I had high hopes for a Green Member’s Bill to be drawn. The Greens had 14 Member’s Bills in the ballot, out of a total of 40, so the odds were pretty good to get at least one.  In the context of the proposed SOE partial privatisations and the Overseas Investment Office decision on the Crafar Farms sale, I would have really loved Russel Norman’s Overseas Investment (Restriction on Foreign Ownership of Land) Amendment Bill to be drawn.

Sadly, that was not to be the case, and none of the 14 Green MPs’ Bills will see the light of day until at least the next ballot. The Bills that were drawn were new Labour MP David Clarke’s Holidays (Full recognition of Waitangi Day and ANZAC Day) Amendment Bill which was under Grant Robertson’s name before the election, and new National MP Simon O’Connor’s Joint Family Homes Repeal Bill.

Neither appear to be controversial from a Green perspective. David Clark’s Holidays Amendment Bill would “Mondayise”  Waitangi Day and Anzac Day for the purposes of the Holidays Act, meaning when the observation of those days falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the following Monday would become a public holiday. That is consistent with Green policy on work-life balance. Last year, because both Waitangi Day and Anzac Day fell on  weekends, workers got two days less holiday than usual.

Simon O’Connor’s Joint Family Homes Repeal Bill seems to have been a long time coming. The Law Commission recommended as long ago as 2001 that the Joint Family Homes Act 1964 be repealed, as almost all of its provisions were redundant, given subsequent legislation. I am curious as to why neither Labour or National led Governments have progressed that recommendation until now, when it finally surfaces not as a Government Bill, but as a Private Member’s Bill.

The Green Party caucus is yet to consider either of the Bills, and at there may be a few technical issues to be addressed at least with the Joint Family Homes Act repeal one.  But they both look sensible suggestions in principle, so I hope Parliament gets on to progress them promptly so other Member’s Bills get a chance to be debated.

There have been eight prosecutions in the past year in the Bay of Plenty regarding breaches of dairy effluent disposal rules and conditions. This is eight too many.

Meanwhile in the Waikato, an Otorohanga farmer has been fined almost $50,000 for two deliberate breaches of effluent rules in March and November 2010.

The Green Party has a plan to clean up our lakes and rivers. We would provide better support to regional councils to work with farmers to ensure that they have all the tools they need to comply with rules and regulations. We would also enable and encourage dairy companies to impose harsher financial penalties upon operators who break the rules.

We need to send the message loudly and clearly: No one has the right to gain personal profit by destroying the common good, that is our precious rivers and lakes.

Dear Mayor and Councillors,

I have to say that I was a little bemused by the Chairperson’s actions with regards to the peaceful presence of the Te Arai crew at the Town hall meeting yesterday. In a democratic society it is appropriate that everyone should be polite and take in to account the democratic right of others. However, that cuts both ways. There are a much more significant number of people who support Te Arai the way it is than those who want sub division The placards were private property and you could have asked the group to move to the back to allow others still seated to be able to see.

The “polite” thing for council to have done was to acknowledge the protest and show respect for the community at large via a “due process” that culminates in what is appropriate for Te Arai. Just to remind you of the beauty of Te Arai I took this photo last Saturday while I was there. A photo taken at Mangawhai or Black Swamp looking south is just as breathtaking. It is as close to paradise as one would find anywhere in the Auckland area. Don’t spoil it. Please read on.

I don’t think any of you would have seen the Te Arai supporters and their families outside the meeting yesterday so here are a couple of pix of them. Many of them travelled from the area to show you their passion for it and all of it’s current inhabitants (rare birds included).

The word ‘development’ is used most widely today (ironically) to describe real estate ventures. The strongest definition for the word is about progress and growth. I don’t believe that we as a society are making progress anymore. All we are doing is killing the earth and making many of it’s inhabitants extinct – what a legacy!

Te Arai could be a natural place where can we can say we have helped to address natural balance. At the moment we are just smothering nature with our capitalist style blitzkriegs. Omaha started as a happy little place with a few baches. Look at it now! it’s just another suburb of Auckland with a black SUV uniform. A small sub division at Te Arai is just the thin end of the wedge. Smart lawyers will argue precedent for future expansion.

Make the decision for nature and the huge public amenity value Te Arai has now, not the profit wants of a few.

Finally, to those of you who support Te Arai as is, thank you for your visionary position.

Yours sincerely

John Shaw, Aucklander and surfer.

Lake Rotorua is seriously degraded and a huge reduction in the amount of nitrogen going into the lake is needed into order to clean it up. While land management practices such as fencing waterways and planting riparian margins play their part in cleaning up our lakes and rivers, the elephant in the room is the diffuse pollution that comes from inappropriate land use and high stocking rates. Much of the farmland in the Lake Rotorua catchment sits on porous pumice soils, and nutrients from fertilizer use and animal effluent drain through the soils rapidly making their way into waterways. Some of this land should never have been allowed to be converted to intensive agriculture in the first place.

A key part of the Green Party’s Clean Rivers Plan is to adopt a minimum standard for intensive agriculture that would give regional councils better tools to regulate intensive agriculture. It is great to see regional councils such as the Bay of Plenty taking the initiative themselves to recognize that we cannot achieve continued land use intensification and growth, whilst improving water quality.

Key elements of the policy position includes:
• Recognition that land management changes alone will not achieve water quality targets for Lake Rotorua
• Acceptance that the Council has an obligation to consider land use changes to reduce nitrogen loads to the lake long-term
• Prioritising of Council resources towards making land use change over actions to make land management changes in the catchment.

