National’s proxies have been advocating for public protest both openly on social media and behind closed doors with industry groups. Protest was a disaster for farmers at the last election and, no matter how good it may have been for the National Party, I still don’t see it as a constructive or useful tool.
Another reason for my antipathy was the recent policy announcement coming from the National Party leaders; the dog whistling has been so loud my Labradors are in a constant state of confusion. Even if there was evidence unvaccinated children of solo mums had caused the measles outbreak in Auckland, and there isn’t, cutting the benefits of those parents still wouldn’t have prevented it.
Of course dog whistle politics isn’t confined to the Nats, at the last election Labour plumbed new depths with their “Chinese-sounding names” housing attack and immigration policies across the spectrum seemed to be a race to see who could be most xenophobic (the Greens, to their credit, pulled out of that race and Labour won by a nose).
I did attend the meeting though. The fact that Muller had drawn a line in the sand and committed to ending DIRA played almost as big a part in my decision to go as the message from a twitter friend saying they’d be there and were looking forward to meeting me.
I’m glad I went. I was expecting a partisan call to arms and an exhortation to drive my tractor to Parliament in protest at the oncoming new regulations. Instead I got reason, pragmatism and encouragement to respectfully engage with the process.
It was obvious Muller had been giving it his all, fresh off a North Island tour he was in Ashburton after speaking in Timaru earlier in the day and Oxford the day before. Barely able to speak above a hoarse whisper he regularly sipped from a glass of water, joking at one point that it was a delicious 2.5% nitrate. I couldn’t imagine David Parker getting away with a comment like that, let alone getting a laugh from the 70 or so people that had come to hear him speak.
The meeting wasn’t strictly about water, it was meant to address the many issues facing rural New Zealand today, but if a politician is going to address a crowd of Mid-Canterbury farmers there’s little doubt it will become a meeting about water.
Muller set the scene by harking back to Helen Clark’s statement some 20 years ago that agriculture was a sunset industry and built on this theme the idea that the current Labour Government does not like farming and want to see it gone. Whether that’s accurate or not, it was an idea the crowd was receptive to.
He lamented that the progress made by farmers had not been acknowledged and congratulated the room on the way farmers around the country had engaged on the proposed freshwater regulations in a respectful and informed manner. This, he said, was the way forward; engaging with facts and science, not pitchforks. Leaning in, he called it.
My friend and I looked at each other when he said this because this was astounding. This is a radical departure from what I had been seeing in public until very recently and it is a philosophy that I could get behind.
National, Muller said, would not be put in a position where they oppose the freshwater proposals simply because of their economic impact. This would be just as wrong as the situation we currently find ourselves in where targets are being set with no regard for their social OR economic consequences. A balanced solution must be found that takes everything into account.
He’s right of course, I just hadn’t heard National say it out loud until now. ECan currently have a nitrate target of 6.9mg/litre, and shifting that target to 1mg has a diminishing positive effect on the environment while the economic and social costs increase exponentially and potentially catastrophically.
I’ve said before that farmers just want to be left alone, but barring that we want certainty which is why a bipartisan agreement on water policy must be reached. I’m very glad to see National are taking this approach and are there fighting for the economic and mental wellbeing of farming communities.
I look forward to seeing them apply this approach to all communities.
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