Government could have had a better plan for ensuring the public had a good understanding of the problems Three Waters policy was solving, and getting in front of the racist narratives that any talk of co-governance brings up
Opinion: One of the core building blocks of a healthy society is water – clean drinkable water free to all. It's a public good that we all need to thrive. People in our government know it's their job to make sure this building block is in a good state of repair. And it is quite within our means and skills to make that happen.
However, in Aotearoa for years too many people, especially children and older people, have been made very unwell from drinking water. In 2016, in Havelock North 45 people became dreadfully ill with campylobacter, four people died and many have ongoing health problems because their drinking water was contaminated.
As climate change impacts increase, the threats to a healthy water supply will only get worse. After Havelock North an inquiry was held into drinking water in New Zealand and it “uncovered a number of systemic issues in the New Zealand approach to ensuring drinking water safety”, which the Australian Water Association covers in summary in this paper.
Three Waters (drinking, waste and stormwater) is the solution that people in government have come up with to the long-running saga of substandard water quality and water infrastructure in Aotearoa, which was caused in large part by:
* Poor compliance with drinking water standards.
* An unacceptable level of complacency across the industry.
* A serious lack of leadership within the industry.
* Use of untreated groundwater for municipal drinking water supplies.
* Inadequate resourcing of regulators and water suppliers.
There are of course disagreements about whether the specific ingredients to bake the cake we all want are exactly the right ones. However, none of the noisiest public disagreements are actually about whether Three Waters will work to protect people by providing healthy water and water infrastructure.
Many of the arguments against Three Waters ignore the collective care for people and water
What I have heard is a lot about why Three Waters should be ditched because of one particular aspect of the policy – that it has been designed in a way to ensure that decisions about our water are made with iwi and hapū. There is also what I would call small- or anti-government rhetoric driving the opposition, but it's the part about formalising Māori leadership, decision making and equity I want to talk about.
It is interesting that a main argument against Three Waters is not whether the policy will ensure a core building block of our society's wellbeing is in a good state of repair, but rather whether Māori, as the indigenous people and traditional custodians of this land and water – who know how to care for our life-giving natural resources – are properly enabled to bring their wisdom, knowledge and communities’ needs into our decisions on how to care for the water we all need.
When I say interesting, what I really mean is “oh look, racism is being used by some people to deny us all nice things. Again.”
Racism can stop all of us having nice things – including clean drinking water and fit-for-purpose infrastructure it seems
Racism is the wedge that is being used by some people to divide us and reject a not perfect but better than what we have set of changes that will make a big difference to the health of our water and people. And that is a tale as old as white people’s time. I want to be clear that racism hurts Māori and Pacific and people of colour most and most directly.
Racism also works to hurt most of the rest of us in less direct ways. Specifically, when it is used to deny effective and critical upstream changes we need to improve many people's lives.
When racism is used, by politicians for example, to drive a wedge between people in our communities and prevent work that would make the biggest difference it is in essence a massive act of collective self-sabotage.
(If you want to read about other effective public good changes, interventions, and infrastructures that have been halted or removed because of racism, Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together gives a well-researched description of it from a US perspective.)
Anti-racist practices benefit all of us
However, there are solutions to ensure the racists narratives don’t capture critical public-good issues.
First, inoculation is useful – inoculation theory involves alerting people to the strategy/misinformation that is coming. So before being exposed to racist-driven false information and narratives people should get a warning about the likelihood that people seeking power or whatever will try to use racist narratives to divide and divert people’s attention away from the very real benefits of the policy for all of us. You don't repeat any actual racist narratives. You focus instead on naming the motivations of people doing so and reiterate the benefits that most of us across the motu care about. I say this as a Pākeha New Zealander who cares deeply about protecting the people and places I love, something I know I have in common with most people, no matter where we come from, in Aotearoa.
I think people in government could have had a better plan for how they were going to ensure people in the public had a good understanding of the problems Three Waters policy was solving, and a plan for getting in front of the racist narratives that any talk of co-governance brings up.
It is also important that through collaboration, relationships and broad collations of people across our communities we work together to exit stage right the racism that has been programmed into our public and business structures – including our politics and policies. There is no simple fix here. Te Tiriti o Waitangi provides a clear blueprint for how we can start to do that. How as different people coming together we can take best care of each other, and meet everyone's needs. It is no coincidence that the same people who drive a racist wedge through policies such as Three Waters also attempt to belittle and disappear Te Tiriti.
Exciting work has been started at the Ministry of Health with regard to reprogramming our systems: Ao Mai te Rā – The antiracism Kaupapa. What is great about this work is it goes beyond the usual individual-level causes and solutions to racism (implicit bias training for example) and starts to wrestle with the changes that will make the biggest difference within our systems and structures. For me as Pākehā it provides an opportunity to look beyond the issue of whether I am a racist or not – by the way I am, we all are because it's the water we swim in – to see how I might take part in cleaning up that water. Which brings me back to Three Waters.
Ultimately there are any number of public good policies that need to be implemented in the decades to come as part of repairing the building blocks of a healthy society. In addition we need to plan for the big stuff that is coming – climate emergency, environmental breakdown, financial crises, more pandemics. The best way we will do that is through ensuring that the needs and wisdom of all people are directing the plans. And in this country that means ensuring – through structures such as co-governance – that Māori are not just no longer shut out of deciding but in some cases lead it because that simply makes the most sense and benefits everyone. Racism used by some people is a threat to this planning and putting in place the most effective solutions – a nasty, damaging diversionary tactic that we need to reject for all of our sakes.
