Andrew Dickens: Our water infrastructure simply isn't getting better

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge · Sep 1, 2025 · 2m · transcript

The Government’s new plan for water services is called Local Water Done Well. It’s all about keeping control in the hands of local councils and communities, rather than shifting everything to big centralised bodies.

Which was what Three Waters did. Eventually Labour caved and the policy got renamed 10 Waters because there would be 10 regionalised bodies, but even that was not popular. And of course there was the troublesome identity politics around Māori co-governance that freaked a lot of people out.

So now, Councils have to submit Water Services Delivery Plans showing how they’ll manage…