Murray made some very good points regarding the snail-like pace at which improved water management is happening. After many years of what he describes as the “gentle approach” of education and persuasion which has failed to improve water quality, Murray paints a picture of Canterbury as a “no-mans land” of water governance.  This situation is brought about by the lack of unequivocal commitment from both farmers and the central Government to do what is necessary to clean up the region. Sadly, this story is echoed in other parts of New Zealand where intensive agriculture has been left to expand without adequate regulation.

Murray’s speech can be read here:

Murray’s speech covers many of the points made by the Green Party in our plan to clean up New Zealand’s lakes and rivers to make them swimmable once more, including a levy on the use of water by irrigators. You can read our Clean Rivers plan here



The report and the the response of freshwater scientists are worth a look.

The report was commissioned by Fish and Game which led Nick Smith to attack Fish and Game (yawn) more than really getting into the substance of the report. In a nice irony, Nick is a trustee of the Cawthron Institute.

In defending the Government, Nick Smith was forced to go back to a report produced by Yale University which claims that NZ does really well on water quality – 2nd best in the world. It is the same report that John Key has been repeatedly referring to in order to defend the diabolical state of our rivers when BBC Hardtalk and us have asked him about it.

So it’s worth putting on the public record the views of Professor David Hamilton – Professor of Lakes Management at Waikato University and President of the New Zealand Freshwater Sciences Society. Prof Hamilton wrote this release but I’m not sure it ever went out publicly and he passed it on to me at my request – I tabled this statement in the House today with his permission.

It debunks the Yale study: the Yale study is based on data more than a decade old; it lumps NZ in with the rest of the Pacific; and Yale refuse to release their data set so other scientists can’t check their work. The fact that Key and Smith keep using it is a sign of their desperation.

Media Statement: International Water Quality Study Lacks Relevance

The Yale Water Quality Performance Index that ranked New Zealand second only to Iceland, with a score of 99.2, is inaccurate and badly outdated say researchers from Waikato University.

The 2010 Yale and Columbia University study ranked countries according to their environmental performance.  But Professor David Hamilton, Chair in Lakes at Waikato University, is disappointed with selection of data used to characterise New Zealand’s water quality.

“We have not only been lumped together with other Pacific Island nations in the NZ Water Quality Index but the data set used for the study is more than 10 years old” says Hamilton.

He added that “recent scientific reports show evidence of increasing nutrient levels in large numbers of the 77 streams and 134 lakes that effectively comprise a national water quality monitoring network”. NIWA maintains the river monitoring network and the Ministry for the Environment holds the lake data set.

Hamilton says that “in view of recent water quality trends and the intensification of land use that is driving many of these trends, the widely reported Yale Water Quality Performance Index for NZ should be disregarded.  We used the most up to date data from the 134 lakes to examine NZ’s performance against the metrics used for the Water Quality Performance Index and obtained a ranking for NZ of only 66.7%”.

Jon Abell, a Ph.D. student at Waikato University, compared water quality in the 134 NZ lakes against that of more than 1500? lakes across the globe in a paper recently published in the international scientific journal Ecosystems. He says that the rating of 66.7% for NZ is much more in line with where his study placed nutrient levels in NZ lakes compared with lakes internationally.  A follow-up paper found that high production pasture had the greatest effect on lake nutrient levels in the 134 lakes.

Hamilton indicates that Abell’s research has been very important in placing NZ into the international context.  “Many of our lakes have naturally very low levels of nitrogen but we also noted that the most polluted lakes had levels that surpassed even the most polluted of lakes internationally.  His study has also emphasised the need for controlling both nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to waterways because these two nutrients are extremely closely related even though most of the phosphorus comes through sediment erosion from overland flow and most of the nitrogen comes indirectly from leaching into groundwaters”.

The Australian carbon price just announced will be introduced on 1 July 2012 starting at A$23 a tonne rising 2.5 per cent a year. It will be paid by around 500 of the biggest polluters and will be replaced by an emissions trading scheme from 1 July 2015.

That’s about NZ$29/ton compared to John Key’s $12.50, and unlike here, the full package of initiatives can be expected to have a meaningful effect on Australian emissions and the transformation of their economy away from fossil fuels.

As Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Christine Milne said Sunday:

With the establishment of an expert Climate Change Authority, the lifting of the 2050 target to 80%, the five year scheme caps updated each and every year from 2015, and a price floor introduced at the same time, I am confident that this package can deliver real, science-based pollution cuts.

The groundbreaking support for renewable energy, energy efficiency and landscape carbon, the contracts for closure of coal fired power plants and the limits on the use of international offsets ensure that pollution cuts which were pushed into the distant future under the government’s original plans will start now.

Indeed, the summary list of key points from the Sydney Morning Herald is impressive:

- Carbon price to start on July 1, 2012 starting at $23 a tonne rising at 2.5 per cent a year.
- It will be paid by around 500 biggest polluters.
- It will be replaced by an emissions trading from July 1, 2015.
- Price ceiling and floor to apply when trading starts.
- There will be two rounds of tax cuts and increases in allowances, payments and benefits.
- The tax free threshold will almost triple to $18,200 from July 1, 2012, and then increase to $19,400 from July 1, 2015.
- Every taxpayer with income below $80,000 to get tax cut from July 1, 2012.
- Costs for the average household will rise by $9.90 a week.
- Average household assistance, under the “clean energy supplement”, will be $10.10 a week.
- $9.2 billion will be allocated over the first three years for industry assistance.
- Most exposed industries such as steel, aluminium, zinc, pulp and paper makers will get free permits representing 94.5 per cent of industry average carbon costs.
- $300 million has set aside help the steel industry move to a clean energy future.
- $1.3 billion has been set aside for a Coal Sector Jobs Package, targeted at mines that are most affected by the carbon price.
- A $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation will be established to invest in new technology.
- $3.2 billion has been allocated to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
- Closure of 2000megawatts of dirtiest power generators by 2020
- Agriculture is not subject to carbon price, farmers to benefit from carbon farming.
- Small grants will be made for community-based energy efficiency programs.
- Transport fuel excluded, but heavy transport to start paying carbon tax in 2014.
- Climate Change Authority to advise on pollution caps and meeting emissions targets.

