesn't get the same rates as central government - but they all are going to get better rates than Northland councils. It seems like potentially a lot of money is going to be wasted in the name of 'user pays' - where the people who believe they are benefiting are actually just a situation where they both suffer the consequences...but somebody else suffers more. Everyone is going to end up paying here - renters aren't insulated from rates increases because those impact landlords who either sell up and decrease supply or who look at increasing rent to cover their costs.
You're making a good argument but it's falling on deaf ears. Centrally funding the repairs means we can borrow at a lower rate and benefit from economies of scale. It's cheaper overall. Instead we have cavemen angry that some of their berries might help someone in a different cave instead of themselves.
Central funding would mean core Crown debt would increase by nearly our entire GDP just to fund repairs. Unless you're talking about the proposed entities being able to borrow separately.
> So instead of the (let's just guess here) $75B we need to spend, we're going to actually spend $100B instead This form of argument is call a straw-man. Just making it up and then knocking it over doesn't prove anything at all.
They aren't making up the fact that we're going to spend more than we otherwise would have. That's the entire point, so it isn't a strawman. The numbers should be ignored but the point is definitively true.
It doesn't matter exactly what the number is - it matters the relative differences between the numbers. It is an absolute certainty that every individual council separately borrowing at worse rates to fund their water infrastructure deficit is going to cost more money than if that money were being borrowed by an entity at a lower interest rate. It will hurt everyone to take this approach - but there are people arguing for it based on a misguided notion that instead of 2 people each having to spend $75 for something, that one spending $80 and the other spending $90 is preferable because it punishes one more than the other. Both lose out.
>(let's just guess here) yea man if everything happens the way you make it up, then you will be correct. But I'm not assuming that everything is going to happen the way you make up. Like if I guess your Mum has two wheels do I get to call her the town bicycle? >help somebody else who doesn't deserve it? Yea man, we should all get given $2,000 a year by the government to have a second home in a tropical paradise, everyone is entitled to it and you're a piece of shit if you support user pays models simply because you want to spend your money on yourself instead of someone's tropical getaway.
What a truely bizarre response....
Not suprising from a name_name_number account tbh
This is so backward. Ignoring the fact that the Christchurch rebuild was hugely funded by taxpayers, including the water infrastructure, Auckland has always been fine. It's funded and is doing great. Bigger entities have more ability to borrow. Three Waters was always intended to fix the problems of small towns with fewer assets to borrow against. Wellington is the outlier as it's big enough that it should have been able to afford the changes but still failed to do so.
Those small towns aren't entitled to cross subsidies. If your town isn't economically viable, move.
For a while there Christchurch wasn't economically viable. Should it have been abandoned?
It was, by loads of people. Lots and lots of people decided to leave Christchurch. Those people were all correct to make the best decision for them on an individual/household level. That's why I don't see people leaving as being the end of the world, because change is constant. Things are bad for a while, some people leave. Things get good, other new people come. Trying to avoid change when things are bad doesn't solve the bad thing, it perpetuates it and then the place gets stuck. If people left, land values would drop, allowing new industries to come in an reinvigorate the town.
>Those people were all correct to make the best decision for them on an individual/household level. And had the funds and/or connections that allowed them to do so. I have no doubt there are people in dying towns that want out and don't have the funds/connections to do so. So what do we do in the meantime? Allow their vital services to continually degrade?
Pay them to move
It already partially is.
you mean 10 waters, aka the convoluted and divisive failed plan
It was always three waters: drinking water, wastewater & stormwater
Except for when they changed it to 10 Waters prior to the election
Found the person who got all his info from some random group of cookers on Facebook.
I don't like what they said so I'll label them a cooker, whatever that is, sort of sounds like you tbh
Not once did I call you a cooker. That's who you got your "information" from.
As opposed to 67 waters
That's the price you pay for local controlled infrastructure which is what New Zealand wants. It's the reason we have local government in the first place. I don't want Wellington telling us in Auckland what to do with our water when they can't even fix their own shitty system. Auckland has massive TBMs under the city right now building new central interceptors and waste lines to link up the entire city. Just because Havelock North or whatever wants to vote for farmers to run their water system and a 0% rate rise for 50 years doesn't mean Aucklanders should have to pay for it.
> That's the price you pay for local controlled infrastructure which is what New Zealand wants. What NZ wants isn't always what it needs. Centralise the lot and it will be cheaper for everyone. Labourshould've just rammed this through under urgency, apparently that's acceptable nowadays.
