Water rights and ownership

It would be an incompetent Government that hadn’t anticipated the SOE water-use row.

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4th August, 2012

This column has previously advocated making greater use of market mechanisms to allocate the use of water. New Zealand has a comparative abundance of water, but we benefit if it is allotted as efficiently as possible. Those familiar with the issue acknowledge the argument, but many point out that the “P” and “M” words have made it = politically infeasible. People object to privatisation, and there are complex issues of property rights involving Maori. This Government therefore showed considerable chutzpah by tackling both P and M head-on in proposing to partially privatise state-owned ...

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