Local Government (Water Services) Bill
As part of our Local Water Done Well policy programme, this bill creates a strong, flexible framework for local government to deliver water services that are cost-effective, financially sustainable, and accountable.
This bill isn’t just about the system; it’s about the people. For communities like Mt Roskill, where many are feeling the pressure of the cost of living, keeping water affordable is essential. The good news is this bill includes the necessary provisions to finalise our Local Water Done Well deal for water care, which has already prevented a significant 25.8 percent water rate hike for Aucklanders last year, saving Aucklanders possibly $900 million in water and waste-water charges for the next four years.
This is not just a policy. This is a real saving for households, a true win for Auckland, and a real difference for families in Mt Roskill. I commend this bill to the House.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I wasn’t on the Finance and Expenditure Committee for this bill, but I do have an interest in it, and I want to come to some comments around the stormwater aspects of the bill, which I think are worthy of comment.
This is, I think, the third in the trilogy of the Government’s laws replacing Labour’s affordable water reforms. I think it is an interesting political case study of how Opposition politicking by the National Party locked them into a highly unsatisfactory policy outcome. In Opposition, the National Party pandered to localism. Localism’s not something you hear the National Party talking very much about these days—oh, how things have changed. But they pandered to localism, and they encouraged and engaged in a great deal of disinformation about mana whenua involvement in the governance and the organisation of regional water organisations. That’s a decision that they made in Opposition. But what it has done is locked them into, I think, what is for New Zealand a very unsatisfactory policy outcome, and we can see it in the way that in attempting to address—well, I think there is broad consensus about the problems with water infrastructure in New Zealand. There is the well-documented $185 billion over 30 years, the infrastructure gap for water infrastructure, and the unacceptable degree to which communities all around this country lack access to safe and affordable drinking water. So I think we agree on the problems.
What these three bits of law now put in place is a highly fragmented water services system that actually makes it harder for the entities that control and govern that water infrastructure to provide affordable, safe, modern water services and infrastructure into the future. It replaces one form of centralisation with another—that is, putting in place an appropriate and modern and tough regulatory framework without giving the water entities the tools or the balance sheet to be able to deliver on what’s required of them, but threatening Crown intervention if councils don’t comply. There was a lot of talk early on about enabling and supporting, and even requiring, collaboration on a regional basis, but there’s nothing in this draft law which actually genuinely would help the water entities, the councils, and other bodies from collaborating in the interests of efficiency and sustainability. So it is, I would argue, a thoroughly unsatisfactory outcome.
The effect of the National Government’s changes in this area have been to load on to councils a massive financial liability. People will have noticed in the last week that the Government is threatening now to legislate to impose on councils what they can and can’t do. This is the political theatre that this Government loves so much: to basically shovel the responsibility and the blame on to other people while pretending to be innocent.
Rates have been going up and there’s a reason for it: councils—apart from Auckland, which is I think a special case, which we’ll get to—all around the country are struggling to deal with the balance sheet implications of these laws, and they are having to put rates up. That’s one of the things that’s driving the cost of living crisis that is hurting New Zealanders so badly under this Government. So it’s bad policy and a whole lot of political theatre designed to distract and mislead people.
I wanted to make some specific comments about the stormwater provisions in this bill. I look forward to, in the committee stage, hopefully, having the chance to really dig down into some of the detail. But as an electorate MP in the Te Atatū electorate, the effect of the anniversary weekend floods in early 2023 was to expose the fact that the stormwater network was and is woefully under-invested in in Auckland. In West Auckland, that stormwater network mostly consists of creeks and streams and flow paths, and yet the council has never really properly budgeted, or invested and resourced, the management of that network. In my electorate, 300 homes had catastrophic flooding and water inside their homes. There were many cases, in that extreme weather event, of really severe flooding being caused by blockages in the creeks and streams where those houses were built. It was extremely frustrating for the residents, because, not only on anniversary weekend but a number of times in the preceding years, residents had been worried about blockages in the creeks and streams, and they could not get the council to come in and clear those blockages.
Auckland Council, for the last 20 years, has had a bylaw which says that any streams that abut or path or flow over private land—those streams, keeping them clear, are the responsibility of the private landowners. And so the council just washed its hands and refused to do anything about it. That really exacerbated the risks, and in many, many cases of the anniversary weekend floods, neighbourhoods and people’s homes were flooded so badly as to become uninhabitable because of the blockages and the lack of maintenance of those creeks and streams. So I’m pleased to see in the bill that there’s an attempt at dealing with this issue. There’s a provision which says that the water service provider—in Auckland’s case, this would be Watercare—must work collaboratively with the private owner to develop and implement a solution to manage the risk. The buck stops with the operator, with Watercare in this case, because if the collaborative approach cannot be achieved within a reasonable time or the private owner is unable to implement an agreed solution, the network provider—Watercare—must do it. So I’m pleased to see that.
