Waitaki board proves to be own goal

The Waitaki Catchment Water Allocation Board was set up last year to provide an end-run around normal resource management law.

Politically it looks like being an own-goal, however, because its plan has the electricity sector, business groups and farmer irrigators up in arms.

The demure bureaucratic language of a whole-of-Government submission on the plan released yesterday cannot disguise the fact that the Government is decidedly unimpressed as well.

Special legislation establishing the board was passed in September last year, even though one of the main reasons for it - Meridian Energy's controversial Project Aqua power scheme for the lower Waitaki - had by then been abandoned.

It has until next September to approve a final plan for the river. Then it goes out of existence.

It will be up to the Canterbury Regional Council to administer the plan as best it can.

Critics say it is bad public policy to have a body making decisions with profound consequences for many years which is not accountable for them and which cannot later change them if they prove unsatisfactory.

Its plan can only be appealed to the High Court on points of law, not on its substantive merits or lack of them.

"The process that has been followed for the Waitaki catchment sets a poor precedent for other catchments and for the allocation of other resources in the country," says a joint submission by the Major Electricity Users Group, Business NZ and the Business Roundtable.

The board is chaired by David Sheppard who was the principal judge of the Planning Tribunal and the Environment Court. The other members are Sheila Watson, an Environment Court commissioner; Edward Ellison, a Ngai Tahu farmer; Dr Nick Brown, an economist, and Claire Mulcock, a resource management consultant.