If Chris Hipkins thinks rebranding Three Waters by calling it "Affordable Water Reforms" is going to win us all over, then he obviously thinks we're stupid.
At the end of the day, the only serious change I can see here is switching from four monstrous and unwieldy administrations to 10 monstrous and unwieldy administrations.
We're told this means every council gets a seat at the table. But despite the Prime Minister's insistence co-governance is long gone from Three Waters, it's not.
Māori will still have unelected representation on these 'regional representative groups', with their job being to exercise and offer "strategic oversight and direction".
However, they try to spin it, these changes are still a theft of ratepayer assets. - Tim Dower
No one's arguing with the basic facts that drinking water isn't up to scratch in some communities.
Wastewater and stormwater are probably much bigger problems, especially given that they're getting mixed together all too often.
We're told we need to spend $180 billion to bring things into the 21st century. That's around $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Does the Government really think New Zealanders can't work out that if this money isn't coming from their rates, it's coming from somewhere else?
That somewhere else is taxes. There is no magic money tap. If it's being funded by central Government, it's being funded by debt. Debt you and I will have to pay back. - Tim Dower
To be fair to Hipkins, he inherited a sow's ear in Three Waters. Fat chance of making a silk purse from that. - Tim Dower
Labour is being disingenuous with New Zealanders claiming their Three Waters 2.0 policy doesn't include co-governance, will save households thousands of dollars and will keep assets in local control and ownership.
Nothing has changed. This is the same broken Three Waters policy which forces councils into co-governed entities. - Simon Watts
In terms of savings, Labour's own modelling showed eight entities would mean New Zealanders would pay more for water - now Labour is creating ten entities so how will Kiwis now be paying less? - Simon Watts
It is also disingenuous to state that councils will maintain control and ownership over their assets when the governance structure of the entities hasn't changed.
The reality is you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear – Three Waters 2.0 shows Labour hasn't listened to the concerns of New Zealanders up and down the country who have made it clear they want local control of assets and don't want the divisive co-governance structure imposed on them.
Kiwis face a clear choice this election, Labour's broken Three Waters, or National's Local Water Done Well. - Simon Watts
In 2006 Sea World executives, fearful of a backlash from the gay community, decided to change the name of the Phillip Island fairy penguin to little penguin, an act which the community itself described as ridiculous and unnecessary.
That same characterisation could be applied to the lamentably renamed Affordable Water Reforms, aka Three Waters, whose very name has become a controversially partisan clarion call. Lamentable, laughable even, because the water reforms are now less affordable in their new 10-entity formation, a victim of decreased economies of scale.
If Prime Minister Chris Hipkins' policy bonfire two months ago was telling the electorate that he had his eye on the economic ball, then this week's tweaks, and that's all they are, shows that Three Waters is clearly the policy hill they're prepared to die on.
In simply changing the water entities from four to 10, but still denying local government full ownership of their assets, while retaining the 50-50 co-governance of representative groups, and denying councils a promised $1.5 billion, Labour has defined Three Waters as an election issue with a bullseye on its back.
In another word salad this week, Hipkins denied that the 50-50 model is co-governance "as it's traditionally understood", a statement which denies the facts and history. - Janet Wilson
But semantics aside, if Three Waters reforms come to pass on July 1, 2026 – and the odds right now are even stevens if you consider the polls – then increased water bills are a certainty. Because no matter who carves the numbers up – and many have – the costs are astronomical. - Janet Wilson
But whatever Three Waters – sorry, Affordable Water Reform – achieves in terms of providing clean drinking water for larger councils, for smaller ones losing one of their most valuable assets has the potential to be life-threatening.
Water assets represent a council's biggest expenditure, making up 40% of an average council's capex between 2025 and 2029, with that extending to more than 50% for some councils. That's according to the draft report of the Review into the Future for Local Government. - Janet Wilson
Yes, councils around the country have brought this calamity on themselves by kicking the infrastructure can down the road, using the three-year electoral cycle as to why they hide from their responsibilities. But that doesn't justify less democracy for local government, it simply creates the necessity for a more rigorous framework to ensure it's achieved.
The need for change is indisputable; this week's Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ report, Our Freshwater 2023, which tracks Aotearoa's freshwater every three years, proved that when it revealed monitored lakes had worsened by 45% between 2011 and 2020.
Now voters have clearly differentiated choices on who to vote for in seeking that change. You can either choose a locally-owned model with no co-management provisions, or a centrally-based model with co-management.
