frog:
Thanks for the video footage. I saw it on parliament TV in the evening and frankly it came across like he made a fool of himself, I felt quite sorry for the guy, and it is obvious from the Ahuahu’s posts here that I am not the only one to feel this way. This is why I cannot understand you making such a big deal of it, and feel that doing so may damage his long-term prospects more than it helps. Stop highlighting the poor guy’s mistakes, let the issue die, and instead make a big deal over the next time he actually says something worthwhile.

toad:
There is nothing wrong with “collusion” (cooperation) between a farming company and their farming lobby group, just as there is nothing wrong with cooperation between workers and their union.

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I’ve just updated this post by adding the video footage. Hope that adds to the theatre of the occasion!

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The first point here is that the use of the same wording in the Landcorp submission and the Federated Farmers submission smacks of collusion.

Probably more importantly, it highlights the absence of any requirement in hte State Owned Enterprises Act for SOEs to act with environmental responsibility.

Strangely, they do have a statutory obligation under their Act to act with social responsibility, but no environmental responsibility. “You have to look after your workersm but you can stuff the environment as much as you want” is the rather unwholesome message that gives.

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SOEs, regardless of whether it earns them more money, have even less excuse to engage in unethical business behaviour.

I would’ve said the point is essentially that here we have a lobby group, SOE, and a state ministry all arguing against a provision in a bill that has wide popular support.

I’d also note that just because we can’t currently see a practical way to make every area safe for swimming does NOT mean we should avoid setting goals and incentives up to do so.

I think there was certainly a point here, and a good one, but like many senior Government ministers, Anderton is good at obfuscating points by deliberately confusing the issue. For instance, even if he doesn’t have direct ministerial responsibility, Landcorp and its business partices are clearly related to Agriculture policy.

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The only people who should be embarrassed are those who are working to keep our waterways polluted.

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I completely agree with Ahuahu. Of course a farming company (Landcorp) would cooperate with THEIR OWN representative lobby group (Federated Farmers). If Fed Farmers was in cahoots with MAF that might be news, but Mr Norman produced no evidence to substantiate this claim, which was shot down very effectively by Mr Anderton.

All in all a rather embarrassing exchange for the Greens and your newest MP, and I have no idea what you hope to gain by drawing more attention to it, unless you personally dislike Mr Norman and are trying to discredit him. Give him a chance to get his feet, rather than reporting all his early blunders.

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dag..?

phil(whoar.co.nz)

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11:02 should read * is a bit unclear *

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Also, his constant mentioning of children was lame and smacked of Peter Dunne/ Bill English ’02. There are lots of rivers in the country that have always been unsafe and always will be unsafe for children to swim in for various reasons. The wording of the clause sounds, as Anderton says, unrealistic.

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Russel’s point is a bunclear. Landcorp and MAF are quite different: Landcorp is a big corporate farmer, and so it is not surprising that a large farming entity and Fed.Farmers may have joined heads to develop submissions. It certainly doesn’t smack of governmental corruption, although I do think that the government should take a more direct role in certain aspects of SOE’s corporate direction: as it turns out, I passionately deplore the diminishing water standards due to lax farming regulation. However Russel’s point was unsubstantive as it tried to pin this back to MAF. He should have got the message that he was barking up the wrong tree after a couple of times repeating the same question, but instead he had to be told to pull his head in by one of the most effective and impressive senior left-wing MPs. Not a good look.

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