from Bassett, Brash and Hide
When the public grasps just how much power is being handed to iwi, opposition will skyrocket.
Car company magnate Henry Ford once said: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
The same might be said of Nanaia Mahuta’s plans to confiscate the nation’s water infrastructure assets — paid for by generations of ratepayers and taxpayers — and to hand disproportionate control of them to iwi.
Although there is already widespread opposition to Three Waters — with the provisions for co-governance a significant objection — the vast majority of the voting public has no idea of just how much control Three Waters will hand to unelected Māori elites.
When more New Zealanders come to understand clearly that the real purpose of Three Waters is to broker a radical “Treaty settlement disguised as an infrastructure project” — as David Seymour put it — all political hell will break loose.
What stands between the public and such an explosive realisation is a lazy and myopic mainstream media, more than happy to take $55 million of government funds on condition they support a widely contested view of the Treaty as a 50:50 power-sharing arrangement between the Crown and iwi.
In fact, Three Waters goes much further than that. While it prescribes 50:50 co-governance at the overarching strategic level of the four Regional Representative Groups, iwi will have a dominating influence all the way down through the subordinate levels of management.
While the mainstream media snoozes, independent blogs and news sites are pointing out that the principal mechanism for such comprehensive control are the Te Mana o Te Wai statements, buried deep within the Water Services Entities Bill.
And it is clear these statements — edicts that can be issued at will by iwi and hapū and are effectively binding on the water services entity in their region — have no limits or restrictions on what may be included in them.
Just accept the the so called elitists want the whole country and endless payments.