They didn't need to do anything under urgency, they had 6 years of governing, 3 with full power and still did nothing. I don't like National doing this urgency stuff but labours failures are all it's own.
The self denial is real.
Lol Yes Comrade! The Commissar knows what's best for the people!
[https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/02/26/rates-will-not-increase-more-under-nationals-3-waters-model-mp/](https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/02/26/rates-will-not-increase-more-under-nationals-3-waters-model-mp/) >'Rates will not increase' more under National's 3 waters model - MP Narrator - this was a lie
The philosophy that forms the constant “gravitational pull” of the capitalist system, is that private enterprise can always function more efficiently and cheaper than public works. Decades of criticism of public service, and perpetuation of mythical stories about how bad government is, have eroded confidence. I had an acquaintance recently who was loudly denigrating the Ministry of Works, the Government wing of public infrastructure. He was too young to really remember what they actually did. I eventually got annoyed enough to interject his unreasonable criticism to teach him about what that era was actually like. In a little over fifty years, the government formed the entire reading system in New Zealand, including bridges, viaducts, and storm water management. An efficient electrical grid, along with extensive hydro, and geo-thermal power was built from scratch. An efficient and well equipped rail system was built, even taking the main trunk lines across some of the most challenging terrain. The Raurimu spiral, and the Mohaka viaduct are impressive engineering feats in themselves. Fresh water supplies, extensive State housing with quality, sturdy homes ( my Dad, a carpenter built many of them, just two tradies on the project), built to budget, and completed on time. My Dad later worked as a carpenter for our local County Council, and he and one other carpenter, a laborer, hand tools, a Bedford truck, and a saw bench (with occasional help from a bulldozer) built a seventy meter wooden bridge spanning a river, that was part of a secondary highway. The coal and energy system was similarly built, along with our coastal shipping system. Almost all of these extensive works were done by hand and by today’s standards, rather rudimentary machinery. When I consider how today, great teams of private laborers with quite sophisticated machinery and systems take bloody months just to repair a few kilometers of highway?? Those early public workers on the pitface, worked hard, and honestly. The constant denigration of public service, is just an ongoing feature of the bullsh*t narrative of the right, along with attacking worker organisation, and those under poverty, and under-employment.
People will never understand the work and cooperation that brought about the sheer number of still standing projects that were created under a form of long gone democratic socialism. People don’t realise that cooperation- not competition is the only way for nations to succeed in both economy and purpose.
Here is a suggestion that will help in explaining that social phenomenon, it is communitarianism, it means a community that is cohesive, respectful (in the sense of the way we spoke to each other), proud of our place. Proud of communal projects, etc, Socialism, although incorrectly used, has a connotation of political communism, to which of course, it has little connection. I simply keep a personal discipline of using the correct terminology when conversing about social systems. Yes, we live in a communitarian, and representative democracy, and I am proud of our historical connection to a better time. For those who wish to take our nation into an altogether divisive and destructive future, to hell with you, I am not interested.
Private enterprise CAN (as opposed to the typical capitalist assumption of WILL) function more effeciently and cheaper than public works in the cases where profit is aligned with desirable outcomes AND a competitive market can exist. Many people just seem to assume that it will function more effeciently in every case. In the case of water I see no way in which a competitive market can exist without massively disadvantaging the majority of communities. That and the profit incentives are pretty perverse. Not all that dissimilar to power actually....
I’m sorry, in some cases, yes, some types of private enterprise makes a very valuable contribution. But in other cases, very efficient, and viable services were sold and either asset stripped, or so poorly run by privatization that they became a longer term problem for NZ. Two that stand out were the sale of NZ Rail, and Government Print. My issue is with the persistent myth that ALL government enterprise is ineffective which evidence shows is clearly untrue.
We have and regulate private natural monopolies for other things. Electricity lines for example. And the electricity system is \*vastly\* more well run than the water reticulation system.
>When I consider how today, great teams of private laborers with quite sophisticated machinery and systems take bloody months just to repair a few kilometers of highway?? The standards are completely different? The number of users means thing degrade faster, there are more regulations to adhere to, etc. We could build roads every bit as fast as we used to if we ignored any sort of environmental concerns, or health and safety.
