Today, Three Waters was rammed through Parliament to become law.

Ignoring the lack of clarity, the outright mistakes, the many deceptions, the failures to follow due process and the concerns of nearly 100,000 New Zealanders - the controversial Water Services Entities Bill (AKA Three Waters) has been forced through by Labour.

No other party – not even the Greens or the Maori Party – voted for it.

As the media and most politicians dance around the central issue, Hobson’s Pledge will continue to clearly declare that the control of everyone’s water has been handed over to an unelected and unaccountable co-governed minority.

A minority who claims its dishonest mandate by virtue of their ancestry alone, while also being unaccountable to their own people. A doubled-edge sword piercing the very heart of our democracy.

Labour's blatant lies around 'ownership' are now irrelevant – let me be as clear as the water Mahuta is stealing, New Zealanders now have no control of their own water assets.

The justification given for this legislation was the claimed need for urgent investment in infrastructure and fear-mongering about water quality.

It has long since been clear that, in fact, this was and will remain a clear, naked and blatant power grab to transfer control of public resources to a select group of Maori, as foreshadowed by the infamous He Puapua Report.

This is clearly the ambition of He Puapua come to life, enshrined into New Zealand law. 

What has been delivered is a complex bureaucracy that will operate, for at least half of the water entity boards, without any direct accountability to the people of New Zealand. And that half will have an effective veto, as the only ways to make decisions are either by consensus or by 75% majority.

Make no mistake, this is a dark day for New Zealand –

Our voices have been ignored

Unworkable and divisive legislation has been passed into law

No accountability has been delivered for countless mistakes and deceptions

Our democracy has been dismantled

Your support for the work Hobson’s Pledge is doing has become more important than ever.

As a nation, we are being reduced to “us” and “them”. We cannot allow this to continue or let this Government’s powerful Labour Maori Caucus operate unchecked like schoolyard bullies.

There is a better way. A way of living together where every New Zealander is equal under the law and the decisions about our collective property are taken by leaders accountable to the people at the ballot box and through public scrutiny by our institutions.

A way that is, in short, the promise of liberal democracy that is the heritage of all New Zealanders. A heritage that has been handed down to us by every generation before us.

Our Government is continuing to avoid accountability for failing to deliver a single positive outcome while it pushes through a storm of divisive legislation that it pretends will fix the failings of its spiralling and even more divided bureaucracy.

We know the Government does not speak for all New Zealanders, just as the Labour Maori Caucus and the Maori Party do not speak for all Maori.

Our mission now becomes to ensure severe democratic consequences for Jacinda Ardern, Nanaia Mahuta and Labour for this flagrant betrayal of our democracy.

Hobson’s Pledge will redouble our relentless efforts to make every New Zealander understand what is being done to their democracy and what that means for them and the country’s future. 

We have already moved co-governance from the issue that politicians would rather leave unmentioned to a major topic of debate (even in the mainstream media!). 

The next step is to make this theft of our democracy a key decisive issue for the next election – one that the major parties are forced to contend with at the ballot box.

We are currently planning our election year activity to push back against the division of New Zealanders euphemistically called "co-governance". This must be in front of every voter as politicians seek their votes.

It is more critical than ever that the average New Zealander understands just how dire the stakes are this coming election. Your support is essential in making this happen and bringing us back together.

I am delighted to tell you that our drive to publish our Open Letter to the Prime Minister in every major newspaper across New Zealand was successful.

Thank you to everyone who supported our efforts to make this reality - none of this would have been possible without you.

Together, hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders are now well-informed about just how much Three Waters will further detrimentally divide our society.

Yesterday, I personally sent the Prime Minister our Open Letter with my own covering letter. You can click here to view what I sent the Prime Minister. 

But our fight is still not over. This Labour Government  is still planning to ram through the enabling legislation for Three Waters sometime before Christmas.

Fortunately, there is still time and we are the organisation that will be relentless in fighting this Government every step of the way as they seek to divide New Zealanders, when we should be moving forward together as one.

In this Update we cover the new attempts to erode democracy that are hijacking the reforms of the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the further complications with Three Waters that are expanding the loss of democratic accountability from just water infrastructure to just about anything involving water.

*BREAKING NEWS*

Government undermines our constitutional foundations

But first, another controversy broke over the weekend as constitutional lawyers caught up with the unprecedented entrenchment amendment, under urgency, of the Three Waters legislation.

Under the cover of urgency and precluding any opportunity for public consultation or consideration by select committee, this Government has inserted a dangerous amendment into the Three Waters legislation at the last moment. 

In the Waters Services Entities Bill, there will now be a requirement for a super-majority of 60% of MPs to amend or repeal a particular section.

The use of a super-majority is normally used only in constitutional matters, such as the term of Parliament. The insertion in this instance demonstrates the Government’s total contempt for the will of the people and is a direct attempt to circumvent democracy. 

But, for now, back to the rest of the attacks on democracy.

The common thread for these is the insertion of new, unclear, and untested Maori words and concepts into our law, and then requiring compliance with these new concepts across complex and varying issues.

The uncertainty thrown up by this kind of law-making is causing havoc and the need for councils and courts to figure out what the law actually means will result in more delay and expense, along with less democracy and accountability.

RMA reform hijacked

The RMA reform announced last week was proudly introduced by Minister David Parker when he confirmed the introduction of the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill.

While most parties agree reform is urgently needed, this already very complex area of law has two outrageous additions included by David Parker.

First, the new regional planning committees must have at least two Maori representatives on them. Not 50/50 co-governance as some were clamouring for, but still another undemocratic intrusion. And it turns out these committees can have 50/50 co-governance, if the relevant councils want them to – do you trust your council to stand up for your democracy?

