His Worship The Mayor Tasman District Council
Dear Mr. King
I write in order to respectfully advise that the Tasman District Council must reject Council participation in the Government’s ‘Three Waters plan’. If your Council for any reason feels unable to reject the plan out of hand then at the very least you must hold a binding referendum of local voters to determine District/Region participation.
My reasons for urging rejection are as follows;
As you will be aware, the proposed governance areas are along Tribal Boundaries and place Tasman with the much larger population centres of the south and east coasts of the North Island. One would have to be very naïve to not realise we would tend to be left behind in priorities and probably spending.
The Government talks about the economy of scale. Absolute nonsense! Almost without exception experience has shown the bigger the bureaucracy, the more disproportionate the costs, the lesser the accountability and the greater the inefficiency. Sadly our Country abounds with glaring examples of this basic fact.
The proposed Governing body is to be made up of 50% Iwi appointees and 50% Council appointees. It is inevitable the Council appointees will include either Iwi members or avid supporters thus it is likely that the body will end up Iwi controlled.
Whilst on one hand giving over locally owned assets and infrastructure to central control is at the very least unwise, giving them over to a narrow self-interest group that has no voter accountability is madness.
I must also remind you that freshwater is the birthright of every single New Zealander, regardless of ethnicity. Any of the shonky claims put out claiming Maori ownership fly completely in the face of common law and history. If required I can enlarge on this.
The Government also claim that the assets will remain in Council ownership. Again nonsense! Once the assets have been placed onto the balance sheets of the Governing body and they have borrowed ($160 billion) against them then the assets will be lost to local Ratepayers forever and it’s fraudulent to suggest otherwise.
This Three Waters plan is foul. It has the Government using ratepayers’ assets and the birthright of every single Kiwi to pay off Labour party election debts to the Maori Caucus. I urge the Council to reject it along with the Government’s 30 shekels of silver being offered as a bribe.
Please share so others can discover The BFD.