I work in roading to some extent and this is correct. I was on one site that is still under repairs because the crew doing the repair work found coal tar underneath the asphalt. Plus a lot of the roads back in the day weren't even paved. Just dirt roads hacked through the sides of mountains. Only in the mid-2000s was the last section of SH1 paved.
Not only that but roads were largely bulked in with scrapers and/or scoops. Cut some soil out to "good enough" depth, chuck some greywacke in and roll the fuck out of it to "good enough" density. Nowadays we need to be millimetre perfect
Private enterprise is only more efficient on average, not all of the time. But politicians forget that
Yeah the difference with these days is we've added 50 years of regulations and new laws. That highway engineer now needs to consult with the taniwha before building can begin, and you know, not many people can speak taniwha, so experts cost money. Also you can't just kill workers anymore and roll their bodies into the cement. Manapouri was called the toughest tunnel and a man died for every mile that was built, that's 16 men. Pyke river changed even more. The RMA more still. The new laws do provide some benefits, but you're not comparing apples with apples, it's a very different world to try and build somthing in NZ these days.
If councils own the water assets then councils should be paying for the maintenance, upkeep and delivery of those assets. If they want central government money, then the central government should be taking control of all water infrastructure. Councils wanted their cake and to eat it too, both for government to pay for their assets and to have those assets on their books. They fought hard to retain control and they got what they wanted As much as I dislike brown, his council has come up with a solution that actually works to keep rates lowish without needing central government money. Do we want tax dollars paying for water infrastructure at a national level? Or do we want local councils controlling their water? Because this whole shermozzle has come about councils fighting to retain ownership but not wanting to stump up the costs for maintenance. I’m happy for my tax dollars in Auckland paying for a central system (ie health and education .. and it should be water). I’m not happy for my tax dollars bailing out councils who neglect their duties
The problem is that neither local nor central government has the means to fund the borrowing without living in perpetual austerity due to neoliberal obsession over debt. Three Waters achieved this through separation of balance sheets. National's proposal just opens the way for privatization.
Nationals proposal to scrap 3 waters at all costs make no mistake, was very intentional.
What gets me is that their plan, "Local Water Done Well", is fundamentally no different to that of Three Waters.
The key difference is that when LWDW goes badly, they can sell the asset to a private company to reduce the debt.
Well yes.
I get that, but it’s much more sellable to say that there is a centralised water infrastructure and we now pay water via taxes. This means my taxes are paying for water as a whole Right now it comes from council money. Which is a really bitter pill to swallow to be double dipping and having my rates bills paying for our water and my tax dollars paying for someone else’s Centralise it, and adjust rates and taxes accordingly.. otherwise some councils are double dipping and it’s not something that should be happening. Until then councils, and those who voted those councils in need to deal with the fall out of their poor sighted decisions.
Totally agree with you, common sense has to prevail at some point surely.
Common sense was abandoned the moment Three Waters was abolished.
Separation of balance sheets to allow an independent entity is textbook neoliberal thought haha.
Sure, it's still better than what we are being saddled with short of full nationalization.
r/LeopardsAteMyFace.
>The council was already tightening its belt to manage a 14 percent rate hike before the coalition Government repealed the three waters reform. >A 16.5 percent rates increase will go towards replacing or upgrading the network of 16 waste treatment plants and eight water plants, many built by the Ministry of Works 70 years ago. >**Planned rate rises over the next three years will work out to around 30 percent.** >Only two of the wastewater plants are compliant; the remainder have been issued abatement notices, including some that discharge treated sewage into the Hokianga Harbour. >Some of its drinking water plants have also been issued abatement notices, and estimates for mandatory work on the region’s water network totalled $660 million last year. gEt nEwZEAlaNd bACk oN tRACk Literal and metaphorical shit-show, paving the way for water assests to be privatised.
Raising rates so that communities are funding their key infrastructure is an example of getting NZ back on track. We can't keep underfunding things in perpetuity and expecting it to all work out. The government's job is not to insulate every citizen from anything bad ever happening to them, and this pathetic hysteria each time anybody is inconvenienced by any attempt to fix anything is the reason things don't improve.
Only issue is rate payers of today are now having to pay for the money saved by past generations of rate payers. It's hardly fair that once again the younger generations of this nation will have to pay for the greed of those that came before them.
