Niki Gladding: Centralising water services – who’s really calling the shots?
Intro
In case you missed it, the ‘Reform of Just About Everything’ is underway – including the inter-dependent reforms of Resource Management, 3 Waters, and Local Government.
Unfortunately, these pieces of work are being progressed all-at-once, rather than in a logical sequence and it’s impossible to tell how the multiple pieces of new legislation will work together. On 3 Waters Reform, the Government has considered just one solution (one model to address funding issues), and now the numbers presented in its defense don’t stack up. They’re not even in the ballpark.
A sledgehammer raised to strike a structural wall comes to mind. The ‘wall’ is local democracy and I’d say we have a very brief ‘window’ to stop the destruction.