It is almost surreal to imagine an equivalent approach in New Zealand, and that’s unfortunate for more reasons than one. As Co-leader Russel Norman points out, the Aussie carbon price poses a risk to the NZ economy.

If we continue with a weak carbon price, we’ll fall behind Australia economically as their businesses become more carbon efficient under the new scheme,” Dr Norman said.

The support now being offered to clean technology in Australia, both in the carbon price and the $10 billion for clean energy announced today, means we risk losing some of our best and brightest clean technology companies to Australia. Instead, we’d be left with subsidised polluting industries.

We’re already spending about $1 billion a year subsidising carbon pollution, and as the price of carbon goes up, that bill will go up too. We can’t afford to carry polluters while driving away our clean tech entrepreneurs.

…
The race is on to innovate and move to a low-carbon economy. By setting a higher and firmer price on carbon, Australia will have an edge over New Zealand in the new low-carbon economy.

A higher price on carbon will stimulate thousands of smart green jobs in Australia, while New Zealand will be left behind with an economy choked by greenhouse gases.

The Key govt has long argued that NZ needs to align our emissions reduction schemes with Australia. Of course, they didn’t reckon on there being Greens involved across the ditch to ensure a realistic approach was implemented.

Expect the excuses as to why we can’t match the Aussies to begin flowing any time now.

Invasive trout blamed for poor water quality — are farmers off the hook?

Scientists are questioning claims by a prominent dairy industry representative, suggesting trout are a ‘disastrous species’ — no better than ‘freshwater stoats’ — and that farmers have been unfairly blamed for their impacts on declining water quality.

These allegations were made in a speech last week by outgoing Federated Farmers chair Dairy chairperson Lachlan McKenzie, urging members to use science and their own judgement to distinguish fact from opinion.

Professor Colin Townsend, Dept of Zoology, University of Otago comments:

“In his speech, Lachlan McKenzie advises us not to accept someone’s opinion as gospel but to interrogate it and check it out. ‘If robust it will stand scrutiny’, he says, ‘if not, there is cause for concern’.

“As a researcher with 40 years experience and someone intimately involved in both trout research and the effects of agriculture on stream ecology I wish to comment on a few relevant points.

“Our research has shown that by reducing grazing by stream insects, trout can lead to a modest increase in algae on the streambed. These extra algae have the effect of sucking up some nitrogen from stream water and so the trout actually make a small contribution to cleaning up the mess caused by nutrient runoff from farms. In any case, the small changes to nutrient fluxes in streams associated with trout are swamped by the much larger amounts of nutrients entering as diffuse pollution from the land.

“It’s worth noting too that our research in Otago shows that soil erosion, and the resulting smothering of the streambed by fine sediment can be even more harmful to stream health than nutrient enrichment. Unless Lachlan McKenzie has witnessed trout emerging from streams and churning up the land with their big fat hooves, he will find it difficult to shift responsibility from cows to trout.

“Farming is important to New Zealand but so is the state of our environment. Thankfully, many farmers are already doing their best to be good stewards. What is needed now is more discussion, education and collaboration between all sectors with an interest in land and water management, not an untutored and distorted analysis of the evidence.”

Professor Angus McIntosh, Chair in Freshwater Ecology, University of Canterbury comments:

“I have studied the influence of trout on native biodiversity for most of my career, and as a researcher, I’m also involved in developing ways to mitigate the effects of land-use intensification on waterways.

“Yes, it is true that trout have negatively influenced native biodiversity and they do alter nutrient cycling. However, to compare their effects to stoats, and to imply they are somehow worse than, or equivalent to, the effects of land use intensification on water ways is a misrepresentation of the science.

“Firstly, they are clearly not ‘eating the basis of the food chain’ since we have highly productive trout fisheries in clean water streams. Native fish populations have been affected, but the resilience displayed by stream invertebrates in supporting predation by both native and introduced fishes is remarkable. Secondly, the effects of nutrient enrichment on algal accumulation and nutrient cycling are much more powerful than those of trout.

“Experiments conducted in New Zealand and elsewhere clearly establish that elevated nutrient concentrations quickly overwhelm any effect of trout on algae, which is actually small by comparison. Trout have not been responsible for what could be described as ‘algal blooms’ in New Zealand or elsewhere. Moreover, the effects of nutrient enrichment on stream invertebrate communities are also likely to be much stronger than those of trout. …

“The health of water ways in places like lowland Canterbury is very poor at present. The primary causes in agricultural areas are high sediment levels, low flow and high nutrient levels. In urban areas, storm water contaminated with heavy metals and sediment (especially since the earthquakes) are to blame. Discussion regarding urban and rural waterways should be revolving around plans for rehabilitation and management, and needs to based firmly on the best science possible.”

Prof Jenny Webster-Brown, Director — Waterways Centre for Freshwater Management comments:

“Trout may be an introduced species, but they are also the most sensitive species to most contaminants, and the first to show the effects of water quality decline. Because they are widespread globally, there is also a great deal of toxicity data (data that tell us when a particular species will be affected by increasing contaminant concentrations) available for trout; certainly when compared to the data available for species which are endemic to New Zealand.

