frogblog

Yesterday’s West Coast drinking water report segues neatly into today’s release of the proposed National Policy Statement (NPS) for freshwater management. By way of background to this document, Labour promised during the 2005 election campaign it would make rivers and lakes safe for swimming.
As the NPS itself states currently only 60% of New Zealand’s freshwater swimming spots tested met the New Zealand guidelines for water-based (contact) recreation almost all of the time.

Yet, the stated objectives for water quality in the NPS appear to be weaker than some existing policies in regional councils’ Regional Policy Statements and Regional Plan documents.
Russel points out that the proposed NPS would give New Zealand one of the worst freshwater quality standards in the OECD. It is also likely to be slowly drip fed into regional councils’ policy statements over a period of up to 12 years - rather than simply inserting the water quality objectives into regional council plans as the Government have the power to do under the Resource Management Act.

Russel highlighted last month that Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and associated industrial farming lobby groups had hijacked the Government’s water clean-up plan -appearing to work in concert to oppose proposals to clean up New Zealand’s waterways.
He’s now arguing that the NPS is:

…meaningless unless defined objectives are included. Objectives such as “Enabling wellbeing of people and communities” and “Improving the quality of fresh water”, for example, are nonsense without specific dates and defined water quality standards e.g. exactly when rivers need to reach a “swimmable and/or fishable” standard again.