Watered Down Water Scheme A Betrayal

The right to safe drinking water should be top priority for the Government the Green Party said today and slammed the decision by the Government to delay the introduction of safe drinking water standards by three years.

While it is clear that ensuring have safe water would impose costs on some local bodies, said Green Party Health and Wellbeing spokesperson, Kevin Hague, it showed an appalling sense of priority to give this more weight than the right of New Zealanders to safe drinking water.

“This delay is a betrayal of the one in five New Zealanders who do not currently have access to safe drinking water,” said Mr Hague.

Mr Hague said that there may well be a case for more Government assistance to help those councils with a small number of ratepayers to meet the standard, but this did not justify a three year delay.

“One hundred thousand New Zealanders experiencing water-borne disease is not an acceptable price to pay for this change to policy. Some of this preventable illness will be serious and will clog up resource-stretched health services, and the cost to the country in lost productivity will be measured in millions of dollars.”

Mr Hague also pointed out that even after the three-year delay there was no guarantee that water supplies would be brought up to standard.

“While Mr Ryall has said Government is still committed to the standard, this is not the message local government has heard. Local Government New Zealand has today been quoted as saying that it will be using the three year delay to lobby central government to not implement standards and will be seeking more funding instead.”

According to a comprehensive Ministry of Health Study there are at least 18,000 to 34,000 cases per annum of gastro-intestinal disease from drinking water and these are thought to be under-estimates.

(http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/pagesmh/5821/$File/water-borne-disease-burden-prelim-report-feb07.doc)