from Jordan Williams @ Taxpayers’ Union

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 e-mails 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 e-mail 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.