“Trout are therefore a very useful indicator of water quality, and protecting them ensures an additional level of protection for other species from the effects of poor water quality. “

I spoke on the science of declining water quality at the Fed Farmers Conference last Thursday. My PowerPoint presentation from the speech is available as a PDF here.

1. Thompson stands by the claim that women should be paid less than men because they take off more time because of their periods. He doesn’t apologise for it, just says he sorry if he caused offence (ie claytons apology).

2. When asked what his evidence is, he says that “the woman” who does the books at the EMA tells him that female EMA employees take more time off than male employees of the EMA, and anecdotally employers tell him the same.

So his “evidence” is totally shonky. But it gets worse.

3. When asked if this extra time off that women allegedly take is due to their periods, he storms off.

So not only is his evidence shonky that women take more time off, he can’t link it to his claim that it is due to menstruation.

4. Thompson says that he opposes the Greens amendment to the Equal Pay Act on the grounds that it would be a bureaucratic nightmare to record the genders of all staff.

Then proceeds to tell us that his own organisation, the EMA, records the genders of all its staff, hence how he gathered his evidence.

5. He tells us that employees wouldn’t want their pay and conditions revealed as part of the process of addressing pay equity, then proceeds to reveal quite alot of personal information about one of his employees.

6. When he doesn’t like the questions he bullies the interviewer and physically stands over her.

I challenge the Board of the EMA to view this video and tell us that this is the guy they want to represent them and other employers in New Zealand.

With a little bit of creative licence, the exchange went something like this:

Tony: We need to partially privatise them so that Government can raise capital to spend in other areas and so that the energy companies can get access to more capital.

Russel: But the energy companies could just issue bonds to raise capital, you don’t have to privatise them.

Tony: Yes but selling shares is better than issuing bonds.

Russel: But you just forced Genesis Energy to buy Tekapo A&B power stations from Meridian with $821 million in borrowed money, and then Meridian used that money to pay Government a special dividend of $521 million. So effectively you made the power companies go further into debt making it harder for them to get the capital.

Tony: They might have done that but we didn’t make them.

Russel: But if you do sell them, none of the proceeds of the sale goes to the companies, it goes to the Government, so it doesn’t help them get access to more capital at all.

Tony: That’s right. But they can then issue more shares to raise capital.

Russel: But if they issue more shares then the Govt’s share will be diluted and will be less than 51%, and hence you will lose control of them.

Tony: [Pause] Um, well…. if that happens then the Government will buy some of the shares to ensure that we keep at least 51% ownership.

Russel: So to protect your 51% ownership you would need to buy 51% of new shares offered, so half the new capital raised will actually be provided by the Government?

Tony: Precisely.

Russel: What was the point of all this exercise again?

Tony: Life in Wonderland has its own point.

Here was Steven Joyce’s reply:

Nothing to say here. Nothing to say here. Nothing to say here. Nothing to say here.

So Gareth tried again:

Steven Joyce still wouldn’t take a call to respond.

As Toad, one of our regular frogblog commenters, has pointed out at g.blog:

Under the SOP, the restriction on foreign ownership will be gone.  The free local calling provision is supposedly protected.  But there will be a new and far less robust mechanism than the previous statutory requirements. The mechanism to do this will not be a special rights share, but according to the Ministry of Economic Development [PDF] will be:

“…a combination of constitutional requirements on the company, a small parcel of ordinary shares held by the Government, and a Deed between the company and the Government.”

So there will be no protection of free local calling in statute law.  The constitutional requirements and the Deed will be able to be reviewed by any future Government  without any reference to Parliament.  And if Don Brash and his Actoids are part of a future Government, you can bet the farm on free local calling being gone by lunchtime.

As Green Co-Leader Russel Norman said today:

How can we be sure that National or any future Government won’t break the promise to keep a majority ownership stake in our state-owned energy companies?

The underhand way the Government has handled this major policy change on the Kiwi share suggests that John Key can’t be trusted. He’s obviously committed to a privatisation agenda and seems to have learned nothing from the disastrous decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s.

On May 27th I visited the Lower Kaituna River and the Ongatoro/Maketu Estuary, just to the east of Tauranga. I met up with Ray Bushell and Maria Horne from Te Arawa, and Julian Fitter, a local conservationist.

They are trying to save the Maketu Estuary and the Kaituna River, which are highly degraded ecosystems.

The Kaituna River flowed through the Maketu Estuary until the 1950s and it was a thriving food basket. Then a canal was cut so that  the Kaituna was diverted to the sea before it got to the Estuary, and only a trickle now goes through the Estuary. This was in order to lower water levels upstream and stop the flooding of a few farms near the Estuary during high flow events.

The result is that the Estuary is now in very poor shape with the collapse of the kaimoana/ kai awa, ecology, water quality and flows. The local community has lost a valuable community asset. This went alongside the draining of the wetlands so that out of the original 6100 ha of freshwater wetlands, there is only 92ha wetlands remaining – yep that’s right, we’re down to the last 1.5%.

A plan has been drawn up to restore at least some proportion of the flow from the river through the estuary, but as of yet there has been no action.

The problem is made worse by the terrible quality of water coming down the Kaituna River – something I blogged about previously. Nitrate levels have been increasing at about 2% per year since 1990. About a third of the nitrogen in the river comes from Lake Rotorua via the Ohau Channel but the rest comes from the lower catchment of the river – mostly intensive agriculture but also sewerage and meat works.

And if you want to know why there is so much pollution coming in have a look at this:

This is dairy farming, in what used to be wetlands, just near the estuary and the river.

As you can see dairy cows are being farmed in the mud right next to the drainage ditches. There are no fences and clearly the cows have been right in the water. You can spot some of the dairy beasts in this shot:

Here you can see the large algal blooms caused by the huge nutrient loads:

And if you follow this series of drains, this is where they end up draining into the Kaituna River:

But not to worry, as the sign next to this drain says, the water is perfectly safe to swim in:

Good to know the district council is on the job – I’ll get my bathers!