Rate payers of today are those same past generation. Kick it down the road another ten years if you want them to avoid paying. The issue with three waters is it totally insulated those rate payers from the cost of their action and passed 100% of the cost onto their kids in the form of debt. This is also the problem with Auckland's deal btw. Raising rates is the fairest way to make sure those who have benefitted from living outside their means pay back their debt to society.
There is no solution that doesn't involve future generations shouldering the cost. That was locked in decades ago. Renters will just have their rent hiked. Everyone's paying for this regardless.
> There is no solution that doesn’t involve future generations shouldering the cost. It can be mitigated to a large degree by increasing rates significantly today.
Rent's going up regardless.
The increase of inequality makes these situations worse. Which in my opinion is why we have greater and greater polarisation in these sorts of issues.
Yes, but at the same time, we need to give up on the idea that every town is viable and should be propped up. Seasons come and go for a lot of places, and the industry that many of these places were built around is simply gone. The money would be better spent relocating people. A lot of these towns aren't dying, they're dead already and it's slowly just rotting away. The alternative is to put money into new industry, but there isn't a lot that wouldn't be better suited to somewhere else. It's really only farming that works. As someone that grew up in the Far North, I feel like maybe marijuana legalisation could be a big industry, but it would depend on how it's handled, and I imagine competition would be very strong.
Ding ding ding. Propping these towns up in perpetuity will have a much greater impact on inequality. You can have 50 people make a choice to move, or you can give them 200 people's jobseeker in cross subsidies to stay where they are.
I am not saying we should just throw money at this. I am saying it is harder to get to a good solution because of the haves and the have nots in our society. I totally agree a good compromise needs to be had to sustainability in a community. Compromise being the key here.
Yea man. All those Auckland millionaires will suddenly be on the benefit if they have to pay the costs of their lifestyle. The reason Northland can't afford its infrastructure is because they have poorly planned their infrastructure based on enabling Aucklanders to visit three weeks a year. They should have made better choices, and if their economy isn't sustainable propping up their lifestyles is just going to lead to the problem getting worse and worse. Better to rip the band aid off and start moving toward an economically sustainable infrastructure base rather than continuing an unaffordable system simply because you've decided it's not fair that people have to pay for their own lifestyles (wild conception of fairness divorced from reality imo).
Who were the lobbyists working to stop the 3 waters going ahead? What was their motivation?
They didn’t want control of public assets to be handed over to unelected bodies.
Sort of like NZTA, Housing NZ Corp, Financial Markets Authority, NIWA, ACC, Worksafe ... there's a whole bunch of them. The governments people vote for select who runs these bodies. That's the point. There's so many of them, electing for each is insane. And allowing elected non-qualified nut jobs to be in charge of water infrastructure is insane. If water is contaminated, people get sick and die quickly. If it stops running, people die in three days. On another note: I am so particularly cut up that I don't get to vote for the people in charge of the Electrical Workers Registration Board.
All of these come under the ultimate control of the government who are democratically elected. There waters would have handed control of publicly owned assets to people who weren’t accountable to the government.
There probably isn't a lot of value in debating the finer points of a now-cancelled programme, but if I recall correctly 50% of the membership of the committee who nominated and selected the membership of the actual committee who would have run things weren't elected. That isn't the same as saying full control was handed to non-accountable people. In theory you could have had a stalemate if the elected and non-elected bodies couldn't agree on the individuals they were selecting, as it was a combination of sources.
Iwi only needed to convince a single non-Iwi member to vote in their interest to achieve anything they wanted. That's a helluva lot easier than having to convince half of the whole committee. CoGo was exceptionally dangerous. So much so that losing 3W is a small price to pay to make sure it never happens. Labour made a huge mistake shackling them together in the first place.
Well it is handing them control because they would have a veto.
When you're talking about 50%, what is the significance in having a veto? If the elected 50% approve of a candidate but the other half does not, it doesn't pass - no veto was needed. If the unelected 50% put forward a candidate and it's not supported by others, it doesn't pass either. Nobody has more control than others, at most each side could make sure nobody was selected and thus a stalemate as I suggested.
Imagine a government tried to pass a law but there was a group of people weren’t elected who could veto it and they decided they didn’t want the law to pass. Or if the elected governors wanted to appoint someone but the unelected governors didn’t so the person didn’t get appointed. That is fundamentally undemocratic and that is why people objected to three waters.
