Hand-wringing by Minister will not clean up rivers

The Government is doing little else but hand-wringing over the polluted state of New Zealand’s lowland rivers instead of taking the brave action needed, Greens Co-Leader Russel Norman says.

“Yesterday Environment Minister Trevor Mallard told the NZ Water and Waste Association Conference in Christchurch that, ‘Achieving sustainable water management is important for our economic success’ and that, ‘Consumers will not be interested in buying goods that have been produced at the expense of the local environment’,” Dr Norman says.

“Yet at the same conference he promoted the Government’s National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management as a solution and even the Government knows it’s not.”

The policy statement failed to specify dates and defined water quality standards so all regional councils had a clear mandate to clamp down hard against effluent pollution and it failed to meet Labour’s promise to make rivers safe to swim in within a generation, Dr Norman said.

“I’m not the only one saying so. Former Environment Minister Simon Upton called it ‘one of the most insipid and evasive attempts to grapple with a major environmental policy issue that I have ever seen’ (The Dominion Post July 29) and even farming media, which generally support farmers, are now ridiculing it.

Rural News of August 29 said dirty dairying in New Zealand was “gaining international notoriety” and the same publication said on September 2 “the recently outlined National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management demonstrates an abject failure in leadership”.

“Meanwhile instead of supporting river clean-up efforts at regional council level, state agencies have been actively opposing them,” Dr Norman says. “In current hearings by Horizons Regional Council, which is trying innovative ideas to clean-up rivers in Wanganui, the Manawatu and Wairarapa, state agencies Landcorp and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) worked alongside Federated Farmers in opposing efforts to make rivers safe for swimming.”

The words "the values, management objectives and methods used to determine the water quality standards … do not appear to have been formulated on the basis of robust analysis" appeared in both former Federated Farmers president Charlie Pedersen’s submission and in Landcorp’s anti-swimming submission. A MAF submission, withdrawn after complaints from the Green Party, was similar.