Of course all of these activities are entirely unconsented - because they don’t need a consent, they are permitted activities under the RMA. Fed Farmers and Dairy NZ are fighting tooth and nail to ensure that these practices continue to be unregulated. The National Party’s Blue Green Minister for the Environment helpfully watered down the draft National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management so that these activities continue to not need a consent to do this kind of environmental vandalism – in fact it is approved environmental vandalism.

So when you hear about all those serious non-compliance issues, it is just the dairy shed effluent that is the issue – ie just the faeces, urine and wash-water coming out of the dairy shed at milking time. And dairy shed effluent only makes up 10% of the nutrient load going through one of these outdoor industrial dairy factories (aka farms).

But I hear you say, at least there are good rules around dairy shed effluent. Think again. Here is a dairy shed effluent pit that is about 20m from the Kaituna River.

It is full of effluent and is simply a hole dug into the ground, there was no waterproof liner. The pollution laden water is draining through the groundwater directly into the river. So far as we are aware, this is a complying dairy shed effluent system.

Finally, I had enough and headed off to give a talk to Whakatane Greypower, and here’s one of the sights by the side of the highway:

This is the kind of freedom that Fed Farmers and Dairy NZ are fighting to protect – the freedom for every dairy corporation in the country to shit in our rivers.

I make no pretense of being unbiased, but I think Russel nailed the real economic issues facing New Zealand very well:

Bill English didn’t.

Last Saturday I went to pay my respects to one of the grand old men who built the Canterbury Plains, the Rakaia River.

The Rakaia River is the greatest of the remaining untamed braided rivers. Starting in the Southern Alps it reaches the ocean south of Lake Ellesmere/Te Waihora. It is one of the rivers that literally formed the Canterbury plains by moving rocks and stones down from the Southern Alps over millions of years.

The Rakaia was the first river in New Zealand to be protected by a Water Conservation Order (WCO) in 1988 – Water Conservation Orders are the equivalent of national parks for rivers.

Russel and Eugenie Sage next to Rakaia River

The WCO protects minimum flows in the river and draws a line in the sand against irrigators and hydro companies. In a world where greed never sleeps, and freshwater is everyday more valuable, WCOs are essential to stop the relentless pressure to take a little bit more every year until there is nothing left.

And that’s why Trustpower (owned by Infratil) and the National Party Government are determined to break the WCO protecting the Rakaia River to extract water to irrigate up to 140,000 hectares of south Canterbury. There’s money in that river and they want it.

They plan to mine this national park.

Rakaia River with Mount Hutt in the background

I started the day at the bottom of the Rakaia, at the Rakaia Huts settlement at the mouth of the river. I travelled with Eugenie Sage, one of the elected ECAN councillors that Nick Smith sacked because she stood up for water, and Scott Walters from the local Greens. We met with Bill Southward, chair of the hutholders association, and went out on his jet boat to see what’s happening. First time I’d been in a jet boat, quite good fun.

Bill and jet boat

One of the paradoxes is that low flows in the Rakaia causes flooding at Rakaia Huts settlement. A bit counterintuitive, but at the mouth of the river it is, as Bill puts it, The River versus the Sea. The ocean current carries shingle north up the coast, and, if the river flow is weak, the sea will close the entrance to the Rakaia river with shingle. And if the entrance is closed the river will bank up and the lagoon will rise up until it floods parts of the settlement.

Mouth of the Rakaia with shingle being pushed from right to left by the coastal currents

Bill’s lived down there for donkey’s years and has seen more and more flooding as the river has got weaker as more and more of its water has been abstracted by dairy corporations, either directly from the river or from the many bores drilled down near to the river.

He showed us how the spring fed rivers running into the lagoon had reduced in flow, as a result of the groundwater dropping under the impact of extraction for dairying.

On the bank of the lagoon

Then we had a meeting with the locals at the community hall. A few people came over from the huts on the south side of the river but most of them from the north bank settlement. It would be fair to say that there was a fair representation of four wheel drives and the hunting fishing shooting fraternity amongst the attendees.

Meeting at Rakaia Huts Community Hall

People at the meeting had a lot of memories and stories to share. Memories of when there used to be trout in the Selwyn river, before it was drained for, and polluted by, irrigation. Stories about how they used to swim in the rivers as kids but how they wouldn’t let their kids in them now. Stories about what a great wonderful river the Rakaia was but they feared they were witnessing its slow death just as they had witnessed the slow death of other nearby rivers.

And they had a great anger at their loss, an anger that all New Zealanders should share. They saw the arrival of the great dairy herds – 5000 cows on Rakaia island between the north and south branches of the Rakaia river with ready access to irrigation water and effluent disposal.

As ordinary New Zealanders who liked to hunt and fish and enjoy the outdoors they felt helpless when faced with the giant dairy corporations with all their money, and with the Selwyn District Council and the government in their pocket. Conspiracy theories abounded.

Pivot irrigator on banks of Waimakariri River.

And rightly so, there is a conspiracy. There is a conspiracy to drain the Rakaia for more dairying. Forest and Bird’s Official Information Act requests revealed that as far back as September 2009 central government was meeting with Trustpower and had decided that they needed to change the WCO on the Rakaia if Trustpower’s irrigation scheme using Lake Coleridge for storage was to proceed. Here’s one abstract

Aide Memoire from Gerry Brownlee and David Carter to John Key, 4/9/09:

To accelerate the TrustPower Lake Coleridge proposal, application could be made to MfE to amend or revoke the existing Rakaia WCO.

