20530 (2026). Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall to the Minister for Infrastructure

20530 (2026). Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall to the Minister for Infrastructure: What evidence, if any, does the Minister rely on to support his claim, made at a public meeting in Lower Hutt in May 2026, that the debt being transferred from Wellington City Council to Tiaki Wai is "neatly correlated" with the Town Hall restoration project?

Hon Chris Bishop: My comments at a public meeting in Lower Hutt, which I did not expect to speak at, were made after I was asked to speak impromptu during the evening. What I said reflects what I was orally briefed on at a meeting with DIA and Tiaki Wai. DIA was clear in the meeting that the amount of debt being transferred by Wellington City to Tiaki Wai is significantly higher than the amount of money the council ever borrowed for Three Waters. I am advised that Wellington uses an unusual approach in its Funding Impact Statements where instead of ringfencing debt, they allocate the amount of servicing they pay on all debt and use that to reverse engineer a debt number for water assets. However, in an RFI conducted by DIA in 2021 for councils to submit their water debt, at that time Wellington City answered that they had $134 million in water debt. This information is publicly available on the DIA website, under water reform archives. In the council’s 2025 water service delivery plan, Wellington Council’s indicative debt transfer amount was $703 million - a difference of over half a billion dollars.