Dear Friend,

In case you missed the email from Peter Williams (no relation) last week, the news is now slowly coming out...

Yesterday, the NZ Herald reported on the very matters your humble Taxpayers’ Union blew the whistle on last week:

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says big cheques will have to be written to pay out the many contracts canned as a result of repealing Three Waters.

[…] Speaking to Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking, Luxon said a lot of money was spent to implement the scheme, and it is going to take a lot of money doing the opposite.

“I think there’ll be massive overruns,” Luxon said.

That’s an under-statement! We understand officials have spent upwards of one billion dollars – $503 per Kiwi household!

The article goes on to say (our emphasis):

Luxon admitted there were employees under the scheme who were only one year into five-year contracts who would have to be paid out.

While not sure of the exact numbers of staff who would fall into the bigger payouts around 400 staff were currently working on Three Waters.

He said the Government would have to pay some out of their contracts when the programme was scrapped.

Peter had dozens of emails from supporters who could not believe that 427 staff were working on Three Waters. Many thought it was a typo! This confirmation from the Prime Minister is certainly not good news.

Let's be clear - putting staff and consultants onto five-year contracts was not an accident. They wanted to make it hard for the new Government to roll back Nanaia Mahuta's policy.

And still to be made public are all the IT contracts. We understand they contain cancellation clauses with penalties worth many hundreds of millions of dollars alone.

Loading up these costs was a deliberate and cynical move by the faceless and unaccountable officials under the last Government to try and snooker efforts to Scrap Three Waters. We cannot let the Wellington ‘blob’ (supported by the left-wing media) win.

As Peter pointed out in his email below, this is what Luxon, Seymour and Peters are up against. Some of their colleagues are already starting to backslide on pre-election commitments because officials are saying ‘it’s all too hard, Minister’ and ‘you can’t do that, Minister’.

So, if you’ve not already, please chip into the fighting fund to keep the Government on track.

Only with your support can we fight all the voices in the media, and the public service activists trying to derail the policy agenda the new Government was elected to deliver on. Click here to make a secure donation and keep the Scrap Three Waters effort on track.

Thank you for making this effort possible.

Jordan @ Taxpayers' Union

From: Peter Williams <[email protected]>
Date: Thursday, 7 December 2023 at 3.45 PM
To:   <[email protected]>
Subject: 🚨Scrapping Three Waters is at risk! 🚨 

Hi Friend,

I'm sorry for the long email, but this one's urgent. I’m just back from a meeting with our Three Waters team in Wellington, and I feel sick.

We all knew that the last Government was doing all it could to embed Three Waters, but it is much worse than we thought.

To put it mildly, the officials are going to town to pile on the ‘official advice’ that scrapping Three Waters is illegal and all too hard.  They are delighted to have an unexpected Minister who hasn’t worked in the area and they are working hard to ‘school’ him on the sector.

At a confidential briefing last night, we discovered that the Department of Internal Affairs has hired 427 policy officials for Three Waters.  That is whole office floors of bureaucrats working on policy alone.

As we suspected, they worked right through the election period – and were even signing binding contracts after the election and while the coalition deals were being negotiated!

The 427 people are nothing to do with actual front-line services, infrastructure maintenance, pipes, or actual water (that’s the job for the separate army of officials that have been hired by the new co-governed water entities).  The 427 is just the central bureaucracy to set up and design policy applicable to the Three Waters co-governed entities!

In short, it’s all at risk, . Unless we kick back into gear, it was all for nothing. There’s no nice way to put this, but we need your urgent support.

What we now know: officials have set a trap for the incoming government

The officials have gone about and signed up to exorbitant office leases, IT contracts we understand will cost around $500 million, and $12 million for 'iwi collectives' deepening the roots of co-governance. 

All up, it looks like the officials have racked-up a billion dollars of contracted costs that the new Government can’t get out of.

That’s $503 for every New Zealand household – and not one cent of that went to actually fixing pipes!

And just you wait, .  As the information drips out, it’s not going to be ‘look how irresponsible Internal Affairs has been’ – we know the media will run with ‘how dare the Government scrap something that so much money has been spent on!’ and ‘Government ignores official advice not to scrap three waters!’.

They have laid this booby trap, and it is only a matter of time before official advice is “leaked” given to the media as an attempted hit job to fend off a repeal.

And let’s not kid ourselves.  This was the plan all along.  Wellington’s blob loves Three Waters because it centralises power with them and takes it away from local communities and voters.  They can probably live with scrapping Three Waters – as long as they design and control what it is replaced with!

“It’s all too hard Minister – our option is the only option”

– 427 Officials at DIA

It’s now or never,

As you know , working with experts in infrastructure, local government leaders, network-economics specialists, and regulatory economic lawyers, the Taxpayers’ Union has ensured there is an oven ready replacement to Three Waters.  That’s what the officials are now trying to discredit.

But our model is based on mainstream utility regulation used around the world in water, electricity transmission, airports, and telecommunications.  We haven’t reinvented the wheel but have ensured there is a better alternative to both Three Waters and the status quo. It works in a very similar way to how electricity lines companies have to balance both the need for good investment, provide a reliable and safe service, but can’t overcharge or ‘gold plate’ engineer and abuse their natural monopolistic power.  Unlike the ‘official advice’ being fed to the Minister, the wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented because of the Treaty.

We can’t let officials inject the devil into the detail

So from our end, the policy work is done and the legal drafting is about 75% complete.  But leaving the filling in of the mechanical gaps to the very officials responsible for Three Waters the puts the whole thing at risk.  We need your help to finish the job.  We need to give the strongest possible arm to the governing parties to hold their nerve and overrule officials.

And it’s also clear there is still a political scrap to win.  We must ensure the new Government and Ministers don't give into the pressure from the media, protesters, and powerful bureaucracy critics.

These officials will stop at nothing to protect their jobs and keep Three Waters (or an equivalent)

Remember when DIA officials were caught secretly making changes to the Three Waters legislation, going behind the backs of MPs? Their willingness to sneakily make law changes, even without the knowledge of the then Labour Ministers, shows just how far they are willing to go. The fact not one head rolled for that skulduggery shows how rogue both officials and the Department have become.

Right now there is a competition for the ear of the Minister. Politicians will always take the easiest option, and officials have laid traps to make Stopping Three Waters a minefield.

We need your support to reactivate the campaign, get the detail of the alternative done and dusted, and Scrap Three Waters.

I hope you’re with us.

Peter Williams Financial Supporter and Former Board Member New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union

ps. Time is not on our side. Every day, the Three Waters behemoth drains millions, hires even more staff, seals more contracts, and entrenches itself further.  We need your support right now.

pps. Christopher Luxon, David Seymour and Winston Peters have all promised to scrap Three Waters within the first 100 days leaving almost no time to properly develop a proper replacement that protects local democracy and ends co-governance – we need to make sure that they have something to replace it with, otherwise that job once again be left to the very same people who created Three Waters in the first place.  Click here to get the job done.