By: Mike Hosking | Wednesday, September 19, 2012 7:39 AM

It must be a funny old business being part of a charade for that is all this week’s consultation over water is. Each day this week the Government is meeting with a number of invited groups who apparently have some sort of long standing interest with water and its rights and they’re going to talk about the idea of ‘shares plus’.

‘Shares plus’ is going nowhere because the Government has said it isn’t. It seems the Government recognises some Maori interests in water and has done for a while. Monetising it with board seats and ticket clipping is a step too far. They’ve looked at it, don’t like it and aren’t going to do it.

So why then you ask are they sitting down and talking about it? Well that’s the charade. They need to be seen to be doing the right thing so that when they go to court and are asked whether they’ve done the right thing they can say yes. This will help their case.

Life is full of funny meetings and consultations like this, job interviews where you know you aren’t getting the job but the process has to be seen to be done. Discussions over plans or ideas that never stood a hope in hell of getting off the ground but at least you can say you’ve gone through the process. For a very black and white person like myself, it all seems such a waste of time given basically it’s all driven by dishonesty. What’s the point of having a series of discussions when you know nothing is going to change? The two parties won’t agree and further not only won’t they agree but when they don’t agree you have an increased level of resentment due to the fact that you’ve wasted your time anyway. Remember the Government did this with Maori when they announced they were going to sell assets. The Maori Party packed a sad, they had some consultations, nothing changed and life continued as normal.

How much time you reckon has been wasted over the years in meetings where you knew before they started were going to end up changing zip? I suppose once in a while some sort of miracle occurs, someone says something no one has thought of, someone breaks down through the sheer boredom and volume of the consultation and goes ‘alright you win, have it your way’ but I can’t think of any.

So we’ll wind our way through the week and the meetings, we’ll go through the prerequisite interviews and questions - did you agree, did anything change ,are you hopeful, blah blah blah. Then because nothing happened they’ll go to court. The charade will be presented as something it isn’t i.e. evidence of a consultative process, and the Government will then get on with the sale of the power companies. You’d have thought in the 21st century that something slightly slicker might have been thought up.

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