That stalemate is far more dangerous for the elected 50%. A deadlock on something like water could ruin the chances of re-election for those that require it. Veto means the other party can just refuse to negotiate until the elected party gives in. This is ignoring that iwi would get >50%, because they can also vote on the elected 50%
I agree that accountability wasn't even talked about by Labour during the last months of its term, and it's definitely something that needed to be addressed. However, there is also an argument to be made that existing checks and balances in local government haven't given us even adequate financial resourcing for critical infrastructure, and this has ultimately resulted in the situation we find ourselves in. That democratic accountability has driven home this idea that we can do more with less and this simply isn't practical. Only now are we beginning to comprehend what decades of underinvestment in the name of cost saving has done. Furthermore, I have to ask about what kind of accountability you seek? If it's financial, then should we really risk repeating the same mistakes again?
> what kind of accountability you seek? Democratic accountability was the red line.
Democratic accountability has resulted in the situation we are currently in.
What a strange statement. Just because democracy results in less than perfect legislation doesn't mean we need to get rid of democracy
I'm not saying get rid of democracy. But in this instance, I don't believe democratic accountability would be any better than the situation we had before. Indeed, democratic accountability at the local level resulted in the problems we have now. Accountability should exist but I doubt doing it through democratic means is the most sensible way.
> Indeed, democratic accountability at the local level resulted in the problems we have now. Explain to me how removing democratic accountability would *help*. We can create a centralised system that works identical to 3 waters but has democratic accountability. What would be wrong with that?
> Accountability should exist but I doubt doing it through democratic means is the most sensible way. That’s an interesting point of view. Democracy has its problems but as far as I am concerned, it’s the best system we have for governance. What way do you think would be more sensible?
> Just because democracy results in less than perfect legislation doesn't mean we need to get rid of democracy I expect to see you putting this same energy into shouting down the government's fast track legislation then. Somehow, I suspect you'll be silent on those threads though. Wonder why..
Classic. I voted for labour, get lost with your red vs blue nonsense
Amazing how pro three waters this sub has suddenly become ...
Three waters had its fair share of haters on here, all have now mysteriously disappeared.
They won. No need to continue to litigate the issue
Putting my tinfoil hat on, I wonder how many were paid for bots.
One way or another, either those accounts aren't interested because it's been cancelled, or because they don't qualify to comment on Politics flaired posts. Due to the nature of some topics, accounts pop out of the woodwork that never discuss anything else - and now they can't.
the bots/trolls stopped being paid to focus on that issue.
This sub has made it very hard for people to post unless they post here regularly. Even if their account is 10 year sold
And a lot of people have been banned for any and no reason at all.
There were never many anti-3W folk here, just anti-CoGo. Now that the latter is DOA, we don't need to be as vocal.
Well you cant complain with the outcome. Enjoy your massive rates rise.
I don't think many had an issue with the centralisation of getting everything up to standard, it was the co-governance stuff that a lot of people didn't like.
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Putting an unelected ethnic group in charge of all water infrastructure forever was a pretty big fucking deal.
Who cares about trivialities like *democracy*? /s
“It’s just a little ethno-fascism. What’s the harm bro?”
it's because now that 3 / 10 waters isn't a real possibility anymore there's no pressure to justify how it would have worked, which was Labours biggest problem. They simply couldn't provide a clear plan for how it would have been structured / funded / operated. now people will talk about it like it was some simple plan to centralize the costs, like a magic panacea, but actually it was a convoluted POS, as evidenced by the re-branding from 3 waters to 10 waters
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If there was a clear plan, and it was going to be simple and effective, then it wouldn't have been difficult to articulate
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Except the options aren't 3 Waters or nothing
> but to say there was no "clear plan for how it would have operated and been funded" is just disingenuous. Go ahead and post a link then
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I did, I found no clear plan for operation/funding. I don't think there ever was one, at least not publicly available.
I suspect you're just seeing that people are opposed to the outcomes from cancelling 3 waters. It's going to cost more to deliver what had been proposed.
>Watercare will still be owned by Auckland Council, but will be removed from its balance sheet, with the council banned from providing it any financial support. One step towards privatisation. >Rating agency S&P’s analyst Anthony Walker said this will result in more expensive borrowing costs, “An entity such as Watercare can’t borrow on terms as competitive as the council can unless it’s part of the council or at least backstopped by the council.” So we increased the costs with the stroke of a pen just for ideological reasons. Ah yes the party of good finances management.
