A central basic meme for anyone contemplating a fraud, rort or other too often quasi government compliant effort to extract money.

Fair go is littered with examples where sheer greed buries little people trying to get something done when the smart bastards enter the provider ranks.

Wellington’s new “Mallard Stand” on the parliament lawn one more example of a wide boy or maybe  girl evidently charging almost 300k for a slide that would normally come in at around a couple of grand tops. Then un-named permit grinders took a similar amount to garner official sanction, mentioned were design consent and other ticket clippers,  taxpayers are forced to fund every day.

Such arrant waste and extortion seems to be a pandemic affliction in almost every area where other people’s money is available.

Todays headline has “The Waikato River Authority” seeking ten cents a liter as a “Levy” on water taken from the Mighty River by Auckland City to solve their total mismanagement of providing the “Staff of Life” for its citizens and industry.

Now in almost every shopping trolly where a few plastic containers of vastly over priced water, are to be seen, ten cents a liter seems paltry, however when applied to water already having incurred costs that are truly eye watering already, for infrastructure and treatment it becomes a massive wealth transfer from rate payers of an increasingly dysfunctional town council to the impressive sounding “River Authority”.

That triggered a bit of research as to just who might be going to be rorting somewhere in excess of five billion dollars a year and for water that was once said is “owned by no one”,  delivered/taken to provide a necessity of life for a city a short distance to the north.

Shock horror it seems to be another  sanctioned transfer of money taken by state fiat to a race based group who daily receive advantaged funding based on  ethnicity.

The Grand sounding Waikato River Authority bequeathed by those nasty Nationals currently under fire for reducing the tangata whenua  component of their parliamentary ranks.

My rather lazy research effort very quickly took me to a page published by the Office of the Controller and Auditor General. A couple of excerpts;

Appointment and composition of membership

The Authority has 10 board members – five appointed from each river iwi (Tainui, Te Arawa, Tuwharetoa, Raukawa, and Maniapoto) and five Crown-appointed members. The regional council nominates one Crown member and one is nominated by the territorial authorities. The Minister for the Environment appoints one of two co-chairpersons; iwi choose the other.
The Authority’s investment committee consists of the co-chairpersons and deputy co-chairpersons, and two others. It gives the full board recommendations on applications for funding. In 2015, one of the deputy co-chairpersons chaired the investment committee.

Accountability

The Authority is a unique public entity. It is not subject to the Official Information Act 1982 or the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987. Trustees do not have to make minutes of their meetings public or publicise where meetings are held, and can hold meetings behind closed doors. One interviewee told us that the Authority is “at arms length from government”. However, the meetings are of interest to many and the Authority gives iwi boards a written summary of its discussions.
The Authority’s annual report to the Minister for the Environment is presented to Parliament. The annual report includes financial statements and a summary of attendance at meetings.
The Authority must monitor its activities and achievements and the clean-up initiatives that the Trust funds. The Authority must report at least once every five years to the Crown and river iwi on the results of its monitoring.

Says it all really.

So where regional and unitary authorities are set up across the nation to monitor and control the flow of water within their delegation, for some reason the “Mighty River” that traverses the North Island from the Desert Road where much of the water that used to flow south and west via the Wanganui is added to the river that generates much base load  electricity before entering the Tasman Sea near Raglan requires another layer of “authority.

An Authority that has discovered a windfall opportunity to exploit its asset to many billions of dollars  a year in a sort of Koha I am guessing.

That is not merely “Greed” it is Grand Larceny.