The Alliance Party says the Crown inquiry into the Moa
Point wastewater disaster needs a wider
focus.
Alliance Party local government spokesperson
Ethan Gullery says the inquiry’s scope is limited
primarily to Wellington’s governance under the Local
Government Act.
He says the inquiry fails to examine
the national policy and funding decisions that have driven
wastewater failures across the country.
“Moa Point
did not fail because of Wellington alone,” says Mr
Gullery.
“It failed because successive governments,
over 40 years, chose to treat infrastructure as a cost to be
minimised rather than a public good to be maintained. This
inquiry needs to grapple with that national reality, or we
will simply be back here again when the next pipe bursts in
another city.”
Mr. Gullery says the figures behind
the crisis are damning.
According to recent
performance reviews, New Zealand records thousands of sewage
overflows nationwide annually, while approximately one-third
of the country’s wastewater plant consents have expired,
meaning they often fail to meet modern environmental or
public health standards.
“This is a public health
issue as much as it is an engineering one,” says Mr
Gullery.
“Untreated sewage discharging into our
coastal waters is the predictable consequence of neoliberal
governments that kept rates and taxes artificially low by
deferring the maintenance bill onto future
generations.”
“We are now those future
generations, and the bill has come due.”
Advertisement – scroll to continue reading
The
Alliance notes that the government’s own National
Infrastructure Plan, released earlier this week, identifies
a $275 billion pipeline of projects and a maintenance
backlog that has left New Zealand ranked near the bottom of
the OECD for asset management.
“You cannot solve a
national problem with a series of fragmented local
inquiries,” says Mr Gullery.
The Alliance is calling
for a comprehensive national infrastructure audit and a
fully funded, state-led investment programme,
including:
A National Infrastructure
Commission with Teeth: Empowered to assess the full
national picture across water, transport, and energy with
binding timelines and public reporting.
100%
Public Ownership of Water: Amending the Commerce
Act so water provision can no longer be a commercial
activity, ensuring services are under democratic community
control.
A State-Led ‘KiwiWorks’
Programme: Rebuilding in-house public engineering
and construction capability so New Zealand is not dependent
on expensive private contractors to fix crises.
“The
inquiry should ask not just what went wrong at Moa Point,
but who decided that underfunding was acceptable for so
long,” says Mr Gullery.
“The answer to that
question isn’t just in a Wellington council chamber,
it’s in the Treasury briefings and Cabinet decisions of
governments going back to the 1980s. The Alliance is the
only party prepared to stop the rot by returning these
essential services to 100% public
ownership.”
