Russel’s reponse to the State of the Environment Report

by frog

From his media release this afternoon:

“Not only [has the Government] failed to solve the problems threatening New Zealand’s biodiversity which were the key problems identified in the 1997 report, we now have the addition of major problems of environmental degradation caused by land use intensification and increased roading transport, which are also driving water quality problems and greenhouse emissions…

We have doubled the number of vehicle kilometres travelled. New Zealanders are crying out for better public transport, but this Government’s response has been to launch the biggest road-building spend this country has ever witnessed. We need more public transport.

We need central Government to provide strong direction on cleaning up our waterways via a National Policy Statement and a National Environmental Standard under the Resource Management Act. These must contain timelines and targets for improvement.

Federated Farmers will oppose this kind of regulation but the Government must act on behalf of all New Zealanders who want clean rivers and on behalf of those dairy farmers who are doing the right thing by the environment and being undercut by corporate agribusiness.”

Interestingly Jim Anderton has gone in to bat for the Government, saying:

“The Greens, in their usual fashion, want all the world’s problems solved today, but the remaining challenges of agriculture’s impacts on water quality in New Zealand have been accumulating for over a century and will take at least a generation to fix.”

Well, that makes the choice for voters fairly straightforward; You can have the Greens who want to introduce solutions that will work now, or a Labour/Progressive government (Batman and Robin?) that that want to take a generation to fix it.