Once the consultation has finished and all the submissions have been summarised, the Ministry will pass their advice on to Cabinet who will then issue a National Policy Statement for Freshwater.
That’s it. There’s no select committee hearing and no need for a law change, the NPS will provide direction to regional and district councils as to how they should carry out their responsibilities under the Resource Management Act.
Realising I needed to learn a lot more about the proposals I attended the Ashburton meeting along with some three hundred other concerned locals, and I’m very glad I did because I learned a lot. Not from the officials giving the presentation, as you might expect, but from the well informed members of the audience.
From people like Ian McKenzie and Colin Glass I learned that the current NPS nitrate target of 6.9mg/litre represents a reduction of roughly one third for Canterbury, and setting a new target of 1mg/l DIN (dissolved inorganic nitrogen, which includes nitrate, nitrite and ammonium) is physically impossible if you want to continue farming.
I learned that the science behind the 1mg DIN target hasn’t been made public; I learned that the economic impact of trying to reach that target hadn’t been modelled, and I learned that the inclusion of that target had not been warmly welcomed by the Freshwater Leader’s Group.
Getting any kind of useful information from the panel was a frustrating endeavour: one person asked if Canterbury’s 3,000-odd kilometres of stock water races would be treated as rivers and therefore subject to a 5m fencing setback. The answer was “I don’t know.”
An industry representative stood up and, citing the definition of a river, said they would indeed be subject to the setback. I tweeted his opinion and was contacted the next day by a freshwater scientist who contradicted this assessment.
Getting information from the people who wrote the proposal shouldn’t be this difficult.
Above all I learned that farmers are annoyed. The crowd were polite and respectful but the underlying tension in the room was palpable. Freshwater, agricultural emissions, reducing waste, hazardous substance assessment and more are all happening at once, it’s little wonder that calls for farmer protest have been growing on social media. As one lady in the audience put it, “when is it time to start acting like the French?”
The obvious answer is never, it’s never time to act like the French.
People fondly recall Shane Ardern driving his tractor up the steps of Parliament in 2003 to defeat the proposed “Fart Tax”, and ask why we’re not doing it again. Apart from the security bollards and the high likelihood of the tractor falling through Parliament’s forecourt into the new subterranean carpark, there’s the small issue that the protest didn’t actually work. Sure farmers weren’t asked to pay for emissions research via taxation, but our industry bodies agreed to pay for it via levies instead, with the government reserving the right to reconsider the tax should payments ever stop.
Protest is most successful when you’ve got something the Government wants, which is why teachers and other unionised bodies protest and go on strike when Labour are in power, they know the Government is scared of losing their votes. A successful farmer protest would be one that happened when National are in power, Labour don’t have the rural vote and aren’t scared of losing it.
Protest can be harmful too, just look at the disastrous water protest in Morrinsville leading up to the 2017 election. I don’t know who organised it but they should be ashamed, it was pure muppetry in motion.
The protest drove a wedge deeper into the urban/rural divide and lifted Labour’s urban vote. NZ First got an easy win when they used the policy as a bargaining chip in coalition negotiations, and Labour were more than happy to drop the proposal because they knew charging for water was buying a war over water ownership that they weren’t prepared to fight.
Farmers were the losers from that fiasco, painted as greedy buggers who wanted to make a profit from resources taken for free, and forever remembered as misogynistic dinosaurs who thought the Leader of the Opposition was a “pretty little socialist”.
Forget the idea of organised marches, who wants to protest against protecting the environment anyway? Attend the meetings and fill the venues to overflowing, more than a hundred people sat outside the full bridge hall in Winton, and engage intelligently and respectfully with the process.
The consultation period has already been extended by two weeks, extra meetings are being scheduled and bigger venues found. Ministers are aware of how intently this is being watched and DairyNZ and Beef & Lamb are presenting a united front for the farming sector.
We can all agree with the high level objectives being proposed, and we’ve certainly let the Ministry know their first attempt at a plan to get there is sadly lacking. This is our only chance to mould the proposals into something we can all live with, and you only get to do that by talking to people, not shouting at them. Let’s not waste our opportunity.