Second, the new legislation contains a requirement that councils “recognise and uphold te Oranga o te Taiao.”

So we have another case of Maori words with a Maori concept being slipped into an English language Bill and an English legal framework.

This term, new to statute in New Zealand, is defined in the Bill but the scope is so broad that to suggest it will reduce complexity, as the Minister assures us, is naïve in the extreme.

Dr Oliver Hartwich, Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative, presented an excellent analysis of the legislation in his article in the Australian (paywalled).

He observes that “Tikanga is mentioned 31 times, Matauranga Maori comes up 26 times. Kaitiakitanga can be found in seven places. They all beat “property right”, which features only three times.

Dr Hartwich rightly observes that the Bill is taking the integration of purported Maori custom into the New Zealand legal system to a new level.

The nuanced definitions and attempts to recognise special interests are all underpinned by the so-called duty to give effect to the principles of The Treaty of Waitangi.

Besides the policy goals, each time this happens, everyone operating in the relevant space (and resource management affects everyone) is left uncertain of where the bounds of the new law are until the courts rule on it. But the courts also wind up with enormous space to define what these concepts mean, as there is very little in the way of agreed definition.

We the public lose direct democratic accountability over our politicians to achieve policy outcomes, as they hand over that power to the courts and new unaccountable bureaucracies with their vague law-making.

At least for now, we have the most direct form of democratic accountability still available to us, with a vote at the next election.

At the heart of each piece of new legislation or policy introduced by this Government – whether it is about education, health, water, environment, resource management, or local government – is a consistent and egregious fundamental principle, that New Zealanders are to be afforded different consideration based upon ancestry.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the rapid and almost overwhelming pace at which these changes are being foisted upon us is intentional.

Distract, Divide and Overwhelm is a sound strategy for any power grab.

Submissions on the Natural and Built Environment Bill close on 30 January 2023. Perhaps influenced by the 80,000+ submissions received on the Three Waters legislation, the Government is hoping that New Zealanders will be too busy and distracted to challenge yet another enormous piece of divisive legislation.

When asked directly, the Prime Minister cannot guarantee that non-Maori and Maori will have the same level of representation and openly states that she believes one person, one vote is an “overly simplistic” approach to democracy. For this reason alone, we must brace ourselves for another battle that demands New Zealanders are treated equally before the law.

The layers of racial bureaucracy will see the wheels of progress grind to a halt, our nation further divided and all of that for no better outcomes for those who are in need, Maori or otherwise.

The many waters of Mahuta

The complexity of Three Waters reached an even greater muddle of confusion due to the change introduced at the second reading on 16 November 2022. The Bill is now awaiting Third Reading and will likely become law before Christmas.

Now included in the Bill is additional clarification of how the Te Mana o te Wai (the respect or authority of the water) provision should be applied. This expands the potential scope of the complex, co-governed Three Waters bureaucracy out to the coast (that’s right, foreshore and seabed all over again), geothermal water, and hydroelectric facilities.

The ambition is galling.

When the water entities are already structured in a co-governance model, with elected representation forming only 50% of the boards, that added layer of the Te Mana o te Wai obligations results in a further reduction in the influence the democratic sphere will have over water. The Prime Minister is lying when she claims that there is no expansion in scope to the Three Waters legislation.

Layers of Representation

While every Government agency and all new legislation are inserting obligations to a certain interpretation of The Treaty of Waitangi, the radical changes to Local Government New Zealand’s guidelines to your Council’s Standing Orders are another direct assault on democracy.

It is important that silence not be seen as tacit acceptance or endorsement of these new proposed Standing Orders

Stand up for democracy and tell your Mayor to do the same by actively rejecting the divisive and anti-democratic proposal to change council Standing Orders.

Less than three weeks ago, Hobson’s Pledge publicised the new standing order guide from Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ).

Standing Orders are the procedures that your council uses to conduct their meetings and the way they debate. Their purpose is to enable local authorities to exercise their decision making responsibilities in a transparent, inclusive, and lawful manner.

LGNZ send a guide to these standing orders, along with a template to use, to councils at the start of each term and they have made significant changes to this year’s guide from the last version in 2019, without announcement, fanfare, or scrutiny from the media.

These guidelines assert a new special status in decision making for Maori and iwi that will limit the democratic authority of those who were elected by the voters at large (which included Maori).

Tell your Mayor (and the Chair of your regional council, if you have one) to reject these radical and undemocratic changes at defenddemocracy.nz.

The new guidelines claim that iwi and hapu “have a mandate based on their role as the indigenous governors of the land”.

LGNZ does not explain how they came to these conclusions and, without a fundamental change in our constitutional law in the last three years, there is no legal basis for inserting this new status for iwi, even though they try to make it sound like councils have to comply.

You can read the guidelines here: StandingOrder_16_09_22.pdf (lgnz.co.nz)

Councils will be bureaucratically crippled in their decision-making by the cultural minefield that these recommended standing orders require.

Should your council adopt these guidelines there will be:

1. Different rights based for some based upon ancestry
2. More bureaucracy
3. Delays in decision making
4. Increased costs
5. Less accountability

As the newly elected mayors and councillors begin their work serving your community, it is essential that they are reminded of their responsibility to be representative of all their constituents.

Send a message at our easy to use tool and demand that everyone have an equal say in your community. We make it simple to find your mayor with just your postcode.

Our communities need to be inclusive and representative of all New Zealanders, regardless of their ancestry. Do not allow this radical manifesto to differentiate one group of New Zealanders ahead of the rest. We must not be divided against ourselves and this wedge of bureaucracy will do just that.  

Hobson’s Pledge is continuing to push back against racism and will continue demanding that all New Zealanders are treated equally before the law.