Officials and Ministers were looking at how to change the WCO so they could get access to the water and lower the minimum flow. The following graphic shows probably the best case scenario for the impact of the scheme:

The Government was looking for a way forward when an opportunity presented itself in the form of the Canterbury mayors attacking ECAN. When the Government removed the elected councillors at ECAN, they simultaneously undermined WCOs in Canterbury with the same legislation. The earthquake has now provided perfect cover to steal the water from the river.

Only a people’s revolt will stop the river-eating dairy corporations and their agents in central and local government.

Pivot irrigator, Canterbury Plains

Then we headed upland through miles and miles of industrial dairying. Bill remembered when all this land was drystock farming and now it’s all irrigated with the Rakaia’s water.

We stopped to look at a fish trap – masses of water is taken from the north bank of the river next to the SH1 bridge and enters irrigation channels and passes through this dinky machine supposedly to remove fish.

According to those who have seen it in operation it kills more than it saves.

Here is one where water is taken from the south bank. This is the amount of water taken when irrigation is not occurring.

Then we went up to the Rakaia Gorge. Most of its length the Rakaia is a braided river spreading widely across its shingle covered river bed, but here in the gorge it is penned in for a while and it thrashes from side to side as it passes through.

We stopped for lunch above the gorge to be briefed by Dr Tim Davie from the regional council about studies underway to understand how much river water is lost to groundwater.

It seems that both flow minimums and flow variability are essential to the health of the river. Minimum flows mean that there is enough habitat for freshwater fish; medium flow events clean out the periphyton that grows on the shingle underwater; and big flows are essential for cleaning out the vegetation that grows on the islands between the braids. This vegetation can act as habitat for stoats and other predators of the birds on the river. If you eliminate the variability by controlling the flow, you eliminate the flora and fauna adapted to that variability.

Edith Smith from Ashburton Forest and Bird talked about the flora and fauna of the river. Nearly three quarters of all the wrybills in the world live on the Rakaia – wrybills are the only bird to have a a right bending beak – to poke under the shingle for food. Black fronted terns are endangered but common on the river – absolutely beautiful.

Time for my second ever jet boat trip, this time in Phil Deans’ jetboat.

Phil’s family are old time Canterbury, their family donated the park in town and the family homestead was famously destroyed in the quake. Phil is a farmer in the foothills who thinks we are doing too much too fast and threatening what makes NZ special, like the Rakaia River where he fishes and jetboats.

We went down to the Highbank intake, where Trustpower are already pumping up water using some of the existing infrastructure of the Rangitata Diversion race.

Then we headed upstream through the gorge. Stunning place. These are the places that make New Zealand special.

The Rakaia River Gorge – NZ how it’s supposed to be

Those who came before us wisely protected this magnificent river. They made this river into a national park for all of us. Now a new generation wants to mine this national park. We mustn’t let them drain the light from this beautiful river.

I’m standing next to Shayne Cunis, Watercare’s Water Treatment Manager. Shayne has been involved in various battles that Watercare has conducted to try to stop the Waikato River getting even more polluted, and, much to his chagrin, I mentioned him and Watercare’s battles in Parliament a few years back.

This is me drinking the water.

Tastes pretty damn good actually, but by crikey it takes a lot of effort to make it this good.

This is what the river water looks like after it is drawn from the river, screened for big objects and has coagulants added.

Pretty ugly. You may be able to see large globs of muck coagulating on the aluminium sulphate coagulant.

Then this is what it looks like after the coagulated gunk is removed.

Much cleaner but still with a lot of nutrients. There is algae visibly growing on the surface and on the pipes.

Then the river water goes into the really fancy part of the treatment plant which is the membrane filtration – lots of long straws with tiny little holes in them – the holes are 0.035 microns across (micron is one thousandth of the milimetre). So only things that are smaller than 0.035 microns can get through into the straw and to your tap – which stops the protozoa such as giardia and cryptosporidium (from all the animal faeces in the river).

This is what the straws look like when they are out of the water.

After getting through the straws then they go through carbon filters, which apparently have nematodes and other things growing on them which filter the water even further. You can see through the clean water down to the carbon filters in this picture.

Then it gets a bit of chlorine added to kill the viruses and anything else. A bit of fluoride is added, as well as some lime to get the pH right.

And then out comes clean water that is sent in a pipe over the Bombay Hills to contribute about 10% of Auckland’s water – a number that is likely to increase over time as Auckland grows.

This very sophisticated treatment plant cost around $155m. It delivers water at around 19c per cubic metre (1000 litres), which is considerably higher than the cost of the water coming out of the dams in the Hunua Ranges.

The Waikato river treatment plant and pipeline were built after the 1994 drought and were pretty controversial at the time. But it’s here to stay.

What I like about it is that it means that about one in three New Zealanders (Auckland, Hamilton et al) have a very direct interest in the quality of the water coming down the Waikato River because their drinking water is extracted from that catchment. The more polluted that water is, the more expensive and difficult it is to treat it. And if the water gets more polluted, then Watercare will have to invest in even more sophisticated treatment equipment than they have now.

So how bad is the water at the end of the Waikato river?

This is a photo of the mouth of the Waikato taken from the plane yesterday.

Really bad is the answer. It has masses of sediment, lots of nitrogen and phosphorous that feeds algal blooms and heaps of faeces and everything associated with faeces such as bacteria and viruses. There is also a fair bit of heavy metals, some of it natural and some added by Contact’s geothermal plant (they are one of the few geothermal plants that doesn’t re-inject).

A short way upstream of the mouth, the level of faeces near Auckland’s water intake regularly breaches swimming standards. The faeces is largely animal in origin.