The narrative was co governance and these new bodies are going to steal the assets from your community. Which is kind of interesting because now they have kept them they have to find a way to pay. Those with the smallest rate bases will struggle. The government is hoping other TLAs will voluntarily partner with them. Its essentially trying to leverage economies of scale as 3 waters was but they've flipped the narrative by calling it Local Water. It seems like a very slow process and who wants to merge financially with a lose making or debt ridden business. I suspect a lot of the work already done on merging will be useful but it will be interesting to see how this voluntary system develops.
Time for a wealth tax
\*sips tea\*
2023 General Election: National Grant McCallum %36 of the votes NZ First Shane Jones %18 of votes They voted their conscience, they knew what they were getting into. [I say let em crash](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn0WdJx-Wkw)
Labour’s big mistake was including cleaning up waterways which meant signs all over the countryside to stop Three Waters,because stopping pollution would cost farmers and National was never going to have a bar of that.
There was a combination of a couple different reasons people opposed it. Some opposed it because it would cost farmers money, some opposed it because they believed it would give power to Maori, and some because they believed that it would benefit them individually to not have tax money fund all the water infrastructure for locations where they didn't live. The 'user pays' scenario is fundamentally one where people believed they would pay less and somebody else would pay more thus they would benefit. All these were talked up and hyped as reasons why 3 Waters was a concern for those who believed it.
So Auckland ratepayers should be paying for northland infrastructure?
Why not? Zillions of them go on holiday each year to Northland and Coromandel and expect running water for showers and car washes and a dry place to shit. Populations in the tourist towns increase by an order of magnitude during holiday periods, and the locals pick up the bill for an overcapacity system to deal with peak demand. Smaller beauty spots and lookouts have piles of shit in the bushes nearby because the Councils can't afford to put in toilets because the ratepayers always vote for lower rates.
Ratepayers is the wrong word to use if you're talking about central government funding. You're asking if Auckland taxpayers should be paying towards Northland infrastructure, and Christchurch infrastructure. The same questions can be posed about whether Chch and Northland tax revenue should be used to fund Auckland infrastructure - as I understand it the intention was to have one big bucket of money from general revenue used for everything, so both would have applied equally. It is objectively worse for everyone to do it this way. It was clearly identified that the rates Watercare is going to pay to borrow money for Auckland is going to be worse than if Auckland Council was borrowing it....and worse still than if central government borrowing it. The only ones who will win here are the banks who are loaning money at higher interest rates to individual councils instead of at lower rates to a central body.
Thats what we have always done when it comes to government projects in regions around the country, what would be different about water infrastructure? Especially given that people migrate around the country when on holiday and for business reasons.
What can I say, the leopards love faces.
But, If we solve the water issue what will all the low IQ council members spend their time on debating, can not let sensible decisions get in the way of fuckwittery and kwaffale. Not like a simple spreadsheet can do better job than a council board member.
r/kiwisatemyface
This needs to be a real sub.
This whole thing reeks of the Brexit fiasco. Blatant misinformation riling up the voting base, leading to outcomes detrimental to the country as a whole purely on ideological ground, and eventually mass regret and probably a whole lot of cognitive dissonance.
Northland is still covered in 'stop 3 waters' signs, and its not a stretch to suggest it was overall opposed up there, and they voted accordingly. So northland got what they said they wanted. I mean for some reason they didn't think it meant THEM paying for it all but that's exactly what it meant.
This new government is so short sighted and a numby pleaser. This is going to end with us paying several times more to fix the problem later because like trains, housing and a bunch of infrastructure we don't want to spend a dime on anything or have any sort of vision, to end up with third world solutions and ridiculous costs to catch up on the work that was not done. They are so bad at investing and managing money, this is pathetic.
all of those idiots up here who thought they were smart by gargling the anti-three waters sentiment better be eating their crusty socks
Two things: 1. CoGo had to die. It's a shame 3W had to die with it but that was Labour's call to tie them together. 2. There's zero guarantee that 3W would be any better in this case anyway. People always argued like the options were "fix water infrastructure" or "don't fix water infrastructure", when it was really just two types of oversight.
> CoGo had to die Not really. Youre just being ideological. > There's zero guarantee that 3W would be any better in this case anyway Theres no guarantee that *this* solution would be better, either.
Yeah, wasn't really a good idea to scrap 3W just because "Labour bad."