But one thing is incontrovertible; however the water is managed, whoever owns it, it will be you and me paying for it in some form, either as a taxpayer, a ratepayer or as a consumer.
It's how those costs will be distributed that's the devil in that detail. - Janet Wilson
It sounds lovely to say 'listen to kids'. And no one wants to say that 'children should be seen and not heard'. (Of course not – it's gender-critical women, the people who want single-sex spaces and single-sex sports, who should be seen and not heard, silly!) But there's a reason that children don't have the same rights as adults – why they can't get a tattoo, have sex, get married, buy alcohol, fight / die for their country or drive a car. It's because they don't know who they are or what they're doing yet. - Julie Burchill
There's a reason that we writers are more likely to be witch-hunted than other professions. We love words. We know that being forced to repeat lies is how every evil regime in the world flexes its power. There's a reason the torture of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is followed quickly by O'Brien finally forcing him to lie about how many fingers the torturer holds up. Today, the lie about four fingers being five has been replaced by those who hold up a penis and force onlookers to say that it's female. - Julie Burchill
Trans-rights activists hate our side because they've failed to force us to lie. The words they expect us to use are designed to spread untruths. 'Genderfluid' sounds lovely, for instance. It's what my teenage idol David Bowie was being when he shagged around like a sailor on shore leave one day, and wore a dress the next. When I used to dance to my favourite song of his – 'Rebel Rebel' – I was always full of glee at the line that never got old: 'Got your mother in a whirl / She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl.' We old people don't look down on today's trans antics because we're uptight fuddy-duddies – we do so because we're still reprobates. We find the idea of needing external validation for one's identity pathetic. We didn't need it from our parents; we certainly wouldn't have wanted it from building societies to beer brands, as the softies do today. And as for the poor old whirling mum (trying her best!), today she'd be marched off to the Pronoun Police for not immediately identifying which one of the 72 BBC-approved genders her indecisive offspring was on that particular day. Boy or girl? How dare you limit my potential – today I'm otherkin!
If you go and get sterilised before you can vote, you're not going to be genderfluid, which sounds like being a mermaid cavorting atop a unicorn. If you're a young woman having your primary- and secondary-sex characteristics eviscerated, you're not going to have much in the way of fluids at all – you will be scarred and desiccated instead. If you're going the other way, you will most likely keep hold of your precious male genitalia (less than five per cent of transwomen actually have the chop). Perhaps you'll become a big bully in too much blusher yelling at lesbians to suck your lady-dick. The first option is sad and the second is bad, but they both often have roots in mental ill-health. - Julie Burchill
One of the handy effects of wokeism is that it conveniently ignores class as a form of privilege. So if you went to a fee-paying school, but then identify as 'queer' or an 'ally', you can then behave as if you had a tougher start than, say, JK Rowling. As a child, Rowling was told that, due to her social class, the nearest she could ever get to her dream of being a writer was being a teacher. During the years she spent struggling to become a writer, she was a single parent, on benefits, escaping a violent husband. She has gone from being a billionaire to a multimillionaire through the sheer amount of money she has given away. So she doesn't need to ponce about #BeingKind to prove she's one of the good guys.
Meritocracy itself is now 'racist' and 'the antithesis of fair', according to one Alison Collins, a former commissioner of education in San Francisco. And in the acting racket, it certainly seems almost impossible for bright working-class kids to take work away from the privately educated pricks and princesses currently ruling the roost. Still, I do feel hopeful on reading that a new Harry Potter television series has been commissioned by streaming service Max. Let's hope that the next lot of kids JK Rowling makes stars of aren't such a bunch of prissy, privileged little tossers as the last lot. - Julie Burchill
Societies across the world have long recognised that we all belong to one human race, that we can best live together in harmony when there is a general belief in equality, all belonging in a united county, as one people, equals. That principle has been steadily undermined in New Zealand since 1975, and is now gone: this is a divided nation moving from separation and partnership to co-governance, and towards two unequal race-based parliaments.
There is a choice to be made between tribal rule and equality. We must face the issue, make a decision for ourselves, of what sort of society we want for ourselves now and for the future. It cannot be dodged; to continue as we are is to accept racial separation. - John Robinson
This is the stark choice facing New Zealand in 2023 – to continue down the path of racial separation and division to tribal rule, or to turn back to equality so we can all proudly say 'we are one people', that this is our land, a proud sovereign nation where we all belong. - John Robinson
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