In Hamilton they say “Flush twice, Auckland needs the water”. And it’s true that Hamilton’s treated sewerage goes into the Waikato, but only a small fraction of the pollution in the river is due to Hamilton’s sewerage or other point source discharges. Around 70% of all the nitrogen in the river, for example, comes from non-point sources, largely intensive agriculture.

Source: Waikato Regional Council

At the top of the river, as the water leaves Lake Taupō, it is so clean that you can see 12m or more through it. By the time Aucklanders extract it at Tuakau, you can’t see your feet if the water is half way up your ankles.

Median water clarity in Waikato River (Waikato Regional Council)

To get a first-hand view of the river I went for a paddle yesterday, starting at Mercer, past Auckland’s water intake, and pulling out at the Tuakau bridge.

At Mercer I met with Rangi Mahuta and Sally Koia from Waikato Tanui. They are pretty distressed about the state of the river. Tainui are now part of the joint management River Authority which was a Treaty settlement deal. It has some funding to clean up the river and some regulatory tools. The Government has appointed John Luxton to co-chair the Authority with Tuku Morgan, which, given Luxton’s background with Open Country Cheese with its record of pollution, doesn’t fill me with hope. But we shall see.

Joining me on the paddle were Al Fleming and Jon Wenham from Forest and Bird. Al has blogged on the trip too, reflecting

“I can remember swimming in the Waikato River at Cambridge on a daily basis during my summer youth, but one look at the Waikato River at Mercer reminded me why that was no longer possible.”

Jon on the river:

All the rain meant the river was probably even browner than usual – you can see the paddle disappearing into the water.

There were some nice bits of regenerating kahikatea forest, here’s Al in front of some.

We paddled down past the intake for Auckland’s water at this buoy.

And then we came across some pretty average farming practice in these parts.

These animals are unfenced right on the Waikato River. I went over to have a look and they decided I was interesting too, and a big bunch of them came over to have a look at the kayak.

The faeces and urine go straight into the river and the trampling on the edge adds to erosion and sediment. This is what Fed Farmers are defending against regulation.

It is very basic to fence animals out of large rivers, but even this very basic level of good farming practice isn’t in place on the river. We need rules in place to regulate intensive agriculture like this so that we can clean up our rivers.

The real challenge is that getting basic good farming practice in place is only the beginning. Even with good practice there is still a huge run-off of nitrogen from intensive agriculture. As I said in the House back in 2008

Watercare … stated in a submission that discharges from just one industrial dairy development in the Waikato catchment involving Landcorp could mean “the nitrate increase and increased risk of protozoa would cause a decline in water quality”, and “If irrigation was allowed for this one project, summer low flows in the Waikato would reduce by a further 13 percent and river nutrient concentrations could go up by 120 percent.”

Thankfully that particular project didn’t go ahead after the financial crisis but there are plenty more that will take off with dairy prices at high levels. We need clean water rules.

Thanks to everyone involved including Colin for the kayaks.

Russel goes over a 7m waterfall on the Kaituna

Russel is about to wrap his second annual Dirty Rivers Rafting Tour. Russel has been visiting rivers that are either dangerously polluted, or threatened due to large dam and irrigation projects, and rafting or kayaking them with local environmentalists, whitewater enthusiasts, iwi, farmers, and media.

The purpose of the tour is to highlight the threats to our precious rivers, but also to celebrate some of the most beautiful rivers in the country. It’s also to put pressure on Environment Minister Nick Smith to adopt clean water rules now before it’s too late.

In this podcast, on the eve of his final trip, Russel talks about the highs and lows of the tour, whether he got sick from the dirty water or scared going over a 7m waterfall, and why we need clean water rules, now.

This week’s track is Regenerate, by the Midnights, supplied courtesy of Loop.

Clink the arrow thing to listen…

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If you’re having problems with our Flash player, try this alternative site. This podcast series is now available on iTunes.

The problem with urgency is that it often means that laws don’t receive the kind of scrutiny they should. So it means you get laws with mistakes and laws that do bad things without ever giving the people a chance to influence them.

To be fair, sometimes urgency is just extending the sitting time of parliament just to get through a backlog but using normal processes. Nonetheless, the amount of time parliament spends in urgency can give some indication of how much the governing parties are trying to subvert the usual checks and balances of parliament.

It is great to see Russel’s concerns now being echoed by others in the political arena and the media.  Here’s Labour MP Grant Robertson, last week:

1. By-passing the select committee process should be something that is done in only the most exceptional circumstances. It may be that a different kind of urgency motion should be required for that, with perhaps 75% of the House having to agree.

2. We should investigate whether there is a way of extending the sitting hours of the House in a way that does not compromise the integrity or quality of the legislative process. One suggestion that has been floating around is to allow for the Committee of the Whole House to sit on Wednesday and Thursday mornings when the relevant Select Committee is not sitting. I am sure there will be other suggestions.

And National aligned blogger David Farrar:

1. That standing orders be changed so that a bill can bypass select committee stage only with approval of the Speaker (as is needed for extraordinary urgency).
2. That standing orders be changed so that question time automatically carries on, even if the House is in urgency
3. That the number of sitting weeks be increased, hence reducing the need for so much urgency, from 31 to 33 by reducing the number of two week recesses from five to three.
4. That standing orders be amended to distinguish between “extended sitting hours” which would merely extend the sitting hours on Wednesday and/or Thursday and full urgency (where you specify particular bills, and the House keeps going until they are disposed of)

Today, the NZ Herald joins in:

The copyright law is an especially curious case. It was set aside after being reported back from a select committee last November, and did not seem a pressing matter. All the Government’s rush has done is spread apprehension. A more considered approach would have avoided this. Likewise, there seemed little reason for urgency for the latest Christchurch legislation, other than to establish the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. The Government had already granted itself wide-ranging emergency powers under law passed after the first earthquake.