It also makes it really clear that the private owner is not required to fix a blockage in the network if that was caused by an act or omission of another person in relation to other land. That’s one of the things that so often happened: further upstream in this network of creeks and streams, there might have been a flood or a blockage that caused flooding upstream, or trees flowed down and blocked the stream on private land. So I’m pleased to see those provisions in there.
We will, I hope, in the committee stage dig down a bit more into the precise definitions and the wording, because it’s very, very important in a time of increasing extreme weather-related events, that stormwater networks in our towns and cities have the capacity to cope with these events. This kind of regulation is really important for delivering that. I’ll leave those comments there. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori i te rangi nei mō tēnei o ngā pire e pā ana ki ngā take wai.
[Thank you, Mr Speaker, indeed greetings to us all in the House. I stand to express the statements on behalf of Te Pāti Māori today regarding this particular bill that concerns water issues.]
The ongoing Crown position that everyone owns the water is designed to extinguish the rights of tangata whenua to water. This bill further embeds this position. Here we have the explicit removal of Māori from decision-making roles in water governance, replacing co-governance arrangements, and replacing them with structures dominated by territorial authorities. This shift relegates iwi and hapū to mere consultative roles, with consultation that is non-binding and discretionary. This constitutes a clear breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and of the Crown’s obligations as a Treaty partner. It is ignoring Māori rights.
For this reform to be successful, the Government must re-establish negotiations with hapū and iwi to determine how Māori rights and interests will be given effect to in freshwater management and allocation. Māori involvement is not optional. It is essential for the sustainable and just management of water resources into the future, and this is exactly what the Waitangi Tribunal recommended to our last Government during the establishment of three waters.
The Crown should be working directly with hapū and iwi to create a standard process for addressing Māori rights and interests in water more broadly, including matters of allocation and ownership. Effective reform requires regulatory systems that are coordinated and inclusive. Entrusting individual councils with the authority to decide whether Māori may participate in water governance places the Crown at risk. It increases the likelihood of Treaty breaches, it exposes both the Crown and local councils to litigation, and it undermines the legitimacy of any water services framework moving forward.
This bill also exacerbates the clearly inadequate water services that Māori communities endure. It perpetuates a fragmented, patchwork approach, where access to investment is inconsistent, creating winners and losers, instead of ensuring equity for all.
While this bill contains provisions that seemingly prevent the privatisation of water services nationwide, it’s crucial that the public understand that the Government is, in fact, laying the groundwork for partial privatisation. This involves a local council joining or forming new council-controlled organisations for water services funded by Government grants, and in order to receive funding, a council-controlled organisation must completely have detachment from council oversight and decision making. This separation, effectively, means that these water services organisations will be partially privatised. This isn’t just a minor change, but this is a significant step towards the full privatisation of our water resources.
This bill not only fails to uphold Te Mana o te Wai as a legal principle; it actively repeals it. The bill’s commentary says that “Clause 15 removes the objective to avoid environmental harm,” which is signalling a shift away from kaitiakitanga in favour of urban development, and thereby increasing the risk of environmental degradation.
In the face of accelerating climate change, this bill also omits explicit climate change responsibility for water services providers. There are no requirements for resilience planning, no mandatory vulnerability assessments, and no obligations to prioritise adaptation for the communities most at risk.
To summarise, this bill tramples tangata whenua rights, ignores Te Tiriti obligations, entrenches further environmental harm, and sets us up for the long-term privatisation of our waters. Te Pāti Māori does not commend this bill to the House. Tēnā rā koutou.
I rise as the last speaker on the second reading of the Local Government (Water Services) Bill. This is the third bill that the Government has produced as part of its Local Water Done Well policy programme, which the National Party have campaigned on and is an election promise that we’re delivering. The first bill repealed the previous Government’s water services legislation, the second bill established preliminary arrangements for the new water services system, and this very bill, the third bill, will now establish enduring settings for the water services system.
What’s most important for New Zealanders? We’re asking councils to get back into delivering the basic services that all ratepayers and New Zealanders deserve. I commend this bill to the House.
The question is,
Motion agreed to.