You do realise the government is allowing local bodies to borrow more money for infrastructure and that companies like Standard and Poors set the credit rating standards based on the councils and their organisations ability to pay it back, their income and expenditure and their asset base to debt ratios.
Government are allowing them to borrow more….. if that borrowing is too much that it effects the councils or their organisations credit rating, that’s their responsibility…. not central government.
You do realise that there is only one country in the world which decided it would try to follow Scottish Water by establishing its own version…. NZ. If the Scottish Water way of doing things was so good, why haven’t other countries adopted it? Think of this, before Scottish Water came into being, it was estimated that just over 20% of water leaked from their system, now it’s over 30%. Smaller cities and towns water infrastructure has deteriorated there while only slight improvements have happened to the major cities…. despite them receiving the bulk of the funding.
TBH, I would rather we had looked at what they are doing right in an earthquake city like Tokyo where their water leakage is less than 10% and adopted that here nationally than do things like complaining that a water leakage of over 30% was happening in Wellington. I’d rather that central government funding was available for new water treatment plants in smaller communities like Havelock North than have a centralised bureaucracy. I’d rather we concentrated on outcomes than ideology.