Legislation rushed though in this manner has a much reduced chance of being good law. When the select committee stage is bypassed, a valuable chance to iron out problems is removed and opposing viewpoints are denied due consideration. A glaring example of this was the law change introducing national standards in schools.

Well done, Russel, for getting this discussion started.  All we need now is for National to take notice of your concerns. Maybe that will happen now some of their supporters are beginning to share them.

As recently as January 18, the regional council warned people to keep their dogs out of the river, otherwise they could eat the toxic slimy black sludge algal bloom and die.

Getting vomiting and diarrhoea in a bikini might look glamorous but it’s still vomiting and diarrhoea.

The Mangatainoka has its headwaters in the eastern slopes of the Tararua Ranges Forest park where the water is clean and full of life. But as it travels east onto the farmland of the Wairarapa it collects pollution from agriculture, sewerage and industry.

The degraded river then turns northward to join the Manawatu for the journey through the gorge that cuts a mountain range in two, creating the Tararuas to the south and the Ruahines to the north, before flowing through Palmerston North and out to sea on the west coast.

Old man Manawatu is older than the mountains themselves but his sickness is palpable.

We started just downstream from the Pahiatua bridge, not far from the Fonterra processing plant.

There were some of the crew from the Ruamahanga trip, including Mike Birch from Whitewater NZ and Dave Woodcock from Wairapapa Outdoor, Vicky and Heike from Massey Uni ecological economics who have been working with the community on solutions, and others who just cared about the state of the river including the Wai Not Go Green crew. Special mention to Stella McQueen who has self-published a book on looking after native fish in an aquarium and is now doing a masters in freshwater ecology at Massey – awesome.

The Greens have been battling with Fonterra because of their application to get a 22 year extension for their resource consent to dump untreated condensate from their Pahiatua plant (below) straight into the Mangatainoka.

The condensate is what comes off the milk when it’s boiled to create milk powder – it has elevated levels of nutrients and is hot.

I had gone to look at the discharge point for the Fonterra plant in October last year. Steaming milky smelling fluid, visible through an open manhole cover, could be seen pouring into the Brechnin stream which then drained into the Mangatainoka.

There were huge algal blooms in the stream.

Fonterra say that by changing the discharge point, from the Brechnin Stream to the Mangatainoka itself, they will improve the stream, which is probably true. But they will still dump into the river.

Fonterra argues that the nutrient-rich steaming water will make little difference to the Mangatainoka because it is already so polluted, which is also true to a point, but also quite shocking. Remarkably, in their application they even concede that agricultural runoff is one of the main sources of pollution of the Mangtainoka. But they argue that because of the existing pollution they should be allowed to keep polluting the river.

That which makes this grass green will also make the river green

It is deeply hypocritical that Fonterra downplays agricultural pollution when we try to get them to clean up dairy farms, but then they play up agricultural pollution when applying for a point source discharge for their processing plant.

In Victoria, Australia, where Fonterra pay for their water and there are stronger regulations, Fonterra have invested in reverse osmosis technology which turns condensate into clean water that can be reused in the processing plant. In NZ the water is free and there are few regulations so they figure ‘why spend the money to clean and reuse the water when you can get more bore water for free and dump the polluted water in the nearest river’? Of course this goes completely against the Manawatu Accord that they signed last year in which they promised to be part of the solution for cleaning up the river – if everyone took the approach that it’s already polluted so a bit more pollution won’t matter then the river will only ever get dirtier.

The flow in the river was pretty low so we had to carry the rafts over many of the little rapids. The river bottom was covered in sediment and algal growth. There were very few fish visible. I lifted up the rocks in the riffles to find invertebrates but there were precious few. Fish and Game’s drift dive results have shown a dramatic drop in the number of trout in the river from about 96 trout per km in 1987 to 7 trout per km in 2009.

Fonterra are right that agricultural pollution has left the river in a dreadful state. We also drifted past the discharge point for the Pahiatua town sewerage; charming.

The river was full of navigation hazards left over from previous pointless flood mitigation attempts – large railway irons poking out of the river bed (like the Ruamahanga), wire mesh and other crap.

Finally we rounded the bend and there was the Tui brewery.

I nearly stripped off and frolicked, but then the large blue plastic pipe discharging god-knows-what put me off.

Thanks to Mike for his organising role, Dave for the rafts, and everyone for coming along.

But here’s Minister for Everything, Steven Joyce, deputising for Finance Minister Bill English,   replying to Green Co-Leader Russel Norman in Parliament today (full transcript available here):

Dr Russel Norman: Why is the Government ignoring the compassionate offer of New Zealanders to chip in to pay for a levy at $1 billion a year, which is a much more fiscally responsible approach, and one that avoids the risk of a credit downgrade due to increased borrowing, and that also avoids the risk of inducing a new recession if there are big spending cuts in the Budget?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I note that it is a compassionate offer by the Green members on behalf of a whole bunch of New Zealanders they do not speak for. I think that is largely what is going on here. That is cool and everything, but the reality is that the Government believes strongly that we can reprioritise expenditure. As I have said, the Budget will be out in the middle or at the end of May, or something like that, and the Greens will have a chance to see how the Government will do that.

Um, Mr Joyce, the poll indicated that substantially more New Zealanders favoured a levy over increased Government borrowing or substantial public spending cuts to help rebuild Christchurch. But the Minister for Everything obviously has his own agenda.   It is to create an economic crisis, and then use that as an excuse for privatisation of the assets we all own as taxpayers.