Labour leaves legacy of pollution

The Labour-led Government should be ashamed for allowing the country’s waterways to become more polluted under its watch, despite Labour promising at the last election to make rivers safe for swimming in, Greens Co-Leader Russel Norman says.

Greenpeace, Fish and Game and Forest and Bird have strongly criticised government policies on freshwater after a Forest and Bird report today showed the country's waterways were more polluted than five years ago.

“This follows Environment Minister Trevor Mallard’s speech to the NZ Water and Waste Association Conference in Christchurch last week where he did little except hand-wringing about the problem and promoted the Government’s National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management as a solution when even the Government knows it’s not,” Dr Norman says.

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 A MAF submission, withdrawn after complaints from the Green Party, was similar.

Dr Norman supported Forest & Bird and Fish & Game’s calls for an independent review of the dairying industry’s clean streams accord, leading to stricter targets in improving water quality and more effective penalties for those failing to meet the target.

Recently the Greens have proposed increased instant fines regional councils can charge for effluent breaches. The present maximum infringement carries a fine of only $750 and some councils have been lobbying for a “mid-level” regime of higher instant fines under the Resource Management (Infringement Offences) Regulations 1999 as an interim step before needing prosecution.

The party has also mooted a resource levy on all commercial water use and that the revenue from the levy should reduce rates and income taxes. Despite a 50% growth in commercial water use over the last decade, with about three quarters for irrigation of intensive agriculture, as a general rule there is no price paid by industrial dairy farmers to use water.