Watts SimonSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Tomorrow is a big day for this Government. Despite the objections of local communities Labour will use their majority to ram through the three waters reform at first reading. This is the beginning of the end for them. They've had opportunity after opportunity to engage constructively and work with local government—not against them—and they have rejected that opportunity at every chance. Yesterday in the House I put a straightforward question to the Minister of Local Government: what councils have opposed this reform? There are too many for a five-minute call because together they represent councils of over 3 million New Zealanders. It goes deeper than that. You cannot go into a town hall around this country where there aren't voices opposing this Government's three waters reforms. I can see the faces on the other side of those MPs because they know that local councillors and their local communities are up in arms while they sit silent. They know as we do that this bill of 134 pages is a severance letter to every single one of the entire Labour Party's backbench from Nanaia Mahuta and I don't have any great hope for those MPs opposite who will come out tomorrow and should be backing their communities. That's a terrible shame because our communities are watching. The greatest tragedy is that this was entirely avoidable and was caused by an endless chain of mishaps and bad-faith actions all based on a core agenda of centralisation and control. We all accept that something needs to be done and this is how and where the Government has failed. Although they decide what the solution is it's centralisation and a four-entity mega-model and that's all in by force if necessary. They can give councils just eight weeks to submit on that—a laughably short amount of time—but they could have given them 80 weeks and it wouldn't have made a difference because Cabinet papers show that the decision to take water assets by force had already been made before the consultation had even begun. Then it became a blame game. This Government has spent millions of dollars on marketing consultants showing TV ads of sludge running out of taps and laying the blame squarely with local government. Even the Minister now admits that this was a mistake. To the surprise of precisely nobody that didn't work and every poll shows that Kiwis utterly reject this Government's reforms. In the One News Kantar poll only one in four Kiwis support these reforms. In the Curia poll it was only one in five. Last week a poll showed 76 percent of New Zealanders think water services should be directly accountable to voters including 74 percent of Labour voters. New Zealanders reject these reforms. Maybe marketing wasn't the answer so then they fell back on the classic Labour adage Throw a few billion dollars at it and then hope for the best". The $2.5 billion support package which councils can spend on pretty much anything shows how desperate this Government is to buy support. The money is being borrowed against these water entities putting them directly in debt before they even start operating with the rest being taken out of the back pockets of hard-working Kiwis who are out there without a single metre of water pipe being put in the ground. Councils and communities still oppose it though. Councils who know know that they can find the solutions to these problems. They know that this can't be dealt with through Wellington alone and the answers to these problems are found on the ground where the work is done. The other side is not listening. They'll do what their Minister does and turn a blind eye and say that everything is OK. But National is listening. We hear your voices and we've got your back. The National Party will repeal this legislation and replace the three waters reform. The debate having concluded the motion lapsed."