I’m not sure how or why the NZ economy manages to get water management so completely wrong, all the time. How is it that Australia, Britain, Japan, I dunno – everywhere else in the world – can have decent water management, and yet we cannot? It is not like we are short of water! Surely we have more water than just about any other country!
It started off a couple of years back with the incredibly stupid campaign for Three Waters – bad videos, incompetent propaganda and a totally incomprehensible business model – and now with the equally dislikable and equally bad and somehow different yet still exactly the same clusterfuck that is Tiaki Wai. Started out bad, still getting worse, run by invisible idiots who don’t talk or appear in public, with an insistence on installing water meters everywhere, including to properties that simply do not need them.
Case in point today on Wellington Scoop, where an article quoted a granny who has an apartment as well as a basement garage. The apartment uses water, the carpark does not. But guess what? Yep – she gets two separate water bills, despite the garage neither using water, nor making / disposing of water, no sewer, no rain water pipes, no fresh water in, not hot water, zero H2O in any way. Yet still gets a bill. That pisses me off, so I wrote in the comments:
“Will Peet ! How about making your first real move on the water front a good one? Why not simply front foot this unfolding disaster, by seizing the bull by the horns, and saying quickly and publicly:
“If a property has no water coming in or going out, then we will simply cancel that water bill, completely.”
That would gain you huge political goodwill, and save you a whole mass of the deeply irritating advertising campaign, and would clear up a whole pile of bad issues right from day one. So then you can simply say to Ceridwyn Roberts and her basement car park bill – Don’t pay it, we will cancel this. As there is no water going in, or going out, there can never be a water meter there, nor any need for one, and so just scrap the account. Completely, totally, and immediately. Do it now.“
I don’t understand why we can’t get better Chief Executives of companies – someone who has some sense of how to manage public expectations first off. Will Peet is apparently the (current/former?) head of Site Safe and “has been an independent director on the board since 2021. A civil engineer, he’s been involved in construction through the rail and defence industries and has worked overseas from America to Afghanistan to Antarctica to Aitutaki. Based in Wellington, Will works as an independent director and advisor and is a member and chair of several major project governance groups.” I’ve got a lot of time for engineers, they are some of the nicest and most competent people out there – almost as good as architects, but, you know, not nearly… but Tiaki Wai – you need to step up and handle things !
Some people are getting really het up about this, understandably so, as the projected increases are horrific! I’ve no idea if the following numbers are true or not, but this is an example from somewhere on the interwebs, forecasting over the next decade:
