Three Waters Misinformation

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I went to parliament to pray with a group of Christians recently. Simeon Brown was the only MP at this event, and he asked us to pray for Three Waters. He said that although he would not say what his stance was on Three Waters, as the prayer event is meant to be non-partisan, he has a very strong stance (to be clear, Simeon isn't a fan of Three Waters - and the National Party has pledged to repeal it when they are next elected).

Now, I'm not clued up enough on this topic to know whether Three Waters is going to be a good thing for New Zealand or not, so I have no idea if Simeon's concerns are valid. However I'm a little concerned at the kind of disinformation being spread about what the Three Waters proposal actually is.

As a primer, the three waters the government is talking about are drinking, waste and storm - so, basically the clean water that's pumped to our houses, offices, etc, the used water that leaves our houses, and the rainwater that needs to be moved away from streets, parks, etc back to the ocean (so basically, like the internet, this infrastructure is a “series of tubes” - in this case moving water around rather than data).

The Three Waters reform is a plan to centralise the management of this water infrastructure through four regional organisations, rather than its current management by 67 independent councils around the country. The reason for this reform is that there are concerns in government that in some places our water infrastructure is being neglected, and is falling into disrepair. The reforms are said to be an attempt to save us a lot of money in the long term, as the government will proactively fix issues before they become more expensive problems - and these larger regional organisations will supposedly be able to spend funds where it's needed, rather than each individual council having to raise money locally through rates increases.

The sticking point of this new proposal for many seems to be embodied in a sentence I found on an Internal Affairs summary of Three Waters, talking about protection against future privatisation:

“The involvement of iwi/Māori, with councils, in the strategic oversight and direction of the entities will enhance these protections.”

From what I can tell it's this “co-governance” with Māori that seems to be freaking a lot of people out! I think some of them might have the wrong end of the stick, though, as we'll see:

When I visited a QAnon conspiracy meeting a few weeks ago, a speaker told the crowd that Three Waters would see 12,000 million tonnes of water shipped out of New Zealand every day. That number is about 10 million times higher than the estimated national usage of water in New Zealand per day (227 litres x 5 million people) - and is obviously nonsense. But I'd be surprised if anyone at the event bothered to do the maths and figure out whether what they were being told is true.

As if that's not bad enough, another spreader of Three Waters misinformation is Lee Williams, a prominent English conspiracy theorist who lives in Christchurch. He released a video recently expressing his concerns, where he says that Three Waters will give our water to Māori “elites”, including the rain that falls from the sky!

The idea that Māori will own the rain, or be able to make billions of dollars, just by having a say in how our water infrastructure is managed, seems laughable. But Lee is convinced that, like He Puapua, this is all a part of the erosion of our (god-given) rights.

Of course, Lee has a history of scaremongering about Māori “elites” taking over our country. Because of his views he's been visited by the police a few times for a “chat”, and even lost his job last year when his employer found out the hateful things he was posting online.

The Taxpayers' Union is another group spreading misinformation, saying on their “Stop 3 Waters” roadshow that Three Waters will introduce a “monopoly”. Of course it's not like we have a choice of our water provider at the moment, as it's always our local council that delivers our water, so calling the new proposals a monopoly seems like a deliberate attempt to misinform people.

Now, as I said before I don't know if Three Waters is a good thing or not - I don't consider myself qualified to figure that out, and my guess is we'll only know in the long term whether it actually saves us money, or just makes the current problem worse. But the spread of misinformation on this topic is not helpful, and to me it seems to be a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters (sorry for ending on a bad pun, but honestly it was accidental!).