Source water: the crucial missing ‘water’ from the new Taumata Arowai Three Waters legislation

Join the University of Otago for this summer talk presented by Dr Mike Joy, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Drinking water, wastewater and stormwater will soon be administered centrally by a new independent regulator, Taumata Arowai. Considering the perilous state of the three waters in New Zealand this sounds like a great idea, but the approach is classic government ‘ambulance at bottom of cliff’ thinking. For drinking water, they have forgotten the fourth water. Rather than trying to treat the symptoms we should be looking at the source of the problem – that is the source of the water.