Kedgley Sue: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:15564] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 First I would like to record my disappointment that the debate on a bill as significant as the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill has been so truncated that I did not have time to put forward any of my amendments to the last part we debated Part 1. This bill is about a major change in New Zealand. It allows the privatisation of our water supplies. It allows ownership of our water supplies by private multinational corporations for 35 years yet we are having a very truncated debate. This bill is being rammed through under urgency. The public has a right to expect that members of Parliament will at least have a say about this far-reaching bill and be able to introduce amendments. So I would like to record my disappointment at the truncated nature of the debate on this hugely significant bill before us. 
I am quite certain that Roger Kerr from the Business Roundtable is listening with mounting satisfaction as we debate all the parts of this bill. Roger Kerr the Business Roundtable and the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development have been lobbying since the 1990s for the Government to allow the privatisation of our water supplies. I have here a number of policy statements and articles that Roger Kerr has written. They point out that private water companies have annual revenue of $300 billion and they beg us to allow private corporations to take over our water supplies. Roger Kerr has achieved his wildest dreams. For 30 years he has been lobbying for this day and he and others will be listening to this debate with huge satisfaction. Finally their lobbying efforts have paid off and from now on multinational corporations will be able to take over our water supplies for 35 years. They will be able to own them control them and manage them for 35 years. What a coup! I know Roger will be listening and he must be enormously satisfied. 
The provisions we are dealing with now are about long-term plans and financial strategy. The key thing is that the consultation requirements in the long-term plans and in other parts of local government have been absolutely gutted by this legislation. Now when councils consult on the long-term plan they will not even have to mention that they have an intention to privatise their water supplies for 35 years or that they have an intention to hand those supplies over to a private corporation to own for 35 years. They will not have to mention this. 
There will be no need any longer to bother to consult communities about such a significant thing. That is the real coup of this bill and that is why Roger Kerr the Business Roundtable and the water infrastructure companies will be rubbing their hands with glee. I predict that there will be parties all weekend for the water companies that have been booted out of communities and countries all round the world because now when they close down their operations in Latin America and even in Adelaide in Australia—they have just been kicked out of Adelaide—they can pick up the pieces come across to New Zealand and seek to privatise our water supply. There will be parties all weekend. One of the main things the private water companies will be celebrating is the fact that they will be able to sneak privatisation in. Councils will not have to consult citizens because there is no longer a requirement to mention in a long-term plan that the water supply is about to be privatised. 
This bill also deals with the financial strategy. One of the many clever little things Rodney Hide has managed to get into this bill is an innocuous-sounding clause that basically requires a cap on rates. It is based on finance and expenditure limits we have seen in America in places like Colorado where they set a cap on spending. In Colorado under legislation similar to this they are not allowed to increase their budget. The aim of course is to reduce spending make us all resent paying our rates and drive down the resources of local government to the point where it becomes bankrupt. 
What happened in Colorado when they implemented the sorts of rate-capping provisions that are in this bill? Well as a result of the grand experiment which this bill is trying to implement the Colorado budget will have a shortfall of $28 million this year which is 10 percent of its budget. It has been brought about by the strangulating effects of this sort of cap. One-third of Colorado Springs’ 24000 streetlights were turned off earlier this year to save about $1 million in expenditure. Residents can adopt a streetlight—they are encouraged to pay $100 a year if they want a light in their street. In the meantime taxi drivers are trying to do the work of police because the police are so overstretched by cuts. Park budgets have been slashed by 25 percent. Grass is now mown monthly not weekly. Buses have been sold and bus services no longer operate in the evenings and weekends. The fire and police budgets lost $5.5 million. 
Is that what we want here in New Zealand? I am sure the people of New Zealand do not want that but that is what is being sneaked through under urgency along with all the other sinister provisions in this bill which is of course all about seeking to implement Rogernomics Part 2. The battleground for the agenda of the Government and Rodney Hide to corporatise and privatise as many assets as possible has shifted to local government in this term of office because the Government has had to rule out national privatisations. This bill is a triumph for them. It is the culmination of years of lobbying and it allows local government to corporatise most of its assets to contract out and to privatise water supplies. 
The Government is hoping that by sneaking this bill in under urgency the people of New Zealand will not notice. It is also hoping we will think that allowing a private multinational corporation to own water supplies for 35 years does not amount to water privatisation—that is what the National Government in its Orwellian double-speak is claiming. Members should not believe that New Zealanders will be fooled. New Zealanders need to be aware of what the rate-capping provision in the financial strategy section is intended to do. It is intended to reduce spending in local government to the point where local government is more and more short of money it eventually goes bankrupt and then—as has happened in Colorado and other places—it is required to contract out and to privatise not just the water supplies for 35 years but all of the other services. 
This is the agenda of this part of the bill and other parts and that is why private water companies will be rubbing their hands with glee. Twenty years of lobbying by Roger Kerr has finally paid off. He and the water companies finally have their goal—allowing them to get their hands on our water supplies and deregulation of the whole water supply industry in New Zealand. It is way beyond their wildest dreams. Already two of the major global water companies Veolia Water and Suez Environment have 39 contracts between them in Australia and New Zealand including ownership of United Water in Auckland and the privatisation of the water programme here in New Zealand. Its name has changed about three times because the ownership of that company has changed over three times in the last decade or so. But Veolia Water this private water corporation owns the water in Wellington and in Auckland already and now under this bill it will be able to get its hands on the rest of the water supplies in New Zealand and it will not even have to consult people in its long-term community plans. That is the beauty of this bill for the private water companies.